Original subtitles

♪♪

- Volunteers from the Armed Forces in World War II

found to possess linguistic qualifications

were frequently directed into the Intelligence Corps.

At the end of this fortnight,

trainees considered to have shown promise

were interviewed by the selection officer,

who went through a pretense of discussing with them

their future.

What the trainee did not realize

was that however encouraging the report on the major's desk,

his fate had been instantly settled

from the moment of the officer's first quick scrutiny

of his face.

The selection officer believed

that blue was the color of truth.

To the blue-eyed trainees, therefore,

went the responsible and sometimes glamorous jobs,

while the rest were tipped into the dustbin

of what was then called the Field Security Police.

The escape from this predicament

was a posting to an overseas section,

employed primarily as linguists,

to bridge the gap between the military

and the civilian population.

On the 1st of September, 1943,

I was posted to 312 Field Security Service,

who had been temporarily attached

to headquarters staff of the American Fifth Army.

On the 5th of September,

we sailed in the Duchess of Bedford

to join the invasion convoy bound for Salerno.

This was the greatest invasion in this war so far,

probably the greatest in human history.

And the sea was crowded to the horizon with uncountable ships,

but we were as lost and ineffective

as babes in the wood.

No one knew where the enemy was,

but the bodies on the beach at least proved he existed.

- There was fighting on the beach

and there was fighting up ahead,

and there was fighting in the harbor and on the banks.

For a while, it didn't matter

whether you were in the infantry,

the Air Forces, or the Navy.

The fighting was hot all around.

We could hear big Navy guns and the anti-aircraft guns

and the roaring of the dogfighters out at sea.

Just out of the range of our boats...

At about 11:00, an excited American officer

dashed up in a jeep.

We'd been issued with a Webley pistol

and five rounds of ammunition apiece.

Most of us had never fired a gun.

With these weapons, we were ordered to assist

in the defense of Army headquarters

against the Mark V and Tiger tanks

that were now rolling towards us.

What this officer did not tell us

was that he and the rest of the officers

were quietly pulling out and abandoning their men.

[explosions]

Outright panic now started

and spread among the American troops left behind.

In the belief that our position

had been infiltrated by German infantry,

they began to shoot each other,

and there were blood-chilling screams

from men hit by the bullets.

Then at 4:00, we started up our motorbikes,

and by God's mercy, avoiding the panic-stricken fire

directed from cover at anything that moved,

reached this field,

with its rabble of shocked and demoralized soldiery.

We crouched in our slit trench

under the pink fluttering leaves of the olives,

and watched the fires come closer,

and the night slowly passed.

We set out to explore a little of our immediate environment.

As the sun began to sink splendidly

into the sea at our back,

we wandered at random through this wood,

full of chirping birds,

and suddenly found ourselves at the wood's edge.

We looked out into an open space

on a scene of unearthly enchantment.

A few hundred yards away, stood in a row,

the three perfect temples of Paestum,

pink and glowing and glorious in the sun's last rays.

It came as an illumination,

one of the great experiences of life.

We were admiring the splendid husk of the Temple of Neptune

when the war came to us

in the shape of a single attacking plane.

Hearing its approach, we crouched under a lintel.

The plane swooped, opened up with its machine guns,

and then passed on to drop a single bomb on the beach,

before heading off northwards.

One of my friends felt a light tap on a pack he was wearing,

caused by a spent machine gun bullet

which fell harmlessly to the ground.

The experience was, on the whole, an exhilarating one.

We appreciated the contrast involved,

and no one experienced alarm.

In our small way, we had become seasoned to the hazards of war.

Some delicate in-built mechanism of the nerves

has accepted and acclimatized itself

to a relative loss of security and minor dangers.

- [singing in foreign language]

- We finally got through by jeep to Salerno,

but found a battle still going on

in the outskirts of the town.

[explosion]

German mortar bombs were exploding

in the middle of a small square

only 100 yards from Security headquarters.

Here I saw an ugly sight,

a British officer interrogating an Italian civilian,

and repeatedly hitting him about the head with a chair,

treatment which the Italian,

his face a mask of blood,

suffered with stoicism.

At the end of the interrogation,

which had not been considered successful,

the officer called in a private of the Hampshires

and asked him, in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner,

"Would you like to take this man away and shoot him?"

The private's reply was to spit on his hands and say,

"I don't mind if I do, sir."

The most revolting episode I have seen

since joining the forces.

[explosions]

Kitted out temporarily as an American private

with bucket helmet, hip-clinging trousers,

and gated boots,

I picked up a lift in an American truck

going in the direction of Naples,

which had fallen three days before,

and where I supposed my section

would already be installed.

At Battipaglia, it was all change,

with an opportunity for close-quarters study

of the effects of the carpet bombing

ordered by General Clark.

The general has become the destroying angel

of southern Italy.

Here in Battipaglia, we had an Italian Guernica,

a town transformed in a matter of seconds

to a heap of rubble.

An old man who came to beg

said that practically nobody had been left alive,

and that the bodies were still under the ruins.

From the stench and from the sight of the flies

streaming like black smoke

into and out of the holes in the ground,

this was entirely believable.

[gunfire]

Somewhere a few miles short of Naples proper,

the road widened into something like a square,

dominated by a vast, semi-derelict public building,

plastered with notices and with every window blown in.

Here, several trucks had drawn up,

and our driver pulled in to the curb and stopped, too.

[clamoring]

One of the trucks was carrying American Army supplies,

and soldiers, immediately joined by several from our truck,

were crowding round this and helping themselves

to whatever they could lay hands on.

Thereafter, crunching through the broken glass

that littered the pavement,

each of them carrying a tin of rations,

they were streaming into the municipal building.

I followed them and found myself

in a vast room crowded with jostling soldiery.

Here, a row of ladies sat at intervals of about a yard

with their backs to the wall.

These women were dressed in their street clothes

and had the ordinary, well-washed,

respectable shopping and gossiping faces

of working-class housewives.

By the side of each woman stood a small pile of tins,

and it soon became clear that it was possible

to make love to any one of them in this very public place

by adding another tin to the pile.

The women kept absolutely still.

They said nothing, and their faces

were as empty of expression as graven images.

Once again, reality had betrayed the dream,

and the air fell limp.

- On October the 1st, 1943,

the armies of liberation entered Naples.

[dance music]

[cheering]

- [speaking Italian]

- The city of Naples smells of charred wood,

with ruins everywhere,

sometimes completely blocking the streets,

bomb craters and abandoned trams.

The main problem is water.

Two tremendous air raids,

on August 4th and September 6th,

smashed up all the services,

and there has been no proper water supply

since the first of these.

To complete the Allies' work of destruction,

German demolition squads have gone round

blowing up anything of value to the city that still worked.

Such has been the great public thirst of the past few days

that we are told that people have experimented

with sea water in their cooking.

And families have been seen squatting along the seashore

round weird contraptions,

with which they hope to distill sea water

for drinking purposes.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of Italians,

most of them women and children,

were in the fields all along the roadside,

driven by their hunger to search for edible plants.

I stopped to speak to a group of them,

and they told me that they had left their homes in Naples

at daybreak and had had to walk

for between two and three hours

to reach the spot where I found them,

seven or eight miles out of town.

I saw other parties netting birds,

and these had managed to catch a few sparrows

and some tiny warblers,

which they said were common at this time of year,

attracted by the fruit in the orchards.

Along the seafront at Santa Lucia,

a similar spectacle of the desperate hunt for food.

Inexplicably, no boats were allowed out yet to fish.

Nothing, absolutely nothing that could be tackled

by the human digestive system is wasted in Naples.

There is a persistent rumor

of a decline in the cat population of the city.

- [speaking Italian]

- The purpose of AMG is to prevent chaos.

Therefore, immediately on occupying a country,

AMG re-establishes civilian government,

brings back order and law.

Field manual 27-5 has it in black and white.

"The object of civil affairs control

"through military government

"is to assist military operations,

"to further national policies,

"and to fulfill the obligation

of the occupying forces under international law."

There it is on paper.

- I arrived to find that we had been installed

in the palace of the princes of Satriano,

at the end of Naples' impressive seafront,

the Riviera di Chiaia in the Piazza Vittoria.

The four-story building is in the Neapolitan version

of Spanish baroque,

and we occupy its principal floor

at the head of a sweep of marble staircase,

with high ceilings, decorated with moldings,

glittering chandeliers, enormous wall mirrors,

and opulent gilded furniture

in vaguely French Empire style.

There are eight majestic rooms, but no bathroom,

and the lavatory is in a cupboard in the kitchen.

The view across the square is of clustered palms,

much statuary, and the Bay of Naples.

The field security officer has done very well by us.

There were military units by the dozen all around Naples

who wish to employ Italian civilians,

and all of these had to be vetted by us

as security risks.

A suspects file had to be started,

and this was a job that fell to me.

The labor involved was immense and exceedingly tedious,

and was much complicated by the prevalence in Naples

of certain family names--

Espositos and Gennaros turn up by the hundred--

and by the fact that material supplied by our own authorities

for inclusion in the official black book was often vague.

Quite frequently, suspects were not even identified by name,

but by such descriptions as "of medium height,"

"aged between 30 and 40,"

"strikingly ugly," or, in one case,

"known to possess an obsessive fear of cats."

Life here promised to be hard-working,

sometimes prosaic, and fraught with routines.

There is no notice in the palazzo

to say who we are and what we are doing here,

so it's hard to understand why people assume this

to be the headquarters of the British secret police.

However, they do and we are beginning to receive

a stream of visitors,

all of them offering their services as informers.

In the main, they are drawn from the professional classes

and hand over beautifully engraved cards

describing them as avvocato, dottore,

ingegnere, or professore.

They are all most dignified, some impressive,

and they talk in low, conspiratorial voices.

Among the civilian contacts of these first few days,

my prize acquisition was Vincente Lattarulo,

a man steeped in the knowledge of the ways of Naples.

He proved to be one of the 4,000 lawyers of Naples,

90% of whom, surplus to the needs of the courts,

had never practiced,

and who, for the most part, lived in extreme penury.

Lattarulo had worked out a scientific system

of self-restraints.

He stayed most of the day in bed and when he got up,

walked short distances along a planned itinerary,

stopping to rest every few hundred yards in a church.

He ate an evening meal only,

normally composed of a little bread dipped in olive oil,

into which was rubbed a tomato.

It appeared that Lattarulo had a secondary profession,

producing occasional windfalls of revenue.

He admitted, with a touch of pride,

to acting as a zio di Roma, an uncle from Rome, at funerals.

His qualifications were his patrician appearance

and a studied Roman accent and manner.

When the Neapolitans tend to familiarity in ingratiation,

Lattarulo shows a proper Roman aloofness and taciturnity.

This, say the Neapolitans,

who are fulsome and cloying in their greetings,

is how a real Roman gentleman speaks.

- [speaking Italian]

- How lucky for all concerned

that the liberation of Naples happened when it did

and the perfect weather of early autumn

helped hardships of all kinds to be more endurable.

From where I sat sifting wearily

through the mountains of vilification and calumny,

I could refresh myself by looking down

into the narrow street running along one side

of the palazzo.

A day off on a remarkably fine Sunday for the season

offered an opportunity

for further acquaintance with the neighborhood.

This is inhabited to bursting point

with working-class families,

whose custom it is to live as much as they can

of their lives out of doors,

for which reason this street

is as noisy as a tropical aviary.

- [screaming, shouting]

- Quite early in the morning,

a family living in the house opposite

carried out a table and stood it in the street,

close to their doorway.

There were a number of other such tables along the street

and constant social migrations took place,

as neighbors paid each other visits.

People called musically to each other

over great distances.

[commotion]

The poor and the rich in Arione live side by side,

constantly rubbing elbows

while appearing to be hardly conscious

of each other's presence.

300,000 of the population of Naples inhabit Bassi.

In the Vicaria district, up to three people

occupy every two square meters in the basso.

All things in Naples are arranged

with as much civility as possible.

-Hello, Joe! -Hello!

$5.00.

- Hello, Joe! Come on!

- Neapolitans take their sex lives very seriously indeed.

A woman called Lola, whom I met at a dinner party,

arrived at HQ and asked if I could help her.

It turned out she had taken a lover

who was a captain in the Royal Army Service Corps,

but as he speaks no single word of Italian,

communication can only be carried on by signs,

and this gives rise to misunderstanding.

- I dance with you,

but I won't let you sleep with me.

- Who asked you?

- You don't want to sleep with me?

- I don't want to dance with you.

-Are you crazy? -Hmm.

[both laugh]

- Watch where you put your hands, GI!

- My name is Yossarian.

- Watch where you put your hands, Yossarian.

- Would I agree to interpret for them

and settle certain basic matters?

Captain Frazer turned out to be a tall and handsome man

some years Lola's junior.

She wanted to know all about his marital status and he hers,

and they lied to each other to their hearts' content

while I kept a straight face and interpreted.

She asked me to mention to him,

in as tactful a way as possible,

that comment had been caused among her neighbors

because he never called on her during the day.

Conjugal visits at midday are de rigueur in Naples.

When the meeting was over, we went off for a drink

and Frazer confided to me that something was worrying him, too.

On inspecting her buttocks,

he had found them covered with hundreds of pinpoint marks,

some clearly very small scars.

What could they be?

I put his mind at rest.

These were the marks left by the iniezione reconstituenti,

injections which are given in many of the pharmacies of Naples

and which many middle-class women receive daily

to keep their sexual powers at their peak.

Lola had made him understand,

by gestures one could only shudderingly imagine,

that her late husband, although half-starved

and even when in the early stages of tuberculosis

from which he died,

never failed to have intercourse with her

less than six times a night.

She also had a habit, which terrified Frazer,

of keeping an eye on the bedside clock while he performed.

I recommended him to drink, as the locals did,

Marsala with the yolks of egg stirred into it

and to wear a medal of San Rocco,

patron of coitus reservatus.

- I want to marry you.

-Not possible. -Why not?

-Because crazy. -Why am I crazy?

- Because you want to marry me.

- Wait, you won't marry me because I'm crazy

and you say I'm crazy because I want to marry you, right?

-Si. -You're crazy.

- Why?

- Because I love you.

[explosion]

- A narrow escape today

while motorcycling along the Via Partenope.

I was riding towards the Castel Nuovo

when I noticed a sudden change ahead from blue sky,

sunshine, and shadow, to a great opaque whiteness,

shutting off the view of the port.

The effect was one of a whole district

blotted out by a pall of the white smoke

sometimes spread from the chimneys

of a factory producing lime.

On turning a bend,

I came upon an apocalyptic scene.

A number of buildings, including a bank,

had been pulverized by a terrific explosion

that had clearly just taken place.

Bodies were scattered all over the street.

But here and there among them stood the living

as motionless as statues,

and all coated in thick white dust.

What engraved this scene on the mind and the imagination

was that nothing moved and that the silence was total.

This turned out to be one of a series of explosions

produced by delayed-action explosive devices

constructed by the Germans shortly before their departure,

in each case from several hundred mines

buried under principal buildings,

a senseless massacre

perpetrated on the Italian civil population.

- [announcement in Italian]

- A tremendous scare this morning

following information given by a captured enemy agent

that thousands of delayed-action mines

would explode when the city's electricity supply

was switched on.

This was timed for 2:00 today.

An order was given for the whole of Naples

to be evacuated and within minutes,

Army vehicles were tearing up and down the streets,

broadcasting instructions to the civilian population.

The scene as the great exodus started

and a million and a half people left their houses

and crowded into the streets

was like some biblical calamity.

Everyone had to be got away to the safety

of the heights of the Vomero, Fontanelle,

and the observatory overlooking the town.

- [shouting in Italian]

- This meant that the bedridden,

the dying, and all the women in labor

had to be coped with in some way or other,

not to mention the physically and mentally sick persons

in clinics all over the town.

I saw men carrying their old parents on their backs.

And at one moment, a single small explosion set off a panic,

with women and children running screaming in all directions,

leaving trails of urine.

At the Vomero, we took up positions

at a spot on the heights

where the road had been intentionally widened

to assist visitors to appreciate the view,

which was splendid indeed.

All Naples lay spread out beneath us like an antique map

on which the artist had drawn with almost exaggerated care

the many gardens, the castles,

the towers and the cupolas.

For the first time, awaiting the cataclysm,

I appreciated the magnificence of this city,

seen at a distance, which cleansed it

of its wartime tegument of grime.

And for the first time I realized how un-European,

how Oriental it was.

A great silence had fallen,

and we looked down and awaited the moment of devastation.

At about 4:00,

the order came for everyone to go home.

The result of a carefully organized plot,

designed to cause the maximum disruption

to the life of the city.

Lattarulo looked even weaker with hunger today than usual

and swayed from the waist,

eyes closed, even when sitting down.

After our chat, I decided to take him for a meal

to one of the side-street restaurants

that have opened in the past few days.

We found the restaurant

and took our seats among the middle class patrons

who kept their overcoats on against the cold.

All the coats were made from our stolen blankets.

No attempt was made

to isolate the customers from the street.

Ragged, hawk-eyed boys,

the celebrated scugnizzi of Naples,

wandered among the tables, ready to dive on any crusts

that appeared to be overlooked

or to snatch up leftovers

before they could be thrown to the cats.

Once again, I couldn't help noticing the intelligence,

almost the intellectuality of their expressions.

No attempt was made to chase them away.

They were simply treated as non-existent.

Suddenly, five or six little girls

between the ages of nine and 12

appeared in the doorway.

They wore hideous straight black uniforms

buttoned under their chins

and black boots and stockings

and their hair had been shorn short, prison-style.

They were all weeping

and as they clung to each other and groped their way towards us,

bumping into chairs and tables,

I realized they were all blind.

Tragedy and despair had been thrust upon us

and would not be shut out.

I expected the indifferent diners

to push back their plates, to get up and hold out their arms,

but nobody moved.

Forkfuls of food were thrust into open mouths.

The rattle of conversation continued.

Nobody saw the tears.

They had been brought down here, he found out,

on a half-day's outing by an attendant

who seemed unable or unwilling to stop them

from being lured away by the smell of food.

The experience changed my outlook.

Until now, I had clung to the comforting belief

that human beings eventually come to terms

with pain and sorrow.

Now I understood I was wrong.

And like Paul, I suffered a conversion.

But to pessimism.

These little girls, any one of whom could be my daughter,

came into the restaurant weeping,

and they were weeping when they were led away.

I knew that condemned to everlasting darkness,

hunger, and loss,

they would weep on incessantly.

They would never recover from their pain,

and I would never recover from the memory of it.

- Naples was ripe for epidemic typhus.

The armies of Adolf Hitler had disemboweled the city.

- We were stopped at a bottleneck

caused by a collapsed building in the Via Chiatamone

where a sanitary post had been set up.

And here, every passerby was sprayed with a white powder

against the typhus.

The news is that Naples

is now officially suffering from two epidemics...

Smallpox and typhoid.

People accept malaria

as a matter of course in this town.

Epidemics, robbers,

funerals followed by shrieking women,

deformed and mutilated beggars,

legless cripples dragging themselves about

on wheeled platforms,

even raving lunatics they'd no room for in the asylum.

People walked the streets with handkerchiefs

pressed over their mouths and noses

as they probably did in the days of the plagues of old.

This morning I actually found myself

in a little square tucked away among the ruins,

where women were dancing to drive the sickness away.

The war has pushed the Neapolitans

back into the Middle Ages.

Churches are suddenly full of images that talk, bleed, sweat,

nod their heads, and exude health-giving liquors

to be mopped up by handkerchiefs,

or even collected in bottles,

and anxious, ecstatic crowds gather,

waiting for these marvels to happen.

Naples has reached a state of nervous exhaustion

when mass hallucination has become a commonplace

and belief of any kind can be more real than reality.

[indistinct shouting]

- Hey, you!

- Hey, come back here!

- The port was working again and supplies came flooding in.

Food, bombs, shells, tanks, plane parts, petrol, lorries,

supplies for peace and supplies for war.

- [speaking Italian]

- The black market flourishes as never before.

65% of the per capita income of Neapolitans

derives from transactions in stolen Allied supplies,

and one-third of all supplies and equipment imported

continued to disappear into the black market.

Every single item of Allied equipment,

short of guns and munitions,

which are said to be sold under the counter,

is openly displayed for sale in the Forcella Market.

- [speaking Italian]

- No feat, according to the newspapers and to public rumor,

is too outrageous for this new breed of robber.

Nothing has been too large or too small,

from telegraph poles to phials of penicillin,

to escape the Neapolitan kleptomania.

[dance music plays]

A week or two ago, an orchestra playing at the San Carlo

to an audience largely clothed in Allied hospital blankets

returned from a five-minute interval

to find all its instruments missing.

- [whistles a signal]

- A theoretically priceless collection of Roman cameos

was abstracted from the museum

and replaced by modern imitations,

the thief only learning, so the reports go,

when he came to dispose of his booty

that the originals themselves were counterfeit.

Now the statues are disappearing from the public squares

and one cemetery has lost most of its tombstones.

Even the manhole covers

have been found to have a marketable value,

so that suddenly these, too, have all gone

and everywhere there are holes in the road.

-Un dollaro. -What?

-One dollar. -What do you say?

- Well, let's give it to him. We'll have a try.

-Si, si. -Okay.

- Come on.

-There. -Thank you.

[speaking Italian]

- Let's go.

Hey, come back here, you!

[indistinct shouting]

- Already at the end of February,

the winter is slipping away

and the onset of the melancholy of spring is announced

by the seller of broad beans, who passes under our windows,

always at dusk, with the saddest of cries.

"A fava fresca."

The warmth of the sun comes through

and seeps into the cold walls

and the town wakes to new life.

On sale now, and only in this season,

is a pagan springtime cake, pastiera napoletana,

made with soft grain of all kinds,

removed from their husks months before ripe

and cooked with orange blossom.

The Vico Satriano,

the narrow street overlooked by one side of our building,

hums with activity

as a great, vociferous spring-cleaning begins

and unwanted objects of all kinds--

chipped crockery, broken vessels,

irreparable articles of furniture--

follow the slops into the street.

Everyone shouts, gesticulates

and sings snatches of mournful love songs,

such as "Ammore Busciardo," "Love The Traitor,"

and a boy has appeared at the street corner beneath us

selling for five lire

a collection of 25 of the latest ballads,

all of them dedicated to romantic frustration.

- [singing in Italian]

[explosions]

- A bad raid last night with heavy civilian casualties,

as usual in the densely populated port areas.

In Santa Lucia, home territory of the Neapolitan ballad,

I saw a heart-rending scene.

A number of tiny children had been dug out of the ruins

of a bombed building

and lay side by side in the street.

Where presentable, their faces were uncovered

and in some cases,

brand-new dolls had been thrust into their arms

to accompany them to the other world.

One man climbed into the rubble and was calling into a hole

where he believed his little boy was trapped

under hundreds of tons of masonry,

begging him not to die before he could be dug out.

"Hang on, son, only a few minutes longer now.

"We'll have you out of there in a minute.

Please don't die."

[wind blows]

- [speaking Italian]

- Today, Vesuvius erupted.

It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen

or ever expect to see.

The smoke from the crater slowly built up

into a great bulging shape,

having all the appearance of solidity.

It swelled and expanded so slowly

that there was no sign of movement in the cloud,

which by evening must have risen

30,000 or 40,000 feet into the sky

and measured many miles across.

The sky was fogged over and ash was falling,

and everything, the buildings, streets, and fields,

was covered to a depth of a half-inch in a smooth grey pall.

There was fear for the safety of military installations

in areas such as Portici and Torre del Greco,

which always suffer the worst effects

of an eruption of Vesuvius,

and I was instructed to find out what the prospects were,

if these could in any way be gauged,

of a worsening in the situation.

An increase in the violence of the eruption

and also of the population's fears

following the news that San Sebastiano

was about to be carried away by the lava stream

and Cercola was threatened,

I was sent to get an on-the-spot report.

Sticky going all the way through the ash with several skids,

I was right under the great grey cloud,

full of swellings and protuberances

like some colossal pulsating brain.

- [indistinct singing]

- At the time of my arrival at San Sebastiano,

the lava was pushing its way very quietly

down the main street,

and about 50 yards from the edge

of this great, slowly shifting slag heap,

a crowd of several hundred people, mostly in black,

knelt in prayer.

The spectacle of the eruption was totally unexpected.

I'd been prepared for rivers of fire,

but there was no fire and no burning anywhere,

only the slow, deliberate suffocation of the town

under millions of tons of clinkers.

The lava was moving at a rate of only a few yards an hour,

and it had covered half the town

to a depth of perhaps 30 feet.

The whole process was strangely quiet.

The black slag heap shook, trembled and jerked a little,

and cinders rattled down its slope.

Dominant in every way, for sheer size

and the number of persons supporting the platform

of images confronting the eruption,

was that of San Sebastiano himself.

But wandering away into a side street,

I noticed the presence of another image

also with numerous attendants,

which was covered with a white sheet.

This was an image of San Gennaro,

smuggled in from Naples on an outside chance

that it might be of some use if all else failed.

It is believed by Neapolitans of all political creeds

and degrees of religious conviction

that the fortunes of the city

depend on the miracle of San Gennaro.

A good miracle is one in which the blood liquefies quickly,

while the failure of the miracle

is taken as a sign of the saint's extreme displeasure

and regarded as a catastrophe.

Fear is expressed that the blood of San Gennaro

may refuse to liquefy this year,

and that such a failure might be exploited

by secret anti-Allied factions and troublemakers

to set off large-scale rioting

of the kind that has frequently happened in Neapolitan history

when the miracle has failed.

- [speaking Italian]

- [speaking Italian]

- At about 8:00,

the saint gave way to this new pressure,

and the miracle took place.

- [speaking Italian]

- ♪ Jesce sole

♪ Jesce sole

♪ Jesce sole

♪ Nun te fa' chiu suspira

[cheering]

- The fragmentation of Italian politics

in reaction to the long-stagnant acquiescence

under fascism continues.

There are now some 60 officially recognized political parties,

having memberships ranging from 100 or so

to nearly two million.

Of all the emergent political forces,

the most numerous, powerful, and rational outside Naples,

in which the urban subproletariat

is royalist to a man,

are the Christian Democrats,

the Social Democrats, and the Orthodox Communists.

- [speaking Italian]

[crowd cheers]

[cheering]

[cheering]

[cheering]

[applause]

- I am concerned

at the increasing number of applications

by officers or other ranks to marry Italian civilians.

The Bureau of Psychological Warfare

has just stated in its bulletin

that there are 42,000 women in Naples

engaged either on a regular or occasional basis

in prostitution.

This, out of a nubile female population of perhaps 150,000

seems incredible.

Three out of four of these girls I have interviewed

will probably cease to be prostitutes

as soon as they can hope to keep alive by any other means.

Nine out of 10 Italian girls have lost their menfolk,

who have either disappeared in battles,

into prisoner-of-war camps, or been cut off in the north.

The whole population is out of work.

Nobody produces anything.

How are they to live?

- [speaking Italian]

- A circular issued by the general officer commanding

is probably the real reason

behind the sudden coming to an end of my investigation

into the suitability of marriages

proposed between the British soldiery

and Italian girls in the Naples area.

In the first three months,

43 such vettings have been carried out,

and in 12 cases, the report has been favorable.

However this may be, I am out of it for good,

having been relieved by the field security officer

of this particular duty in so subtle a fashion

that I'm bound to suspect that after a year of close contact

with the seamy side of life in Naples,

he's been unable to avoid infection

by the deviousness of the environment.

- Hello, Yossarian.

- Ha.

I didn't know.

- That I work for Milo?

Everybody works for Milo.

- Yeah.

Well, he told me to ask for number 33.

- Mm-hmm. 33.

$10, please.

No towel, Yossarian?

[music plays]

- [speaking Italian]

- A most embarrassing episode happened today.

Mobs of youths began to assault girls

found in the company of Allied soldiers.

The girls were chased, and when caught,

their knickers were torn off.

Soldiers who intervened to defend their girls

were promptly beaten up.

The incident highlighted

an unhappy and deteriorating situation

produced by the encroachment of the Allied presence

on the emotional and romantic life of the city.

Then the foreign soldiers came on the scene

and were in immediate collision with the local boys,

who had no work, no prestige, no money,

absolutely nothing to offer the girls.

- Hey, brother, leave her alone!

- A British private, wretchedly paid as he is,

earns more than a foreman at the Navalmeccanica,

while an American private,

who can shower cigarettes, sweets,

and even silk stockings in all directions,

has a higher income than any Italian employee in Naples.

Thus, the long, delicate, intricate business

of the old Neapolitan courtship,

as complex as the mating ritual of exotic birds,

is replaced by a brutal, wordless approach

and a crude act of purchase.

One wonders how long it will take the young of Naples

after we have gone

to recover from the bitterness of this experience.

- [man singing in foreign language]

- The fact is that we have upset the balance of nature here.

And I have arrived at a time when, in their hearts,

these people must be thoroughly sick and tired of us.

A year ago we liberated them from the fascist monster.

And they still sit,

doing their best to smile politely at us,

as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before,

in the ruins of their beautiful city,

where law and order have ceased to exist.

And what is the prize that is to be eventually won?

The rebirth of democracy.

The glorious prospect of being able one day

to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men,

most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted

with weary resignation.

The days of Benito Mussolini

must seem like a lost paradise compared with this.

[crowd roars]

- [speaking Italian]

[cheering]

[cheering]

- [speaking Italian]

[cheering]

[indistinct announcement]

- The thunderbolt has fallen.

Today I was ordered to prepare to leave immediately for Taranto

to embark on the Reina del Pacifico for Port Said,

where I am to pick up 3,000 Russian soldiers

who had been fighting with the Germans

and gone over to the partisans.

The Allied force headquarters' order reads,

"You will be away as long as necessary,"

but does not define the duties to be performed.

My intuition warns me that my stay in Naples

has come to an end,

so I am left with only hours to spare

and no time to say goodbye to any of the friends

scattered through so many towns.

There will be no time for a last glass of Marsala

with any of the scheming sindacos

or the Machiavellian chiefs of police,

who have always, for all their innumerable shortcomings,

shown hospitality to me as a stranger.

There will be no time for a last coffee substitute

in the Gran Caffè in the Galleria

to say goodbye and good luck to several girls

who are virtually fixtures of the place

and bear me no ill will because I was unable to help them

to marry Allied personnel.

I realize that I have had my last meal at Zi Teresa's.

There won't be even a half-hour to spare

for a dash up to the Vomero for a last panoramic view

across the gardens of the Villa Floridiana,

of the great grey and red city spread below,

presenting at this distance

a totally fallacious aspect of dignified calm

or for a final contemplation of the somnolent Vesuvius,

so changed in outline since its reshaping by the eruption.

A year among the Italians had converted me

to such an admiration for their humanity and culture

that I realized that were I given the chance

to be born again and to choose the place of my birth,

Italy would be the country of my choice.

Perhaps when everything is ready for the move-off,

at half past 6:00 tomorrow from the Stazione Centrale,

there will at least be a moment left to call on Lattarulo,

most faithful of my Neapolitan allies.

I know in advance

that having staggered under the impact of the news

and then recovered with proper fortitude,

he will whisper, "I've got a treat for you."

This he will describe as caccia, game,

but it will be a muscled city pigeon,

netted on someone's roof.

He will dash out to find the neighborhood girl

who will stew it in garlic and herbs

and serve it up on the great ancestral salver.

When it is time to go, he will take my hand and say,

"I'll be at the station tomorrow to see you off."

And I know he will be there, as promised,

dressed in all the dignity

of his zio di Roma suit for such an occasion.

[ship's horn blows]

[wind blows]

♪♪