Chapter 1: Begin in an Olive Grove

General Castellano waited for a telegram under the olive trees.

On the afternoon of the third of September 1943, the olive trees around the Allied camp threw a thin, moving shade over the dry ground, and General Giuseppe Castellano waited beneath them. If you could have seen him, you would have noticed a slim officer with dark hair and a careful manner, dressed not in uniform but in a plain civilian suit. Dust from the camp road lay on his shoes. A few steps from where you would have stood, under the trees, stood a large military tent, its canvas hot in the sun and its flaps tied back to let in the air. Inside it a folding table had been set up, and on the table lay a short typed document that would take his country out of the war.

He could not sign it yet. Castellano had come to the camp as the envoy of his government, but he had no written authority to put his name to anything, and the Allied officers would not proceed without it. So he waited for a telegram from his own capital, while the hours passed and the cicadas sang in the olive branches. I have often tried to imagine that afternoon. You can almost hear the clatter of a typewriter in a nearby tent, the engine of a jeep starting and stopping, and the low talk of officers who did not want to show their impatience. You can almost feel the weight of a decision that had not yet arrived.

Do you remember the stone on the station platform, and its first date in September 1943, catching the last of the evening sun? This is the day that date belongs to. On that afternoon, in a tent among olive trees, the long ending of the Second World War began, quietly and almost secretly, with a man in a civilian suit waiting for permission to write his name.

The council vote in July set the first ending in motion.

To see how Castellano came to be standing in that olive grove, you have to step back about six weeks, to a hot night in the capital of the first Axis partner.

On the evening of the twenty-fourth of July 1943, the highest council of the ruling party met in a palace hall for the first time in years. The meeting lasted through the night, and in the small hours of the twenty-fifth the members voted on a motion that asked the king to take back full command. The motion passed by nineteen votes to eight, with one abstention. Later that same day the king received the leader of the government in his villa and told him that he was dismissed. As the leader left the villa, he was taken into custody and driven away in an ambulance, so that his removal would draw no crowds. An elderly marshal, Pietro Badoglio, became head of the new government. His first public words were that the war would continue, and the ally in the north was told the same. In private, however, the new government had already begun to look for a way out.

I want you to notice how this first ending began, because you will not see many like it: it began from within. It was not forced by the fall of the capital or the collapse of an army. It was set in motion by a vote in a council room, by an old king, and by people who had lost faith in the road they were on. The train had not yet stopped, but someone had reached for the brake.

A general travelled secretly to meet the envoys of the Allies.

In the middle of August 1943, Castellano set out on a journey that still reads like a story from a railway novel. He travelled under a borrowed name, with papers that hid his rank, and he crossed several borders by train before reaching a neutral capital on the western edge of the continent.

There, on the nineteenth of August, he was brought at night to the house of an Allied embassy. Two senior officers had flown in to meet him, sent by the Allied supreme commander in the war zone of the south. One was the supreme commander's chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, a tired man with a sharp mind and a short temper. The other was a senior officer of intelligence. The talks went on until the early morning. Castellano had come hoping to discuss how his country might change sides and fight with the Allies. The Allied officers, bound by the demand for unconditional surrender, could only hand him the military terms of an armistice and explain that they were not open to bargaining. They did tell him, however, that the help his country gave in the coming weeks would be taken into account later. You should know that this promise had been written down by the leaders of the western Allies at their own conference in August 1943, in a short memorandum. It was a small door left open in a very solid wall.

As you can imagine, Castellano returned home anxious, with the terms, the radio codes and a deadline. A second envoy was sent after him, and for some days nobody in the capital was quite sure who was speaking for whom. On the thirty-first of August Castellano flew south to a military airfield and was driven to the camp in the olive grove, where the Allied commanders were preparing their next crossing of the sea. He carried their firm answer home that evening, the government agreed to accept on the first of September, and on the second he flew back to the camp to wait for his authority.

The short armistice was signed in the late afternoon.

Early on the morning of the third of September, before Castellano had his telegram, Allied soldiers crossed a narrow strait and landed on the mainland of his country. The crossing began in the dark at about half past four. It was the fourth anniversary of the day on which two of the western Allies had entered the war in 1939, and you may be sure that nobody in the olive grove missed the meaning of the date.

The telegram finally arrived in the afternoon. It came from Badoglio himself and authorised Castellano to sign. At about a quarter past five, in the tent among the olive trees, Castellano and Bedell Smith signed the short armistice, each on behalf of his own side. The supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, had flown in for the occasion and watched. When the signing was over, the officers shook hands, and the photographers took their pictures of men standing awkwardly in the dappled shade, holding their caps. The document itself was short. It had twelve articles, nearly all of them military: the end of hostilities, the transfer of ships and aircraft, the release of Allied prisoners, the use of airfields and ports. The political, economic and financial conditions were left for a longer document to be signed later.

Then came something that you may easily forget. The signing was kept secret. Nobody outside a small circle was told, because the Allies were planning a large landing on the coast further north, and the announcement was to be timed to help it. So for five days, the first partner of the Axis was out of the war on paper and still in it everywhere else. Its soldiers stood at their posts, its ships lay in harbor, and its people went to bed each night knowing nothing of the tent in the olive grove.

Count the minutes between two radio announcements.

The secret ended on the evening of the eighth of September 1943, and it ended on the radio, in two voices, one after the other.

At half past six in the evening, by the clocks of the war zone of the south, the supreme commander announced the armistice from an Allied radio station across the sea. His voice was calm and his words were brief. The government of the former partner, he said, had surrendered its armed forces unconditionally, and hostilities between them and the Allies were at an end. The other side had hesitated until the very last moment. There had been an attempt to postpone the announcement, and an anxious exchange of messages through the afternoon. At eighteen minutes before eight in the evening, Badoglio read his own short proclamation on the national radio. He told the armed forces to cease all acts of hostility against the Allies, and to react to attacks from any other quarter.

Here is a small exercise for you. Take a clock face, or simply draw a circle on paper and mark the hours, and set one hand at half past six. Then move it forward to eighteen minutes before eight. You will find that seventy-two minutes lie between the two announcements. Now think about what those seventy-two minutes meant. For an hour and twelve minutes, the world had heard the news from one side but not from the other. Soldiers and sailors far from their officers heard foreign voices telling them that their war was over, and their own government saying nothing at all. Some believed it, some did not, and many simply waited by the radio, smoking and listening, unsure what to do with their hands. When I did this exercise myself, I sat with my watch in front of me for a few of those minutes, and even five of them felt long.

The days after the announcement brought confusion and grief.

I must tell you plainly, as a friend would, that the armistice did not bring peace to the country that signed it. It brought the war home in a new and harder form.

In the early hours of the ninth of September, the king, the marshal and the senior members of the government left the capital by car, driving east to the coast and going on by sea to a port in the far south that the Allies would soon reach. On the same day, Allied forces landed on the beaches of a wide gulf in the south, and the former ally in the north moved quickly to occupy the capital and most of the country. Many soldiers of the former partner were left without orders. In the barracks and on the islands, hundreds of thousands were disarmed, and great numbers of them were sent north as military internees. On some islands in the east, garrisons that refused to give up their arms fought against their former allies, and thousands of them lost their lives in the days that followed. I will not describe what happened there; the dates are enough, and the mourning is enough.

The fleet sailed out on the night of the eighth and ninth of September to give itself into Allied hands, as the armistice required. On the afternoon of the ninth, the flagship of the fleet, a large new battleship, was sunk from the air. More than thirteen hundred sailors died with her, among them the admiral in command. The rest of the fleet sailed on and reached the harbor of an Allied island on the tenth and eleventh of September, where the ships dropped anchor in long grey lines.

Please pause with me here for a moment, and remember those sailors, and the soldiers on the islands, and the internees on their long journeys north.

An old postcard showed me how slowly the news travelled.

Some years ago, on a Saturday morning, I stopped at a stall in a flea market where an old man was selling picture postcards from shoeboxes, sorted roughly by year.

Near the back of a box marked with the year 1943 I found a card with a faded view of a church tower, sent by a soldier to his mother. The handwriting was neat and small, and the field post stamp showed a date in mid-September. In a few lines the young man told her that he was well, that the weather was fine, and that he did not know where he would be sent next. He did not mention the armistice at all. Perhaps he was not allowed to, or perhaps, a week after the news, he still did not know what it meant for him. I bought the card for a few coins and kept it in a book on my desk. You may find such cards yourself, if you look in the right boxes, and I would ask you to read them slowly, because each one is a small window into a moment when the great events had not yet reached the person writing.

The long armistice was signed on a battleship in a harbor.

The second document, the longer one, was signed on the twenty-ninth of September 1943. The place was the deck of a large battleship lying in the harbor of the Allied island where the fleet had anchored.

By then the government of the former partner had settled in the port in the south, and Badoglio came by sea to sign. The supreme commander came as well. The two men met on board and signed the document that was later called the long armistice. It had forty-four articles. It covered not only military matters but also the political and economic terms that the short armistice had left aside. The phrase unconditional surrender appeared in it clearly. Yet the same day the supreme commander gave the marshal a letter that softened its effect, explaining that the terms might later be modified according to the help his government and people gave to the Allies. So a document of surrender and a promise of partnership were handed across on the same day.

On the thirteenth of October 1943, the government of the former partner declared war on its former ally in the north. The Allies did not accept it as a full ally. They called it a co-belligerent, a word that means one who fights alongside without being bound by alliance. It is a cool, careful word, chosen by lawyers. But for the soldiers who now joined the fighting on the Allied side, it marked the moment when they changed from defeated enemies into partners in a common effort.

Unconditional surrender proved to be a road and not a wall.

Now that you have followed the first ending from the council room to the olive grove and on to the battleship, you can see what the demand of January 1943 meant in practice.

On paper, as you have seen, there was nothing to negotiate. The terms were handed over and had to be signed as they were. In reality, the first armistice was surrounded by talks, letters, promises and quiet adjustments, all of them made inside the frame of unconditional surrender. The demand did not stop people from talking. It only decided where the talking could happen and what it could change. You could compare it to a railway line laid down in advance. The train could not leave the rails, but it could slow down, wait in a siding, and take on new passengers along the way. In the endings that followed, in 1944 and 1945, you will see the same pattern again and again. There is a firm public demand, and around it a careful private search for ways to make the ending possible.

I do not think you or I should judge this too quickly in either direction. The demand gave the Allies unity and gave their peoples a clear aim. It also made it harder for anyone on the other side to step forward early, and the war was long. Both of these things are true, and a history lover like you learns to hold them side by side without forcing them into one verdict.

The country that left the war first became a field of war itself.

You should know that the months after the armistice were among the hardest in the long history of that country. The front moved north only slowly, through mountains and river valleys, during the autumn and the winter of 1943 and on into 1944 and 1945.

If you visit those towns today, you will hear that places which had cheered the news of the armistice on the evening of the eighth of September found themselves on the front line a few weeks later. Families were divided by the line, and soldiers who had served together found themselves on opposite sides. Civilians on every side suffered from hunger, from the fighting, and from the loss of their homes. The armistice in the olive grove had been signed to end a war, and in a narrow, legal sense it did. But it opened a new chapter of suffering for the people who lived where the armies now met. I tell you this, and I ask your patience with it, not to diminish the courage of those who signed, but because an honest chronicle of endings must also tell you when an ending was only the beginning of something else.

The olive harvest came in the autumn of 1943.

When I think of that first ending, and perhaps the same will happen to you, I find myself returning again and again to the olive trees, because they were there before the tent was raised and they were still there after it was folded away.

In late October and November of 1943, in the groves of the south where the front had already passed, the olive harvest was gathered as it had been gathered for centuries. Women and old men spread nets beneath the trees and beat the branches with long sticks. Children carried the baskets, and the fruit was taken to the presses in carts pulled by tired animals, because there was little fuel for engines. Somewhere among those groves stood the trees that had shaded the tent on the third of September. I have no way of knowing whether anyone harvested them that year. I like to think, and perhaps you will too, that someone did, quietly, without knowing what had been signed beneath them.

In the evenings, by the light of small oil lamps, families in those villages waited for news of sons and husbands who had been sent north, or who were somewhere on the far side of the front, or who had simply not come home. The lamps burned the new oil of that autumn, and the waiting went on, in kitchen after kitchen, long after the signing in the olive grove had become a line in the history books.