Plot reminder: 18-year-old Vincenzo has been conscripted to Mussolini's North African campaign, this just a couple of months after his wife, Ada, suffered a miscarriage.

~~~~~

I gravitated towards Ettore Lo Bianco immediately, that very first day in provincial barracks. He, like me, was the sort who kept himself to himself. While the other boys engaged in loudmouthed bravado about how many girls they'd slept with or how we were going to kick those pompous British behinds, Ettore would just lay there on his bunk squinting his bespectacled eyes over some D'Annunzio or Croce. His was the gentlest of souls, the most unbound of minds. Poetry, ancient history, rennaissance art. When the whole damn mess was over, he said he was going to teach in a lyceum somewhere.

War sat heavily with him, like a priest's frock on a sinful man. Death and destruction were as much an anathema to Ettore Lo Bianco as staying silent to a dawn-woken bird. In Mussolini's Italy, conscientious objection was not an option however. Or rather, it was an option, just that one needed to equip oneself with a white flag.

It seemed nothing could separate Ettore and I, not even the hell on earth that was the battle of Tobruk. We slalomed our way through the explosions, our fallen brethren. Cowered behind the shelled-out husks of tanks, kept ourselves just beyond bullet range. The powers-that-be had thought Egypt was going to be a pushover, like the taking of Abissinia back in '36. In African sand our boots may have trodden, but this was very much a European war fought with European weaponry and fuelled by polarised European idealogies. One army which sought to defend democracy, the other intent on crushing it. There could only ever have been one winner.

I killed a man. Just one, but the weight of it feels like a thousand. Feels like a hundred thousand. The bullet spat from my rifle straight and true, and even before it penetrated its target I knew. I just knew. He was too far away for me to see clearly, and there was a veil of smoke from a shelled vehicle nearby, but I had the impression he was young. Little more than a kid, just like me. An Australian, his blond hair matted with sweat. The force of the bullet reared him upwards like a wave, flipped him backwards. The small fountain of blood which exploded from his chest was a vivid scarlet amidst the backdrop of desert beige and military green. It's an image which is forever fused behind my closed eyelids. There waiting in ambush every time I search the refuge of sleep. Every time I blink.

When Captain Terlizzi finally hoisted aloft the white flag, I felt a joyous rush of relief. Our platoon had fought with honour, but now surrounded on all sides by the Allies, surrender was the only valid option. "Ettore!" I called out through the smoke. "Ettore! Ettore!"  Ever louder, more desperate, thinking that some rogue final bullet had tunnelled its way through his heart. But oh, that second joyous rush of relief when at last the call was returned. "Vincenzo! I am here, where I've always been. Right at your side."

After I lifted him onto the back of that British lorry beside me, we slapped each other's shoulders, shared a smile. "It's over now Ettore," I promised him. "The worst is behind us."

And while that was true for most of the men, for Ettore the worst was only just about to begin. If war had sat heavily on him, then internment was some huge crushing force - as oppressive as that burning Kenyan sun which for the rest of '41  roared its fire into our very bones.  I watched Ettore slowly shrivel and dry like the the tomatoes which in our native Puglia are left to the mercy of the August sun. Watched as he paced the perimeter fence, gaze fixed longingly at the African scrubland beyond. A butterfly trapped in a net.

When they shipped us to England in the late winter of '42, the heavy skies and  almost constant drizzle came as a relief at first, like taking a shower after a long hot day spent working in the sun. But within a month or two, Ettore was lost in darkness once more. I could see it in his eyes, the slump of his shoulders. Nowadays, people might call it depression. Back then, the word hardly existed. We knew it just as sadness. Melancholy. The unremitting greyness of the English sky, somehow it had infected Ettore's soul.

The first camp they sent us to was in the grounds of a stately home somewhere near Luton in Bedfordshire. They had us repairing the fencing in the estate grounds, digging irrigation ditches, that kind of thing. Pretty sort of place those rare days the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, green in that way you only see in The British Isles. Trees everywhere, centuries-old oaks as sturdy as stone.

We awoke one night to the agitated voices of the guards outside. At first we thought somebody had tried to escape. It was then I noticed that Ettore's bunk was empty. Turned out he'd smuggled a line of rope from the stables, had been tying himself a noose to a lower branch of one the oaks. Fortunately, a guard had swept past before he was able to climb himself in place.

It had always been clear to me, and now it was clear to everyone else too: what Ettore was suffering from was far more serious than just the inevitable homesickness and cabin fever which we were all forced to bear. The year was 1942 however and across three continents millions of men were exchanging gunfire, hurling grenades at each other, unleashing ever greater destruction from the opened hatches of bomber holds. The suicidal tendencies of one Italian POW paled into insignificance. No psychiatrists were prescribed, no special dispensation rubber-stamped. The camp commander obtained a small quantity of morphine from a nearby hospital and left it up to us, Ettore's compatriots, to ensure there would be no further attempts at taking his own life.

The morphine seemed to help for a while. Indeed, despite everything, the Christmas of '42 was possibly the happiest of Ettore's life; certainly, it was the most memorable of mine. We prisoners put on a show for the guards, a bit of *a capella*Rossini and Verdi interspersed with comedy sketches and copious transvestism. Ettore and I had fashioned a pantomine horse from a couple of spare prisoner uniforms that had been lying around, an outward-thrusting broom meanwhile sufficing as mane. Ettore  performed as head, I as the graceless, constantly stumbling behind. In return for the free entertainment, the guards shared with us their yuletide whisky and gin. Anglo-Italian relations had never seemed closer than that boozy Christmas afternoon. It made you wonder why we'd both been so intent on fizzing shrapnel at each other down there in Egypt. Why international relations between not just our two nations but those of the world over couldn't more resemble some tipsily amicable after-show party rather than the hellish thunder clap of war.

The notice we received four months later that we we were to be moved on again was thus a  sad and regrettable one. That our new Lincolnshire home was going to prove much more austere than the grounds of the Bedfordshire stately home was clear right from the very start. There wasn't even a camp waiting for us, just a muddy, sodden field. We sheltered in tents that first night, a largely sleepless one due to the incessant pummeling of the rain against canvas. Early the next morning lorries arrived with building materials. It was we prisoners ourselves who constructed those Nissen huts. Somewhat perversely, they even had a group of us lay out the perimeter wire which would entrap us.

There was a boy called Salvatore Giacalone from Reggio Calabria. Like Ettore and I, the sort who kept himself to himself. Gentle,  unassuming. He said that when he made it back home he was going to join the priesthood. In the meantime, he it was who took it upon himself to perform the role of medium between the celestial world and the muddy Linconshire field in which we were caged. He it was too who came up with the idea of the painted altar.

Captain Terlizzi and the other senior officers successfully pitched the project to the camp commander - what we were planning required only an end wall and ten square metres of space for the altar - and by the end of our second week there I'd already pencilled up the outlines. It's strange thinking back to it now, but until that point I'd always considered my artistic abilities as a mere pastime. A simple diversion, and nothing more. Some boys were good at climbing trees, or at working out how to put back together the watches or radios or whatever other mechanical object their curiosity had led them to taking to pieces. Others knew how to time the punchline to a joke or make a wild young dog wilt to their command. I, instead, was good drawing - a fact I was pleased about, proud of even, but a capacity which I deemed ultimately useless. Growing up in southern Italy in the interwar years, one learnt not to place too much value on things which didn't put food on the table. Knowing how to repair a fishing net - now *that* was important. How to butcher a lame old horse so that not a single mouthful of offal went to waste. How to shake down every last olive from the tree. But drawing? That was for the rich or the foolhardy.

Yet as I began brushing the first shades of colour onto that wall I realised that art could be important too. A boost to morale. A source of pride not just for myself but for all my compatriots who would in the coming months and years contemplate that altar. Yes, we are captives, the mural seemed to whisper defiantly back at its beholder. But we are Italian and we will do what Italians have always done. We will create beauty.

Though Ettore's own artistic abilities were somewhat limited, I tried to involve him in the project as much as possible in the hope of providing him with something specific to focus his mind on. Indeed, at first, his enthusiasm seemed almost the equal of my own. Guided by his knowledge of rennaissance art, it was he more than I who decided both the basic layout of the composition and the details of facial expressions and clothing. My apostles were arranged in the same order as Da Vinci's in The Last Supper, for example, and bore similiar physical traits.

Once this initial planning stage was concluded however and it was time to get down the hard graft of mixing colours, of spending every spare moment with our noses to that wall, well, it was inevitable that Ettore's mind would once more drift towards the shadows.

As the English summer reached its peak and our toils out there in the fields became ever sweatier, more wearying, Ettore was once more contemplating taking his own life. I know so because he confided in me. It was an evening in late-August just before lights out, me with brush in hand at the wall, he at the altar table behind mixing flesh tone. "I can't go on Vincenzo," came his sudden whisper. Turning, I saw that he was crying, the harsh glow from the spotlight we'd rigged up picking out shiny meandering trails down each cheek."I've tried as hard as I can, but I just can't live this life any more."

There was something about his voice, a certain note of flint-hard determination, which made it clear that he'd made up his mind and that nothing I could say was going to change it.

I sat down beside him, rested a hand onto his shoulder. Forced him to look straight in my eye. Above us, Jesus and his half-painted apostles seemed to gaze down with celestial concern.

"Ettore, what if I help you escape?" I suggested.

~~~~~