European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Nobody was around and no partisans had returned. They must have dispersed in all directions.

We wondered if there were any wounded men or not.

We looked around the house, and there was an English soldier with a bullet in his knee who was hiding in a wagon.

He was waiting for the dark in order to move or for somebody to go look for him.

They put him and Gordon, who were wounded, in the house of a blacksmith, a sort of shop, and began taking them away at night.

They finally got them to Palanzano, in the province of Parma, from where they were taken to Florence by helicopter.

Then we had found this man in the house of a family nearby, hidden in a wagon.

He had been put there by some partisans, who had left him there.

We told the family we were looking for wounded men, and they told us they had one.

In the evening they offered to take us to Casola, on the road from Casina to Albinea.

There was a ditch there, where the crest of the mountain ended.

You could go down the ditch, then back up to Valestra, but it was a very long way.

He had two cows pulling the wagon, and we started to head uphill.

As we reached the road, the Germans who were involved in the roundup in Baiso started shooting at us.

There were bullets flying all around us.

The farmer took off the piece of wood that held the wagon and left it on the ground, running away with the cows.

We were left there with this man with a bullet in his knee, who later told us he was screaming because of the pain he felt.

We waited there and somebody came looking for us in the evening.

I can’t remember well, but I think we went to sleep in the ditch until somebody came to bring us back.

That was the only wounded man we found.