At the end of September there was a sort of interregnum: without the Germans we felt free. I remember Alderico having fun playing soldiers in the square. The events in the Town Hall had happened just before but now it was all quiet again.

The Germans began to arrive. They stopped in the square and then moved on to Torricella. The front line along the Sangro was still uncertain. At the end of October, an Allied plane based on the coast flew over the Old Village and dropped one bomb by the house where Benigno D’Orazio lived and another on Colle Patacchino. A young man was killed, hit by a door blown off by the blast. The British had left Casoli and reached Rangitto.

The day they mined the houses, the Germans arrived early in the morning in lorries. One of them stopped in Piazza Garibaldi to oversee the Old Village. They set up a machine gun at Cassio and another behind the convent, near where the middle school is today. They issued an order giving people two hours to get out and save what they could. The chaos was indescribable. I managed to carry a few things out of the house into the square, and I met two Germans who told me to go into the church - the only place that hadn’t been mined. I ran, along with lots of other people, towards Pastini and I was on the road below Colle Patacchino, near the wooden cross, when I heard a boom. I turned round and saw a column of smoke. They had blown up the house of Benigno, the fascist mayor, and then they began to blow up the first houses in the Old Village. It must have been about 10 in the morning. That evening the German demolition squad returned to Torricella.

The following morning they set about blowing up all the houses in Piazza Roma, Via Peligna, Via del Popolo and the Casette although they could only blow the roofs off these houses because they were earthquake-proof. They came back on the third day to finish the job off but they were stopped at Cassio by a British patrol, so the houses in Via della Pace and that district were saved.

In the ruins I came across Minco Troilo, near to where his house had been. "What’s the matter?" I asked. "Mamma is dead" he replied. Then he said something that seemed strange to me: "The Germans have machine guns; if some of you came with me I could kill them, but what then?".

When the British finally arrived, they set up howitzers in the square, once they had lopped the tops off a couple of cedars in the gardens. They set up a cannon at San Giovanni, after felling a fine oak tree - there was no telling them! And another at Patana, where the road forks to Valloni. They were firing towards the Morgia and Torricella. During a German shelling of Casette, two British soldiers lost their lives and I was very sad about how it happened: they kept hammering on the doors of the houses opposite where the post office is today but nobody would let them in for fear of being hit by the shrapnel that was smashing into the walls of the houses, but it was this that killed the two soldiers. It happened during the day.

I became part of the police force set up by the Allies. I had just been hanging around the square, occasionally helping out Lucio De Gregorio at the register office. A supply of salt arrived, which had been calculated at so many grammes per head of population. The British gave the job to Casari who asked me and Vincenzo Tilli to help him. We filled a pile of little paper bags with salt, measured to the milligramme. The British asked us what we wanted to do next, so I joined the new Police force. The Police Chief was Rocco Curci, a sergeant in the army, who had fled here with is wife after September 8.

The British carried on shelling Torricella, and one morning the radio announced that the British had occupied the village of Torricella, although Minco Troilo and his men had been there first, even taking provisions with them.