Soldier Record

After the Germans invaded Belgium, my great uncle Stanley Carletti, though a British subject, used contacts he had in Bruxelles and his Italian name to get an Italian passport, Italy at the time not being diretly at war with Germany. With his real British passport hidden in the hollowed out heel of his boot, he walked and hitched across northern Belgium and crossed into neutral Holand from where he caught a boat to England. On arrival there he enlisted in the Grenadier Guards but, family history has it, declined the opportunity of a commission as he had already worked out that the attrition rate amongst officers was much higher than for enlisted men. He then served from 1915 through to the end of the war, surviving without a scratch, in contrast to his brother Bertie, who was badly though not fatally wounded serving in the Rifles. He was demobilised in 1919 but then joined the RAF in 1921 and where, while serving in Constantinople (Istanbul) met and then married my great aunt Marie. She had been raised in the Czar's court and lost her first husband, who had served the Czar, in the October revolution and escaped to Constantinople where she was reduced to a stateless person working in a cafe. It was because she spoke French that my great uncle and her came together and became devoted to one another for the rest of their lives.

In a stange case of history repeating itself 26 years after first fleeing Bruxelles, Stanley together with Marie, my grandparents, my father and his brother found themselves escaping from the Germans a second time in 1940, this time a little more comfortably, on the vessel containing the Belgian gold reserves and thus well guarded.