in a three-day operation. Hastings was constantly to the fore, coolly directing and encouraging his men while under constant machine-gun and mortar fire, according to the citation for his Military Cross. After the capture of Piacenza, Hastings and a few companions journeyed through German-held territory, and strode into the piazza of a seaside village on the Adriatic. Hastings thereupon convinced the German officer in charge that it would be in his best interest to provide them with a fine seaside villa and supplies of champagne for the weeks that it would take the Allies to arrive. At the end of April 1945, Hastings was in the Piazzale Loreto at Milan and saw the bodies of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci, who along with other executed fascists, were hanging upside down. He noted that Petacci's skirt had been pinned to her stockings to prevent her underwear from being revealed. Hastings considered this to be a perfect example of the often paradoxical delicacy of the Italian temperament. The Piacenza operation was universally considered a major contribution to the Allied advance. He also found time to assemble a scratch pack - the Brindisi Vale Hounds - which hunted a reported, but probably non-existent, fox. He was spared a posting to Nagasaki by a friend finding him a job in the economic division of the control commission in Austria, a post for which, he admitted at his interview, he had no relevant qualifications. When the friend returned to England, Hastings remained in Austria, taking a staff job with the Army with the sole duty of looking after the polo ponies, and occasionally played himself. He was then sent to a former Wehrmacht training centre, above the Judenburg in Styria, where he captained the British troops' ski-racing team but broke a leg during a competition against the French. 1948 onwards Finding peacetime duties unexciting, Hastings left the Army in 1948. He turned down an offer from Gillette and was refused a job by the BBC. Eventually he was invited by a friend to join MI6, which sent him in 1950 to Finland, disguised as an assistant military attaché. Four years later he moved to Paris, where he observed the conspiracy over the Suez operation and the machinations that preceded Charles de Gaulle's return to power. From 1958 to 1960, he worked in the political office of the Middle East forces in Cyprus. As a result