The watchers

All the guests in the Vatican had the sensation of being watched. If they went out, they were escorted. Men in plain clothes lounged about the courtyard of the hospice. They suspected men in cassocks of being secret agents of Mussolini rather than the Pope. The name of every visitor was taken down and reported to the Italian police. All this was a breach of the Lateran Treaty. But it amused rather than offended. They were much more offended because of what happened when one of the French crossed St Peter's Square (unostentatiously, keeping within the columns of Bernini). The square is inside the territory of Vatican City, and the passage caused instant protest from Italian police to the Vatican and a ban by the Vatican on any of the diplomats crossing the Square.

It was wearisome, the ritual Vatican saluting by gendarmes, bowing from the waist or hips or neck; especially when the spies watching them on behalf of the Fascist police were the most punctilious in these courtesies.

Winston Churchill would have felt uncomfortable if an educated and patriotic German, aided by an equally patriotic ex-soldier as a butler and a secretary, had been installed during the war on neutral territory amid the precincts of Lambeth Palace, almost immediately across the river from the House of Commons. The situation would have seemed intolerable, and we may guess that though Chamberlain and Halifax would nevertheless have tolerated, Churchill and Eden would not.