Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Capt D.: “Rebière, I have something to tell you.”

  ‘DR: “Yes, sir.”

  ‘CD: “We are going to have to make you an officer. There is simply no one else left. You are good at languages, you can read a map and although you are apparently still only about sixteen you count as a veteran now, God help us.”

  ‘DR: “Thank you, sir. Do I have to go on a course?”

  ‘CD: “Good God, man. We are fighting a war. Do you think I am going to send you back to bloody Camberley? The reason I am promoting you is that you are the best I have left, God help us, not so I can send you home!”

  ‘DR: “I thought everyone had to go back to Sandhurst for training. Or I think maybe at Verona, there’s—”

  ‘CD: “Don’t think. You will take charge of a platoon as soon as we get to Montebelluna. The way things are going you may have command of the whole company before long.”

  ‘DR: “Yes, sir, certainly, sir, etc., etc.”

  ‘When the news reached the others, Jack Turney said I must be the first officer in the British Army who doesn’t have to shave. This is not true, as you know, because I shave every day with the other men; but I have decided to grow a moustache to show him anyway, and to frighten the enemy.

  ‘We took up our positions on the west bank of the Piave, where we lived in caves like the 40 thieves. March is the wettest month in Italy, and the Piave was very full and rapid. It is about a hundred yards across and forms a compelling no man’s land, not much wetter than that at Ypres, but a lot less muddy! The object of our existence is a) to cross the river; b) in Denniston’s words “to make a bloody nuisance of ourselves”. The latter is surprisingly easy to achieve, the former rather difficult.

  ‘At ten o’clock sharp each morning, the Austrians send over about twenty shells, then stop. In the evening, they come down to the river to get water. I imagine those detailed to do so must be on some sort of charge or are voluntary members of the suicide squad, because they offer excellent sniper targets – just agile and distant enough to be sporting.

  ‘Making a nuisance of ourselves means building boats and paddling over at night on raids, like a trench raid, except there are no trenches. As the company – indeed battalion – linguist, I am considered indispensable to all such operations and I am always chosen for any boat party. Do I imagine a gleeful look in Denniston’s eye when he tells me, “First name on the team sheet, as ever, Lieutenant”? We paddle over using spades or trenching tools as paddles on rickety rafts knocked up by the RE. Sometimes the Austrians (the “Aussies” as my men call them) put up a flare, and then we dive into the water and swim like hell (very cold: to be avoided if possible). But if they do not hear us, we can get in amongst them and take a prisoner back for questioning. One of the men we brought back came from Villach and knew Herr Geissler, the railway engineer! He was delighted to have a chat about the old days and to be taken prisoner at last. “What does he say, Mr Rebière?” Denniston kept asking, when we had been talking about how much we missed good Carinthian cooking. Anyway, he gave me the details of all the units in this part of the line. They included Poles, Ruthenes, Rumanians, Magyars and Serbians. He told us there was no major offensive planned here. So that put an end to “trench raids” for a time, rather to Denniston’s disappointment.

  ‘All went very well for a bit until he hit on a better idea. If they were not going to attack us, we should build a bridge and attack them. I broke the news to Jack Turney. “What a ******g stupid idea!” “My views exactly, Private. Ours not to reason why, however.” I have become very swanky in the way I talk to the men and I must say I thoroughly enjoy it. I just wish they wouldn’t still call me “Daniel”.

  ‘The Engineers excelled themselves by building several concrete pillars which they somehow contrived to float out into the river at dead of night without being seen by the enemy. Do not ask me how, but I swear to you they did it. The idea was that on top of these pillars, they would erect a wooden pontoon – which is the sort of thing the RE can do in about 20 minutes, putting up wooden pontoons being exactly what the RE does. Two companies were then to cross the bridge and attack. Our battalion occupies approx 3, 000 yards of the river bank; it has three companies with one in reserve. The chances of my company (D) being chosen were what Billy Reader would have called “two-to-one on”. But God – He alone knows why – was merciful, and B and C got chosen for the “stunt”. Denniston utterly crestfallen since he claims the whole thing was his idea, but a bigger bloody fool than he, Col Tucker, is the battalion commander and he made the decision. Over they went one night. Huge firefight and unpleasant bayonet work at close quarters. Inadequate support and forward planning, however, meant that the considerable advance made by our troops could not be maintained, and they were obliged to withdraw to their previous line after severe loss of life. Does that pattern of events sound at all familiar to you?

  ‘The next week, the Piave flooded and the concrete pillars were swept away; I do not think that we will try to cross the river again in the foreseeable future. I mean, we had already established – at considerable personal risk – that no enemy attack was imminent, so what on earth were we doing?

  ‘Next day it was reported to me that several of my platoon were drunk on vino rosso, and I went to investigate. This local wine must be stronger than I had thought, as some of the men were quite ill. One of the sergeants was out of control, and mutinous. I got the worst of them locked up in the guard detention room and had a guard placed outside my billet. The sgt will be reduced to the ranks, which is a pity, as he was a good man and someone less worthy will have to be promoted corporal. I have a mind to make it Jack Turney.

  ‘Soon after that, we were told to prepare to move up into the mountains. It was said that German reinforcements had been spotted by one of our planes and that we expected an attack in the next few weeks. It was by now the end of April, and I was not sorry to see the back of the Piave.

  ‘I am writing this letter, therefore, in the pleasant town of Cittadella, my favourite of the cities of the plain. I am sitting in the restaurant where Denniston came to promote me, and I have just had a good lunch of spaghetti and chicken, with two dark black coffees to follow. I will be out of the “green envelope area” soon when we go up into the mountains and all I shall be able to send is some silly card on which I tick a box saying I am a) all right, b) suffering from venereal disease/wind/fallen arches, or c) dead.

  ‘I do miss you all very much. Please give my love to Aunt Kitty and to C and M, whom I miss most of all. I will see you all again soon, I know. Please also tell Ma not to worry, and that my next long letter will be to her and Pa.

  ‘I am sorry this letter is so long, but I only hope that it gives you half as much pleasure to read as it has given me to write.

  ‘The sun is out, my belly is full and the mountains are calling. I see a Fiat motor lorry in the square and I think it has my name on it. I embrace you all. Daniel.’

  Lt Rebière was told to march his men to their position in the line on the Asiago Plateau at 1000 metres above sea level. There was an adequate metalled road up the mountain over a long series of hairpin bends, but it was reserved to the gunners and their 15-hundredweight lorries pulling six-inch howitzers, ammunition and other stores; the infantry were to scramble up the mule tracks in as straight a line as they could manage.

  To someone who had spent much of his childhood at exactly that altitude, the five-hour climb was not daunting, even with a full pack, though there were moments when he longed for Herr Geissler’s cable-car. The men grumbled continually and he allowed them to stop for ten minutes each hour, if possible at a place where a mountain stream enabled them to fill their water bottles. As they moved up through the pine forests, Daniel felt his spirits rise; it was hard not to feel exhilarated by the thinning of the air, the chill that came with it and the sense of being removed from the flat lands below. They watched the convoy of lorries on the switchback road, pausing occasionally as it passed through h
uge draped camouflage curtains that had been suspended between the pines to fool the enemy spotter planes; some of the vehicles carried anti-skid barbed wire on their solid rubber tyres and the Italian and British drivers pushed them hard through the bends, close to the edge.

  It was bizarre how uplifting it was after the brown and saturated plains of Belgium, thought Daniel. On a few steep sections there was a ‘teleferica’, an aerial ropeway of endless steel cable attached to electrically driven steel drums; these, however, carried only small cars, about six feet by two, clamped to the cable and held on by their own weight. They transported light stores, though had been used to ferry down the seriously wounded, a hazardous journey since they were unstable in the wind and the up-car passed close to the down-car, dislodging any load that stuck out.

  The men begged to stop at Granezza, where an ugly modern osteria promised food and warmth, but it had been requisitioned as the battalion headquarters by some other brigade, and Daniel’s company followed A and C on through the woods. When they had pushed up through the mist and low cloud, he made his men pause and look behind them: there, just visible on the south-east horizon, floating in its misty lagoon, was the city of Venice.

  ‘I am Captain Gregorio, but if you take my position you may call me Luca,’ said the officer who handed over his trench on the plateau. He was a man of about thirty, dark and quick of movement. He spoke in English, and was amazed when Daniel introduced himself in Italian.

  ‘My Italian is not good,’ he said, ‘but I try. Do you speak German?’

  ‘I try not to,’ said Gregorio. ‘We are fighting for the ownership of these mountains and the right to speak our own language, but I was brought up near Arabba, and many people in my village spoke German. So . . . A little.’

  ‘Then we will get on very well,’ said Daniel, in Carinthian-accented German.

  Gregorio smiled widely. ‘I think so. We are going into reserve near Castelfranco, but some of my company will stay halfway up the mountain at Granezza. You must come and visit me. Come and have dinner.’

  ‘I will. I must settle in first. Then I will see what I can do with some lorry-hopping.’

  ‘Good. You collect water from the reservoir. It is pumped up from the plain. There is more than enough for your men – unless the pipeline is hit. Then you will have to drink wine.’

  ‘Do they bomb it?’

  ‘Yes, they do. But we have hidden it well. We are quite good engineers, you know. Good luck, Daniele.’

  ‘Thank you, Luca. I will see you as soon as I can get down.’

  ‘We shall have pasta with wild boar. I shall shoot it myself. With a mortar if necessary.’

  He disappeared, laughing loudly, and Daniel could see how relieved he was to be out of the line.

  The Italian trenches they took over had been blasted out of the rock because the earth covering was not deep enough to be dug into a defence. For the first four days the men set to work to extend and improve the system; they had to punch a cold drill into the rock with a sledgehammer to make a hole for the charge. The noise of the explosions was the only sound of warfare.

  From on top of a promontory, Daniel surveyed the entire plateau of Asiago. The allied line ran in and out of pine woods on the west and southern edges; the Austrians and their allies were mostly in open country in front of the small town of Asiago itself and were thus easily observed by aeroplane. The entire plateau was about eight miles from east to west and two or three miles in breadth, ringed with higher mountains. There was the occasional flash of an artillery piece from the enemy line, followed long afterwards by a rumbling report; but after the Western Front, it hardly looked like war at all.

  The company cook baked polenta from the local maize flour, which made a change from the pork and beans and tins of stew, though somehow did not taste as good as when the men had had it made by the farmers’ wives in the villages of the plain. Accommodation for the officers was not in dugouts but in various wooden huts concealed in the pine forests, and on the first evening Daniel was invited, with the other platoon commanders, to dinner with Captain Denniston.

  ‘I don’t want your men thinking this is a cushy billet,’ said Denniston, pouring himself a glass of whisky. ‘We expect an attack, and meanwhile the time we have must be spent profitably. Do you understand?’

  His servant, a silent, unsmiling man called Rampton, brought in the food, which included Italian sausages he had bought in Cittadella.

  ‘Wine, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Just a little.’

  Daniel had hardly ever drunk wine before and had seen its effects on his men, but he wanted to get used to it before he had dinner with Luca. It is quite odd, he mused, as the alcohol loosened his thoughts: last month alone I bayoneted three men to death on the Piave and a few days ago I marched a platoon for five hours up a mountain to the exact spot marked on a map; but I have never made love to a woman and I do not know if I can manage to drink wine.

  In the course of the next week, the men continued to improve their living conditions, though their first duty, Daniel was happy to notice, was towards their officers, and he was invited to sleep in a sort of cave, dug into the side of the hill with a smart opening made of white stone fragments left from trench detonations and a lintel of sawn pine. A wooden bed was provided inside and, since there was room for three, Daniel insisted that the newly promoted Corporal Turney join him there along with Sergeant Shields, when they were not on duty elsewhere. When he himself was resting, Daniel admired the view across the plateau.

  He took out a notebook to write down the names of all the flora that he knew his father would be interested to know about on his return. On the lower slopes were wild rhododendron or Alpenrosen, though the red bushes, lovely as they were, did not look like roses to him. Near his own ‘cottage’, as he secretly called it, was a pink plant; he thought perhaps it was ‘thrift’, but he had never paid much attention to botany. The blue flowers, he was sure, were harebells, and they grew profusely. When a parcel arrived from home containing not only some of his mother’s cake but, from his Uncle Thomas, the works of Shelley with the note ‘See “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”’, a happy solution came to him: he would take specimens of all these wild flowers and press them between the pages of Shelley as a gift for Charlotte and Martha. He thought of their blonde heads leaning over the book together, and was a little anxious that they would laugh at him.

  There were no animals in the mountains – though lower down there must be wild boar – or he sincerely hoped there were for his dinner’s sake; nor were there any birds, which was disappointing, as he had somehow expected buzzards or eagles; but at least there were no rats.

  Odder and odder, he thought, as he laid a small pink flower carefully between the pages of ‘Ode to the West Wind’, breathed deeply on the Alpine air and rested his eyes on the long view over the plateau: seldom have I felt so tranquil as now I do, at war; seldom have I felt more at ease with the world, or more content.

  He saw Luca Gregorio whenever he could get down the mountain. The wild boar proved elusive, but there was always something good to eat at Granezza and Daniel invited him back to his ‘cottage’, where he served him Maconochie’s stew and polenta, with oranges, which were now a staple of the ration. Luca asked to see the company cook, and explained to him that he needed to put olive oil and herbs with the polenta next time; luckily he had brought plenty of wine, so they could wash down the glutinous mixture. They sat up till late, while Luca told him about his family in Arabba and his work in Verona, and his wife and two daughters. He seemed fascinated by the fact that Daniel could speak even a little of his language and wanted to know more about his family. Luca was the first person Daniel had told since joining up that his father was a psychiatrist.

  In late May, by dint of some fortunate ‘lorry-hopping’, Daniel was able to profit from the day off that Denniston had given him. He met Luca at nine, and they set off down the mountain in a Fiat lorry that was bound for Vi
cenza. Daniel wanted to buy some boots better suited to the mountains and an electric torch to replace the one blown off him at Passchendaele, so that he could more easily read Shelley; Luca told him that the modern town of Schio, the other side of Thiene, would be able to help. In return, Daniel planned to spend the first instalment of his extra officer’s pay on buying them the best lunch that Schio could provide.

  ‘Don’t be too hopeful,’ said Luca.

  In Thiene, they were deposited at Mario’s bar, where any passing traffic stopped for an exchange of news on road conditions and the progress of the war. Luca persuaded a post office van to take them on up the narrow roads of the mountain again, through the green meadows, to Schio, which they reached at noon. Luca made some inquiries at the post office, and by lunchtime Daniel had his new boots and a bicycle lamp, which was the nearest thing to a torch that Schio could manage; the shopkeeper allowed him a spare bulb, but had no extra batteries, so Daniel conceded that Shelley’s longer poems would have to be read by day. The restaurant that had been recommended to Luca entailed a walk through the centre of the modern town.

  As well as a large textile works, Schio was famous for its hospital, which they stopped briefly to admire. It was a large three-storey white building, with tall cypresses in its gardens. It was only as they were about to move off that Daniel noticed that the place proclaimed itself, in large letters beneath the pediment, to be a Hospital for Neurasthenics. He smiled to himself. Where English asylums invariably had an Italianate design, the Schio madhouse had a belltower with a spire that might have come from rural Sussex.