Private Angelo

by Eric Linklater

  Simon’s reduction in rank, however, did not impair his friendship with useful Christian names, and he had no difficulty in arranging that Angelo should be attached to the Force as an interpreter. Angelo was given a suit of battle-dress, a small stipend, and a place in the sergeants’ mess. His official adoption by the army of liberation pleased him immensely. A few qualms that he felt to begin with – the queasy offspring of his experience in the mountain village – he quickly put aside as unmanly and trivial, and he set himself zealously to acquire the sangfroid and practical outlook of the Englishman. Within a week or two he was putting on weight, and the sergeants’ mess thought highly of him as a vocalist.

  Because the detached company was enjoying one of its idle seasons, Simon was able to remain with it while his collar-bone mended, and under his patronage Angelo quickly extended his knowledge of England and the English.

  Much of what he learnt surprised him. He had always heard that the English were an arrogant, wealthy, and aggressive people; and he was astonished to find that they thought of themselves as very mild and easy-going creatures, chronically hard-up, and habitually deceived or overridden by their continental neighbours. They did, however, take a pride in their sense of justice, and to Angelo this was quite incomprehensible; for he had often read of the many millions of Indians, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Basutos, Zulus, Kikuyus, Scots, and Irish whom they held in slavery.

  They were curiously heartless, he decided, for although they were far from home he never saw them weeping and sighing for their distant wives, their deserted lovers, and their half-forgotten children. They wrote, indeed, innumerable letters, but said remarkably little in them. They ate enormously, and were continually making jokes that no adult European could understand: Angelo did his best, but was forced to conclude that their sense of humour, though deceptively robust, was quite elementary. The private soldiers grumbled prodigiously and professed a fearful cynicism about the intentions, practice, and good faith of their Government; yet strangely continued to serve it with zeal and do their duty with alacrity. They appeared to become dirty very easily, for they were always washing themselves. They talked a good deal about fornication, but looked askance at the Americans for their excessive indulgence in it. They all regarded football as a more exacting and therefore more praiseworthy art than making love, and many of them preferred it.

  Angelo one day persuaded Simon to speak of English politics. Did Simon, he asked, truly believe in democracy?

  ‘Yes, I think I do,’ he answered. ‘It doesn’t work very well, of course, but what does?’

  ‘Would not the ideal government,’ asked Angelo, ‘be that of an autocratic ruler who was also a philosopher?’

  ‘Not in England,’ said Simon. ‘No one would admit that it was ideal, in the first place, and in the second we regard philosophy as a rarefied sort of entertainment, like chess or the more difficult crosswords.’

  ‘You are a Conservative, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, ‘yes, I suppose I am. I have never actually voted, but then I am also a member of the Church of England, and except for an occasional wedding I haven’t in fact been to church since I left school. The Conservative Party and the Church of England are rather similar in that respect: you can belong to both of them without doing much about it. – I belong to two or three very good clubs, now that I think of it, that I never use though I still pay my subscriptions. – But what I do believe in most devoutly is the party system, because when you get tired of the party in power you can always kick it out. You can kick it fairly hard, indeed, throughout its tenure of office. I should say that democracy is really represented by a party with a mind that knows how to act, a tender bottom that tells it when, and a well-shod electorate.’

  ‘I find that very interesting,’ said Angelo, ‘but how are you going to ensure that your electorate can afford good shoes?’

  ‘That’s a problem, isn’t it? Some people say that we shall have to work very hard and export everything we make; others maintain that we must work even harder, but buy it all ourselves; and others again declare that our real difficulty is to know what to do with our spare time. To tell you the truth, we’re in something of a muddle, and that is just what you would expect if you knew us better. We have been in a muddle for so long that most of us now regard it as our normal environment. And probably it is.’

  Angelo regarded him gravely. He did not like to say that he had studied at school the long course of England’s history, and often heard his teachers expound and deplore the cold calculation, the Oriental persistence, the diabolic art of English statesmen through the ages. Muddle indeed! – But more recently he had discovered that the English hated to be asked about their history, for none of them remembered it. So tactfully he changed the subject and asked, ‘Are English women very passionate?’

  ‘Between their tennis-playing in girlhood and their later addiction to the card-table, there is a season during which they are not indifferent to love,’ said Simon.

  ‘But the war has affected their traditional way of life, has it not?’

  ‘It has indeed. They have gone into the Services, they have gone into factories and offices. They have given up tennis altogether, and postponed their bridge.’

  ‘And their season of love?’

  ‘Love has adopted a war-time policy like that of the farmers,’ said Simon. ‘With equal enthusiasm it has cultivated both field and furrow; and assisted by the foreign troops now quartered in Britain it has ploughed thousands of hitherto neglected acres.’

  Time passed agreeably. Thin blue skies and a hint of warmth in the morning breeze foretold the return of spring. On the southern slopes of the mountains the snow-line grudgingly retreated and exposed a wet black earth. Hailstorm and sleet-squall blew with a slattern’s fury, but never lasted long. Winter was fighting a losing battle and retiring slowly to the north. Every day the sun rose a little earlier, and sometimes shone with a brief but splendid promise.

  Simon one day proposed to visit some friends near Venafro, and invited Angelo to go with him. On the way there he spoke of a great air-assault that was going to be directed against the enemy’s hitherto impregnable position at Cassino. All winter, in a frozen landscape like the mountains of the moon – but besmeared with blood and lashed by fire – the Allies had been fighting with a sorrowful heroism for possession of Monte Cassino, and now at last Cassino and all the Germans in it were to be blasted out of existence by the concentrated attack of a huge fleet of bombers. By noon of the next day, said Simon, Cassino would be merely a scar on the landscape. It was the fifteenth of March.

  Simon’s friends, whom he was visiting, were on the staff of a general whose camp was pitched on a wooded hillside. Angelo was by now on very easy terms with his English co-belligerents, for his command of their language persuaded them that he was of superior character to the majority of Italians; he had learnt to speak respectfully of the campaign in Libya; and Simon told everyone he met that Angelo had saved his life. Simon’s friends invited him to have a drink, and he listened with great interest to what they were saying about the coming air-attack.

  It began soon after breakfast on the following morning. They stood outside the mess-tent and watched the attacking fleet pass overhead, and listened to the rolling thunder and blunt reverberating echoes of myriad bursting bombs. Hidden from sight by the mountains, Cassino was about twelve miles away as the bomber flew.

  Presently they went in to drink another cup of coffee, and a flight-lieutenant described, with professional enthusiasm, the extraordinary accuracy of the bomb-sight by which missiles could be successfully aimed from prodigious heights at targets far below them. But a nervous member of the company made some comment on a drumming noise of aeroplanes directly overhead, and his uneasiness affected the others. They went out from the tent and again stared upwards at the sky. They were just in time to see the sunlight glinting on a shower of swiftly falling objects, and to throw themselves flat on the ground.
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  Only a few of the bombs exploded near them, and as soon as they had decided that the attack was not likely to be repeated most of them rose again, wiping stains of grass and mud from their battle-dress, with no graver injury than a shocked surprise. A young captain, however, an officer with a pale and intellectual cast of features, whom a large fragment of hot metal had missed by a few inches only, was so annoyed as to be openly critical of the flight-lieutenant who had spoken about the accuracy of aerial bombardment. But the flight-lieutenant explained that a good bomb-sight was still good though a navigator might bring it to bear on the wrong target.

  ‘It is as a target that I am speaking,’ said the Captain bitterly.

  ‘You were very nearly hit,’ said the flight-lieutenant. ‘You cannot deny that the bombing, as bombing, was excellent bombing.’

  ‘Art for art’s sake,’ said the Captain.

  ‘I admit,’ said the flight-lieutenant, ‘that a bomb is no respecter of persons.’

  ‘If persons are not entitled to respect,’ asked the Captain, ‘why are we fighting this war?’

  ‘It is easy to criticize,’ said the flight-lieutenant.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the Captain. ‘For those who could criticize you with the authority of personal experience are too often left speechless.’

  They stared at each other with some dislike, until another officer asked, ‘Where are Simon and his Italian friend? Has anyone seen them?’

  They were discovered, close together, on a narrow shelf of the hillside. Angelo lay unconscious, having been clouted on the head by a flying clod as big as a tea-tray; and Simon with a disconsolate expression sat holding his left thigh which had been laid open by a bomb-splinter. Angelo was bleeding from the nose, and to a hurried examination Simon’s wound appeared to be co-extensive with the damage to his trousers, which were torn from the knee to the haunch. An ambulance was quickly summoned and the two casualties, roughly bandaged, were removed to a field-hospital without delay. There it was soon discovered that neither of them was seriously injured, for Simon’s wound, though fifteen inches long, was little deeper than a scratch, and Angelo was merely bruised, bewildered, and very angry.

  ‘Do I, in any way, resemble Cassino?’ he asked Simon, as soon as he was allowed to visit him.

  ‘There is no apparent similarity,’ Simon answered.

  ‘Then why was I bombed?’

  ‘We all make mistakes from time to time.’

  ‘We do not all carry bombs. To make a private mistake in your own house is one thing, but to make a public mistake with a bomb of two hundred and fifty kilogrammes is different altogether.’

  ‘Year by year,’ said Simon philosophically, ‘science puts more power into our hands.’

  ‘So that we may throw bombs at the wrong people?’

  ‘Science like love,’ said Simon, ‘is blind.’

  ‘I prefer love,’ said Angelo. ‘It makes less noise.’

  He was still angry, and not to be pacified until Simon told him that in a day or two they might be going to Sorrento. Simon was on terms of friendship with the senior surgeon of the hospital – they called each other by their Christian names – and his contention that such wounds as theirs would heal most quickly in convalescence by the sea had not been seriously disputed.

  Angelo was momentarily pleased. ‘It is very beautiful in Sorrento,’ he said. ‘Many people used to go there for their honeymoon.’ – And then he fetched so deep a sigh that Simon asked him what the matter was.

  ‘For the last two days,’ said Angelo, ‘I have been thinking about nothing but bombs, and whenever I fell asleep I had a nightmare. And now I have begun to think about my sweetheart Lucrezia and the honeymoon we cannot have until the war is over; and that is worse than bombs, for I shall not be able to sleep at all. It is very difficult to be happy.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘LET US MAINTAIN our good temper,’ said the Count. ‘Let us keep a sense of proportion. There are seven deadly sins and only two redeeming virtues, which are faith and love –’

  ‘I should include good manners,’ said the Marchesa.

  ‘So should I, if I had my way,’ the Count agreed. ‘I should include tolerance, a judicious taste in music, a preference for the baroque in architecture, a certain refinement in the apprehension of physical beauty and one’s responses to it, a talent for imparting gaiety to conversation, and so forth. These would all be redeeming virtues if I were the ultimate authority and final court of appeal; but there’s no use pretending that I am any such thing. It has been decided otherwise, and we have to recognize facts. The essential virtues are two, the deadly sins are seven, and therefore the virtues are in a permanent minority and we should not be surprised that sometimes they suffer a heavy defeat. We should not, that is, be so destructively surprised as to fall into a state of wrathful despair before the scene of a human battlefield from which the virtues have fled shrieking in dismay, and on which the triumphant sins for a little season strut and revel, maltreat their captives, and quarrel among themselves. It is tiresome, I admit –’

  ‘My maid refuses to leave Rome,’ said the Marchesa. ‘The perfume that I have used for ten years is unobtainable in this paltry village, and today the hairdresser, clumsy to begin with, was finally insolent. The few clothes that I was able to bring here now seem like a vulgar admirer whom one has allowed to perform some opportune but regretted service: their excessive familiarity has become revolting. There is, moreover, no company in Montenero, and what is hardest of all to bear, you have turned philosopher.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the Count. ‘That is too kind of you. I explore the fringes of thought, I contemplate human affairs with a certain interest, but that is all. I am not yet conscious of a complete and orderly system of cognition.’

  ‘You should be glad of that,’ said the Marchesa, ‘for it is sheer misfortune to be much aware of any system, whether physical, political, or merely plumbing. The plumbing in this house has now finally collapsed, and no one can be unconscious of the fact. And except for a few hours in the middle of the day we live in such gloom as only good eyesight can distinguish from total darkness.’

  ‘It was the Germans who cut off the electric light,’ said the Count.

  ‘And an English or an American bomb that cut off the water. If our old friends and our new ones both remain in Italy, we shall soon have nothing left at all.’

  ‘And then upon the stony soil of our destitution the seven deadly sins may dwindle and faint with hunger, and by strenuous cultivation the redeeming virtues will show their heads again.’

  ‘Do you look forward to the prospect?’

  ‘No,’ said the Count, ‘I cannot bear to contemplate it. – I am going for a walk.’

  ‘I shall not come with you,’ said the Marchesa, ‘for I cannot afford such an expense of shoe-leather.’

  The little town of Montenero di Roma, where they had been living in seclusion for several weeks, had formerly been a popular resort of tourists. There were several good churches in it, the largest being that of Santa Maria Maggiore, which had an elaborate façade and contained four large paintings of the Holy Family by Luini. There were also a palace that had once belonged to the Orsini, in which there were frescoes by Ghirlandaio, and two restaurants well-known for their cooking. The municipality had built a new sulphur bath below the ruins of that which had been more splendidly created for Diocletian, and but for a surplus of statuary the public gardens would have been charming. The main street, a narrow thoroughfare smoothly paved, curved like a half-hoop round the hill, and in summer time the houses were decked with red geraniums that grew in little balconies of wrought iron beneath their windows. From many places there were broad views of the Campagna, far below and reaching spaciously to the north, and of St. Peter’s dome, small in the distance, in the flat haze of Rome. The town was built upon a wooded hill-top in a broad bay of the mountains, and above it, on either flank and behind it, rose their wrinkled sides. But the wrinkles were hardl
y visible in winter, when the snow filled them.

  How cold it was! thought the Count. How different from the warm seasons when tourists had filled the streets with their clamorous tongues from Birmingham and Bremen and Minneapolis! Heigh-ho for progress: what a lost beatitude that genial vulgarity now appeared!

  The sun shone with a pallid glitter, and the snowy breath of the wind came shrilling down a salita on the right-hand side of the street. The Count turned up the collar of his coat: it was lined with Persian lambskin, tightly curled. Two plump and red-legged girls with scanty dresses ran past him, laughing loudly. An old man stood in the gutter, begging, but seemingly indifferent to the frozen air. A burly fellow with a bare head and his shirt open to the waist stood in the mouth of a lane and shouted to a friend on the other side of the street … There were gradations of sensibility, thought the Count, and no one should generalize on social affairs until everyone had been furnished with an equally efficient circulation of the blood.

  The smoothly paved and curving street led to the Piazza Santa Maria where, in the tourist season, a fountain had risen from the triple source of three dolphins’ mouths and splashed the generous forms of two nereids clinging to the knees of a benignly bearded Neptune. There was no fountain now, and the basin was half-full of dirty snow. Printed posters, signed by the German commandant, defaced the columns of Santa Maria Maggiore on the north side of the square. There was a scattering of German soldiers among the idly moving people. – ‘And how superfluous and out of place they are,’ murmured the Count with a sudden distaste for their strong but awkward figures. The Italians, the several score of them who loosely filled the piazza, were doing nothing in particular to justify their existence, but nothing at all to perturb it. They were talking and gesticulating, they were contemplating eternity and abusing the present, they were behaving like the digits and fronds of a great anemone that reasonably filled its own sea-cove; but the Germans were manifestly a foreign growth and stood out like proud flesh.