Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  The first part of the Duce’s ultimatum arrived last, and I did not know exactly what was transpiring until five o’clock in the morning. I was tired and sick, and I don’t know if I was relieved or pained by the instruction not to deliver it until 3 a.m. on the 28th, and wait for a reply until 6 a.m. It seemed that the ‘Unsleeping Dictator’ (who, I happen to know, used to sleep rather a lot) was determined not only to unleash havoc, but to keep us from our beds.

  On the 27th the Greek Chief-of-Staff summoned Mondini in order to deny that the border incidents and the explosion at Santi Quaranta were anything to do with Greece. Mondini came back very depressed and told me that Papagos had humiliated him by asking a single pertinent question: ‘By what miracle do you know that we did these things when no one knows who it was and no one has ever been caught?’ Mondini tried to placate him by saying that it was probably the British, whereupon Papagos laughed and said, ‘I suppose you are aware that every yard of the border is guarded by Greek patriots who will fight to the last drop of blood?’ Mondini shared my sense of shame and impotence; Badoglio had not kept him informed. Badoglio later told me that he himself was not informed, despite being our Chief-of-Staff at home – was there ever another war when the Commander-in-Chief did not know that there was going to be one? Mondini and I discussed resignation again, whilst outside the Athenians went about their usual clamorous business. It was a beautiful, warm, splendidly autumnal day, and Mondini and I both knew that soon this beauty and this peace were going to be torn apart by sirens and bombs; it was too revolting, even sacrilegious, to contemplate. We began to receive ashen-faced delegates from the Italian community in Athens, who feared internment and persecution in the event of war. I was obliged to lie to them, and I sent them away with my heart bleeding. As it turned out, the Greeks very honourably tried to evacuate them, and at Salonika they were bombed by mistake by our own air force.

  My interview with Metaxas was the most painful occasion of my life, and afterwards I was repatriated, but I didn’t see Ciano until November 8th. You see, the campaign was already a fiasco, and Ciano didn’t want me to say ‘I told you so’. He didn’t really want to see me at all, and he kept interrupting and changing the subject. In my presence he telephoned the Duce and told him that I had said things that I had not, and then he told me that the Albanian campaign would be over in two weeks. Later on, when I had started to make a fuss about the truth of the matter, he sent Anfuso to advise me to go on a holiday, and I suppose that that was the end of my career.

  You want to know about my interview with Metaxas? Isn’t that famous enough already? I don’t like to talk about it much. You see, I admired Metaxas, and the truth is that we were friends. No, it’s not true that Metaxas just said ‘No.’ O, all right, I’ll tell you.

  We had a Greek chauffeur, I can’t remember his name, and we sent him home so that it was Mondini who drove us to the villa at Kifisia. De Santo came along to interpret, though he wasn’t needed in the event. We left at 2.30 a.m., with stars shining like diamonds above us, and it was so mild that I didn’t even have to button my coat. We arrived at the villa, a modest little place in the suburbs, at about 2.45, and the commander of the guard got muddled – he must have mistaken our Italian tricolor for the French one – and he telephoned Metaxas to say that the French ambassador wanted to see him. It would have been comical on any other occasion. As I waited I listened to the rustling of the pines and tried to spot the owl that was hooting in one of the trees. I felt sick.

  Metaxas came to the service door himself. He was very ill, you know, and he looked quite small and pathetic, he looked like a little bourgeois who has come out to collect the newspaper or call the cat. He was wearing a nightgown that was covered in a pattern of white flowers. Somehow one expects the night attire of the eminent to be more dignified. He squinted up into my face, saw that it was me, and exclaimed with pleasure, ‘Ah, monsieur le ministre, comment allez-vous?’ I can’t remember what I said in reply, but I knew that Metaxas suspected that I had come to give him the kiss of Judas. He was dying by then, as I expect you know, and the burden on his soul must already have been unimaginably great.

  We went to a little sitting-room that was full of cheap furniture and those little gewgaws that every middle-class Greek seems to love. Metaxas was an honest politician, you see. He was never accused of corruption even by his enemies, not even by the Communists, and it was obvious from his house that state funds had never contributed towards its embellishment. There could not have been a man more different from the Duce.

  He put me in a leather armchair. I heard later that Metaxas’ widow never let anyone sit in it again. He sat on a couch that was covered in cretonne. We spoke entirely in French. I told him that I had been commanded by my government to hand over an urgent note. He took it, and read it very slowly, over and over again, as though it were intrinsically unbelievable. He made that click of the tongue that Greeks employ to signify refusal, and he began to shake his head.

  The note said that Greece had openly sided with the British, that she had violated the duties of neutrality, that she had provoked Albania … and it concluded with these words that I shall never forget:

  ‘All this cannot be tolerated by Italy any further. The Italian government has therefore decided to ask the Greek government, as a guarantee of Greek neutrality and of Italian security, for permission to occupy some strategic areas on Greek territory for the duration of the present conflict with Great Britain. The Italian government asks the Greek government not to oppose such occupation and not to place obstacles in the way of the free passage of troops that are to carry out this task. These troops do not come as enemies of the Greek people, and by the occupation of some strategic points, dictated by contingent and purely defensive necessities, the Italian government in no way intends to prejudice the sovereignty and independence of Greece. The Italian government asks the Greek government immediately to give the orders necessary to enable this occupation to take place in a peaceful manner. Should Italian troops meet with resistance, such resistance would be broken by force of arms, and the Greek government would assume responsibility for the consequences that would ensue.’

  Metaxas’ spectacles misted over, and behind them I could see tears. It is a hard thing to see a powerful man, a dictator, reduced to this state. His hands shook a little; he was a hard man, but passionate. I sat there opposite him, my elbows on my knees, and I was bitterly ashamed of the folly and injustice of this escapade in which I had become embroiled. I too wanted to weep. He looked up at me and said, ‘Alors, c’est la guerre.’

  So you see, he didn’t say ‘okhi’ as the Greeks believe; it was not as simple as ‘No,’ but it meant the same. It had the same resolve and the same dignity, an identical finality.

  ‘Mais non,’ I said, knowing that I was lying, ‘you can accept the ultimatum. You have three hours.’

  Metaxas raised an eyebrow, almost with sympathy, because he knew that I was not cut out for dishonour, and replied, ‘Il est impossible. In three hours it is impossible to awaken the King, summon Papagos, and get orders to every outpost on the border. Many of them have no telephone.’

  ‘Il est possible, néanmoins,’ I insisted, and he shook his head; ‘Which strategic parts do you wish to occupy?’ He placed a sarcastic emphasis upon the word ‘strategic’. I shrugged my shoulders in embarrassment, and said, ‘Je ne sais pas. Je suis désolé.’

  He looked at me again, this time with a trace of amusement in his eyes: ‘Alors, vous voyez, c’est la guerre.’

  ‘Mais non,’ I repeated, and told him that I would wait until 6 a.m. for his final answer. He accompanied me to the door. He knew that we intended to occupy all of Greece whatever his reply, and he knew that if he fought us he would finish by having to fight the Germans. ‘Vous êtes les plus forts,’ he said, ‘mais c’est une question d’honneur.’

  It was the last time that I ever saw Metaxas. He died on January 29th of a phlegmon of the pharynx that had turned into an abscess an
d led to toxaemia. He died wishing that the British had been able to send him five divisions of armour, without which he had nonetheless succeeded in transforming our Blitzkrieg into an ignominious retreat.

  I had left him standing there in his flowery gown, a little man who was ridiculous in the eyes of most of the world, a little man, accursed with a notorious and intransigent daughter, unelected, who had just spoken to me with the voice of the entire people of Greece. It was Greece’s finest hour and my country’s most disgraceful. Metaxas had earned his place in history amongst liberators, caesars and kings, and I was left diminished and ashamed.

  There, I have told you what happened. I hope you’re satisfied.

  15 L’Omosessuale (4)

  We did not report back to Colonel Rivolta because we had not been instructed to. We were expected to be dead. But the dispatches were full of accounts of ‘border incidents’ perpetrated by the Greek ‘lackeys of the British’. The Army was gripped by a grim sense of outrage, and everyone except Francisco and me was straining at the leash. We kept quiet. We thought it miraculous that we had not been given a machine-gun that would jam after the first shot.

  But we often talked to each other, and our complicity deepened our sense of mutual isolation. We felt a terrible sense of betrayal long before it became the foremost emotion in the breast of every one of our soldiers in the mountains of Epirus. We received medals for what we had done and were ordered not to wear them. We were ordered not to tell anyone that we had won them. We had been tricked into becoming accomplices to murder, and we would not have worn them anyway. Francisco and I made a pact that one day one of us would put a bullet through the brain of Colonel Rivolta.

  I wanted to desert, but I did not want to leave my beautiful beloved. In any case it was a physical impossibility, since I would have had to have trekked across mountain ranges, through uninhabitable wastes. I would have had to find my way across the sea to Italy. And then what? Be arrested? The only path I considered seriously was crossing the border into Greece. I would have become the first of the many Italian soldiers who joined the anti-Fascist alliance.

  My plans were pre-empted by events. Our unanticipated success had obviously impressed somebody, because Francisco and I were temporarily withdrawn from our unit and sent to a top-secret training camp near Tirana. We arrived there after a journey much of which was again on foot, in the expectation of being trained for commando operations. I will admit that both of us were excited by this prospect, as any young man would have been in our situation.

  Imagine our consternation and disbelief when we turned up and found that we were instructors. Imagine the immensity of our misgivings when we were told to train one hundred and fifty Albanians in the art of sabotage. Imagine our incredulous hilarity when we got drunk and talked the situation over. How could it happen to us? We had done one operation and were supposed to be experts. These Albanians were outrageous and hyperbolical Balkan brigands, and not one of them spoke a word of Italian. We did not speak Albanian. We had about a week in which to train them.

  The project was under the control of Jacomoni himself, and we were now fully party to an official conspiracy to create ‘Greek’ incidents which would give the Duce reasonable excuse to declare war. It was as cynical as that. No doubt the Duce thought that Greece would be an easy conquest that would supply him with something to set against the Blitzkrieg of Adolf Hitler.

  The Albanian would-be commandos were all overweight, they all seemed to have enormous moustachios, they were all inebriates, they were all murderous, lecherous, rapacious, and incapable of work or honesty. They were nominally Muslims, which meant having to stop for prayer at inconvenient moments, but Francisco and I rapidly came to the conclusion that they had succeeded in remaining entirely untouched by religious or humane sentiments of any kind.

  We took them on route marches, and Francisco and I were the only ones to arrive at the end. We taught them only to fire brief bursts from machine-guns, but they emptied entire belts at a time and buckled the barrels from overheating. We taught them unarmed combat, only to have knives drawn on us if we appeared to be winning. We taught them how to live off the land, only to find them sloping away to visit taverns in the middle of the night. We taught them how to destroy telegraph poles and telephone installations; one of them electrocuted himself in the penis by urinating on a transformer. We taught them how to eliminate watchtowers; we made them build one, and then they refused to practise destroying it because it had taken so much trouble to erect it in the first place. We taught them how to encourage a local population to rebel; the local populations rebelled only against our Albanians. The only things we successfully taught were how to assassinate generals, and how to create confusion by opening fire behind the lines; they proved this by shooting one of the camp guards and then shooting up a brothel with the intention of robbing the pimps. At the end of the training these commandos were paid very large sums of cash and released into Greek territory in order to begin the process of destabilising it. Without exception they disappeared with the money and were never heard of again. Francisco and I received more medals for our ‘outstanding contribution’, and were posted back to our unit.

  A few more things happened. One of our own aircraft dropped ‘Greek’ pamphlets on us, encouraging the Albanians to revolt against us and join the British. We identified the aircraft as one of ours almost immediately, and some of our more stupid soldiers could not understand why we were encouraging our own people to defect. More of our frontier posts were attacked by our own people dressed as Greeks, and some Albanians had potshots taken at them to make them think that they needed us to protect them. Some Albanians actually shot at us as well, and we announced that they had been Greeks. The Governor-General arranged to have his own offices blown up so that the Duce could finally and definitively declare war. He duly did so, shortly after he had ordered a demobilisation that left us with too few troops and no reasonable expectation of reinforcements.

  I have related these things as though they were amusing, but really they were acts of lunacy. We had been told that the Greeks were demoralised and corrupt, that they would desert to fight on our side, that the war would be a Blitzkrieg that would be over in seconds, that northern Greece was full of disaffected irredentists who wanted union with Albania; but we only wanted to go home. I only wanted to be in love with Francisco. We were sent off to die, with no transport, no equipment, no tanks worthy of the name, an air force that was mainly in Belgium, insufficient troops, and no officers above the rank of colonel who knew anything about tactics. Our commander refused reinforcements because he would get more credit for a victory with a small army. Another idiot. I did not desert. Perhaps we were all idiots.

  It fills me with incalculable bitterness and weariness to describe that campaign. Here in this sunny, secluded island of Cephallonia, with its genial inhabitants and its pots of basil, it seems inconceivable that much of it ever happened. Here in Cephallonia I lounge in the sun and watch dancing competitions between the inhabitants of Lixouri and those of Argostoli. Here in Cephallonia I fill my dreams with reveries of Captain Antonio Corelli, a man who, full of mirth, his mind whirling with mandolins, could not be more different from the vanished and beloved Francisco, but whom I love as much.

  How wonderful it was to be at war. How we whistled and sang as frantically we prepared to move, as motorcycle couriers sped back and forth like bees, how exhilarating it was to cross a foreign border unopposed, how flattering it was to conceive of ourselves as the new legionaries of the new empire that would last ten thousand years. How gratifying it was to think that soon our German allies would hear of victories to equal theirs. What strength was gathered inside us as we boasted of our part in the famous Pact of Steel. I marched at Francisco’s side, watching his limbs swing and the clear droplets of sweat run down the side of his face. From time to time he looked at me and smiled. ‘Athens in two weeks,’ he said.

  The night of October 28th. With five days’ worth of ammunit
ion and carrying our own supplies for lack of mules, we were sent eastward to take the Metsovon pass. How indescribably light we felt when we took those packs from our backs at night! How we slept like babies, and how grindingly stiff were our limbs in the early light of morning! We heard that there would be no reinforcements because the sea was too rough and the British were sinking our ships. We sang songs about winning against all possible odds. We were reassured by the idea that we were under Prasca’s direct command.

  How wonderful it was to be at war, until the weather turned against us. We slogged through mud. Our aeroplanes were grounded by cloud. We were ten thousand men soaked to the bone. Our twenty heavy guns subsided into the morass, and our poor abused and beaten mules struggled unavailingly to extract them. We were assured that the Duce had decided on a winter campaign in order to avert the risk of malaria; we were not assured of winter clothing. The Albanian troops sent with us began to vanish into thin air. It became clear that the Bulgarians were not to fight on our side, and the Greeks brought in reinforcements from the Bulgarian border. Our lines of communication and supply became inoperable before a shot had even been fired. The Greek soldiers did not desert. My rifle began to rust. I was supplied with the wrong ammunition. We heard that we would get no air defence, and that a bureaucrat had ordered our Fiat 666 trucks back to Turin by mistake. It didn’t matter. The trucks bogged down the same as the guns. Heels that once had clicked smartly in salute now came together with a sticky thud, and we began to yearn for the stinging yellow dust of October 25th. We trudged on, convinced of easy victory, still singing about being in Athens in two weeks. We had not yet fired a round.

  We thought that the Greeks were not opposing us because their forces were weak and cowardly, and it elated us, in spite of everything. It occurred to none of us that they had foreseen our strategy and had gone into an elastic defence in order to concentrate their force. We clambered through the inexorable rain and the clinging mud whilst above us the mist swirled about the titanic Mt Smolikas and the Greeks patiently waited.