A Bell for Adano

by John Hersey

  Major Joppolo forgot all the injunctions about behavior in public which he had put down in Notes from Joppolo to Joppolo. He stepped forward and took Tina’s hand. Her hand was cold and loose in his, and she did not seem to realize that he was there.

  “What happened?” Tina asked the young man.

  He said: “I will tell you later, Tina. Please not just at this moment.”

  Major Joppolo said to the young man: “We will have lunch together, at the Albergo dei Pescatori.”

  The young man did not question Major Joppolo with his eyes at all. He said: “Bring Tina at twelve o’clock. I will tell her everything then.” He kissed Tina on the. cheek.

  The kiss made Tina start crying. She buried her face in her hands and shook silently.

  The crowd did not break up for a long time. The men stood right there in the street and told many of their experiences. Couples melted into quartets and quartets into laughing circles, and the women who did not find their men went off alone. Fathers held sons in their arms for the first time. A few men hurried off with their women in a desire to become fathers as quickly as possible. Idlers and curious men who had stayed behind began to mix with the crowd. Laura Sofia the maiden lady circulated in the crowd, hoping that the hunger induced in men by war might be in her favor, but she had no luck.

  Major Joppolo did not hurry Tina. He let her cry until the tears were all gone and her sobs grew dry and awful. He touched her all the time, with a hand on her shoulder or the back of a hand against her bare arm, just to let her know that someone was there.

  Finally the Major took Tina home. A little before twelve he went back to get her. By that time she was all right. Her eyes were red, but she was in control of herself.

  They went to the Albergo dei Pescatori. Giorgio’s friend, whose name was Nicolo, was already there with his girl. Nicolo had changed into civilian clothes. A few minutes after Tina and the Major joined Nicolo and his girl, Captain Purvis came in. Since he and the Major usually had lunch together, it was quite natural that he should join the group, though the Major regretted it later.

  For a time they ate silently. Tina asked Nicolo how things had been and Nicolo said they had not been bad, and Captain Purvis asked the Major where he had been hiding this new quail and he tried to flirt ûwhi t her a little, and the Major made some polite advances to Nicolo to try to cover up his embarrassment over Captain Purvis. But on the whole the conversation was either nonexistent or meaningless.

  It was not until the fruit came on that Tina said: “Nicolo, tell me what happened.”

  Nicolo had been waiting for her to urge him. “It isn’t very nice, Tina,” he said. “War isn’t ever very nice.”

  “I know,” Tina said. “Tell it to me just as it happened.” Nicolo said. “I will have to tell it that way, Tina. That is the way I remember it and I couldn’t lie to you about it. It didn’t happen nicely.” Major Joppolo said: “I guess it never seems very nice.” Nicolo said: “It never does.”

  Captain Purvis, who did not speak Italian, said: “What the hell is all this wop talk about? Let me in on the good news. “

  Major Joppolo decided it was best to ignore the Captain. The Captain started trying to make eyes at Nicolo’s girl.

  Tina said: “Did he ask for me, Nicolo?”

  Nicolo said: “I’d better begin at the beginning.”

  Tina said: “All right.”

  Nicolo looked Major Joppolo straight in the face: “You will see that what happened to Giorgio was a very complicated thing. It was all tied up with what we Italians felt in this war, and I guess with what any man thinks about a war, or even about a game that he thinks he must win. You will see, it was complicated.”

  Major Joppolo said: “I will understand. My mother and father came from Florence. “

  Surprisingly Tina took the trouble to say: “He will understand. “

  Nicolo said: “I don’t know whether I understand myself. It began in the battle for Beja, in Tunisia. It was a -kind of infection, like something a soldier gets in his bowels, only it was in the heart. Our hearts went all watery, and we were through with the war, although we were still supposed to be fighting. It was the artillery.” Tina said: “Did he ask for me, Nicolo?”

  Nicolo deliberately kept himself from being too sympathetic. He said: “You’d better let me tell it from the beginning, Tina. It’ll be better that way, I promise:”

  She said: “All right.”

  Nicolo said: “The artillery was bad. They say you stop living for a moment when you sneeze. When a shell goes off near you, you have the same kind of paroxysm, and when you come out of it, you know you have been dead for a moment. You can’t go on dying like that many times a day, day after day, and be the same. Think what it would be like if you sneezed twenty times an hour, twenty-four hours a day, for days and days on end. Even that would be terrible, and there is hardly any fear in a sneeze.”

  Captain Purvis said: “Cutie, how would you like to dance the dance of the sheets?” But Nicolo’s girl was listening to the story. The Captain said: “Goddamit, I’m going to have to start taking lessons in dago, I can see that. Pass me the vino, will you, Major?”

  Nicolo said: “We all changed, except Giorgio.” Tina gasped a little when she heard the name. Nicolo said: “Giorgio used to argue with us. He said we had to go on fighting until we were consumed, and he talked about our honor, and he used to say that even if war made you think that men were just animals, you had to remember that animals often fight each other to the death. I remember he often used to say: `Have you ever tried to figure out what makes two dogs fight each other?’“ Nicolo turned to the Major and said: “Have you ever thought about that, sir?”

  The Major said: “No, I hadn’t.”

  Nicolo said: “It is worth thinking about “

  Tina said: “Did he ever talk about me?”

  Nicolo ignored her. He said: “It makes war a little more sensible if you think about the dogs. Anyhow, Giorgio was tenacious, and I used to admire him for it, though I always argued with him. I thought we ought to give ourselves up. He was so tenacious that he made me help him kill two Germans and we put on their uniforms and came back to Sicily on a Siebel ferry. We had to be careful to pick two Germans just the right size for uniforms. Giorgio made me do it with him because he said otherwise we would be taken.”

  Nicolo’s girl spoke for the first time: “Tell Tina about the night before you left Tunisia.”

  Nicolo said: “Oh yes, just before we killed the Germans I wanted to back out. I was afraid. I tried to tell him that killing the Germans was dishonorable, and he said that in a war a man’s honor was not measured by medals, because they were given out unjustly, but by the amount he could do for his nation. He said that killing two Germans helped rather than hurt Italy (perhaps, as things have turned out, we should have killed more) and that the best thing we could do would be to preserve ourselves for our country’s next battle. So we slipped into a bivouac and picked out two Germans and killed them in a quiet way which Giorgio showed me, and we got back to Sicily.”

  The Major said: “Didn’t you have any trouble on the Siebel barge? Do you speak German?”

  Nicolo said: “Giorgio spoke a little German, but anyhow we got in with an engineer unit they were apparently trying to save, and they just herded them on the ferry and us with them, and no questions asked. “

  Major Joppolo said: “Were you attacked on the way across?”

  “We came by night. It was only a ten-hour trip. The Germans got quite a bit across by night without being attacked.”

  Captain Purvis said: “Major, you going to sit here jabbering dago with these people all afternoon? How about cutting me in on this pretty little squiff here?”

  The Major said: “He’s telling a story, Captain.”

  The Captain said: “My pants aren’t hot for him, the hell with him, what I want to know is, where you been hiding this little piece?”

  Major Joppolo ignored the Captain and the Captai
n took some more wine.

  Nicolo said: “The ironic thing was that the Siebel barge landed us just down the beach from Adano here.” Tina said: “Why didn’t you come home? Why couldn’t he have come home to me then?”

  Nicolo said: “But the whole point of our coming across was so we could fight again. We turned ourselves in to a division in the hills just this side of Vicinamare, it was General Abbadessa’s division. Tunisia fell just then and so we were congratulated for getting away and they made us both sergeants. Giorgio was wonderful in those days before Sicily was attacked. Most of the soldiers were for faking resistance and surrendering, but Giorgio used to talk about the anguish Italy had had for so long, and he told about Garibaldi and Mazzini and Cavour, and when men said that Italy was beaten, he brought up Britain after Dunkirk. I remember one night a glib one was arguing with him and said that Fascism was evil and so why fight for it, and Giorgio said: `If Fascism is evil, why haven’t you been fighting against it for twenty-one years?”‘

  The Major said: “Was Giorgio a Fascist?”

  Tina turned angrily and said: “He certainly was not.” Nicolo said: “No, that’s the funny part of it. He was in jail a lot here in Adano for nothing in particular except being against the Fascists. And yet in 1940 when Mussolini put us i.^. the war, he was one of the first to go.”

  Tina said: “But what happened?”

  Nicolo said: “I was getting to that. The troops fought badly at the coast, as you know, and fell back on Marenisseta. It was the night of the fourteenth of July. Word came that the Americans were going to hit us the next morning. We were bivouacked in the grounds of a villa just east of the town, and as soon as the news came about the attack, most of the troops went crazy. A bunch of them went into the villa and broke into the cellar and brought out some wine.”

  When Captain Purvis heard the word vino, he said: “Hurrah for vino! That’s one word of Italian I sure can understand. Say Major, what’s the word that we begin with f? I’d like to know if this little dolly understands it.”

  Major Joppolo ignored the Captain. Niccolo said: “The men began drinking the wine, they said they were going to be captured in the morning, the war was over for them, why shouldn’t they have a good time? About twenty of them got very drunk, and they began throwing bottles against the wall of the house. Giorgio got furious and said he was going to stop them. I tried to tell him not to try, because the men were much too drunk to listen to reason.”

  Major Joppolo began to suspect what happened to Giorgio and he said: “Do you think you ought to tell Tina the rest of this story?”

  Nicolo said: “I think I owe it to Giorgio. I told Tina it wasn’t nice. “

  Tina said: “Yes, Nicolo, go ahead.” But she did not sense, as the Major did, what was coming.

  Nicolo said: “I tried to stop him, but I never had much influence over him, he was much stronger than I was. He ran over to the place where they were throwing bottles. They had lit a fire, which was against all rules, and Giorgio stood beside it where they could see him and shouted at them. These men had only been in one battle, but they were crazy with fear, and also with the wine. One of them would get up and shout: `To hell with the son of a frog, Mussolini!’ and he would throw a bottle as if he were throwing it at Mussolini. Then the next one would get up and he’d shout: `To hell with the shedog in heat, Edda Ciano!’ and they would all laugh and he would throw his bottle. Giorgio shouted but they either didn’t hear him or wouldn’t listen. He got in a kind of a frenzy. Remember: he had been through a lot.” Tina began to realize what was coming. She put her hand up over her mouth and her eyes grew wide. Nicolo said: “Giorgio ran over to the wall, to the very place where they were throwing their bottles, and he screamed: `Stop, stop! You are traitors! For the love of Mary Mother of Jesus, stop!’ At first just the fact of his being there made the drunkards stop, but then one of them shouted as if it were a big joke: `Isn’t that Benito Mussolini over there?’ and they all laughed and another one shouted: `Yes, the war has shrunk him!’ and they laughed some more. Then one of the crazy ones shouted: `I hate him! I hate him!’ and threw his bottle at Giorgio.” Tina put her head down and said softly: “Oh, not that way, not that way.”

  Nicolo said: “The first bottle missed, but it broke against the wall and several pieces cut Giorgio. I could see the blood running down his face. He had so much courage, Tina, you would have been proud of him, he did not move away.”

  Tina said softly: “Yes, I am proud, yes, yes.”

  Nicolo said: “I shouted to him to come away but he wouldn’t. He screamed at the men: `We must fight! The only chance for our nation is to go down fighting. The only chance for us as men is to die in battle.’ The men stepped up in turn now and threw their bottles. They were not laughing any more now. Giorgio had touched some spring of â ;1_t in them 1 , „ __

  and they wanted to kill

  him. The men were so drunk that I don’t see how any of them hit him, but the third one did. The bottle hit him in the right shoulder. Of course the bottle didn’t break and didn’t knock him down, but it must have hurt terribly. But he went right on trying to scream to their brains, but they had none now.”

  The Major said: “It must have been awful.”

  Nicolo said: “After he was hit for the first time. He screamed louder and louder, but the pain must have done something to him, because he screamed religious things. He screamed: `Oh Christ Jesus lamb of God heart of Jesus,’ and things like that. The drunkards kept on throwing their bottles. Several of the ones that broke on the wall cut him and soon his face and hands were covered with blood and his uniform began to be torn and blood seeped through. The second one that hit him struck his groin and that apparently hurt him so much that he couldn’t shout any more. When he stopped shouting the drunken men closed in toward him and began throwing their bottles from close and closer.” He stopped and asked Tina: “Do you want me to stop, Tina?”

  She said: “No, Nicolo, I’ve got to hear it now.” Nicolo said: “He finally fainted and the drunken men took bottles and beat him.” Nicolo turned to the Major again. “They were crazy, sir. Their one battle and the air raids and what they had had to drink. They were not Italians any more, sir. They were not even men.” Major Joppolo said: “A thing like that could happen in any army, if the men were frightened enough.” Nicolo said: “Thank you, sir.”

  Then he went on: “I had a pistol. Giorgio and I each had a pistol that we had taken off the Germans we killed. I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I took out my pistol and fired a shot in the air. That only seemed to frighten the men more and didn’t stop them, so I went right up to one and knocked him over the head with the butt and he fell down. Another one who was much bigger than I am turned on me with a bottle, so I fired a shot into the air right in front of his face. He was bringing the bottle down and the shot hit the bottle and cut him up and he started to squeal and that made the others think I was going to kill them all so they ran off.”

  Tina looked up with a question in her eyes.

  “He was alive,” Nicolo said. “He spoke a little. I tried to do what I could for him, but he had lost too much blood.”

  Tina said pathetically, knowing what the answer would be: “Did he speak my name?”

  Nicolo said: “Tina, I have been beside many men who died in this war and no one of them ever mentioned a woman when he died. Men do not talk that way when they die. They talk about their stomachs and they swear, but they do not mention the names of women. I remember he said a snatch from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, and he asked me to move his head to one side, it would be easier that way, but when I did he asked me to move it back. And then he died, Tina.”

  Tina put her head down again and said: “Not even in battle.”

  Nicolo reached out his hand and took Tina’s hand and said: “Oh, yes, it was in battle. It was Giorgio’s battle, Tina. When I fired the shots officers came and they thought Giorgio was one of the drunks, so he will never get a medal. But Tina, no It
alian has died more bravely in this war. Look at me! The drunks and I, we were all captured in the morning. I am ashamed of myself, and the shame I feel and the awful shame the drunks feel and all Italian soldiers feel - we were weak, Tina - the shame will hurt our country for many years. Our only chance is to remember men like Giorgio. If we couldn’t go down fighting the way he wanted us to, we can remember the ones like him who did.”

  Major Joppolo wanted to help. “That’s right, Tina,” he said.

  Nicolo said to the Major: “You see, we are very mixed up. We had no cause to fight for that appealed to us. Do your men?”

  Major Joppolo said: “I don’t know, Nicolo. I think the cause is there, all right. We’ve got to get rid of the bad men, and the Germans have some, and I’m afraid you did - and of course we have some, too. I just don’t know whether our soldiers think much about causes. That’s one thing that worries me about this war.”

  Nicolo said: “That’s what worries me, too. Giorgio was an exception.”

  Major Joppolo said: “That’s true, he was. He would have been an exception on our side, too.”

  Captain Purvis said: “Look at that sonofabitch holding hands with your girl, Major, you ought to root him in the tail and teach him a lesson.”

  Major Joppolo took Tina home and spent the afternoon with her. He was wonderfully gentle with her. His sympathy seemed to help her, and quite often she looked up into his face in a way which gave him a feel, ing in the chest.

  Finally he said to her: “Tina, I don’t know whether it’s fair to say this now, this afternoon, but I’m going to say it anyhow. Tina, I - well, maybe I’d better wait and tell you another time.”

  She looked up into his face in a way that made him think she was disappointed, but she said very softly: “Maybe you’d better.”

  He said: “I’ll tell you at the party on Friday.”

  She repeated softly: “On Friday.” And then she looked away and said: “You know, it’s very strange, but I never knew whether I loved Giorgio. I admired him and sometimes I was afraid of him, and he meant very much to me in ways. But his flesh was very cold. His mind was very stubborn. I still don’t know...”