The men have listened to him attentively and with approval; these are things anyone can understand. One of them who is smoking passes his cigarette to a comrade, and another who has to go on guard promises not to cut his turn short and to stay the whole hour before calling for his relief. They all begin discussing the insect powder which is to be sent to them, if it will kill the eggs as well as the lice or if it will only stun the insects so that an hour later they’ll be biting more than ever.
No one would be talking about the war any more, if Cousin did not begin speaking: ‘Say what you like but according to my way of looking at it the war was started by women.’
When Cousin gets started on his views of women he is even more boring than the cook; but at least he makes no attempt to persuade anyone and just seems to be complaining on his own.
‘I was a soldier in Albania, Greece, France and North Africa,’ he says, ‘I was in the Alpini for eighty-three months. And in every country I always saw all the women waiting for the soldiers to come out of barracks, and the more lice-ridden and filthy we were the more they liked us. I let myself be persuaded once and all I got out of it was the clap; for three months I had to lean against the wall every time I wanted to piss. Now when you’re in a distant country and seeing no other women but those, the only consolation is thinking of your own home and your own wife if you has one, or of a fiancée, and saying to yourself, anyway she’s alright. Then you comes back and yes, sir, find the wife, while you were away, has been drawing her allowance and going to bed with all the men around.’
The others know that Cousin is telling his own story, that his wife went with everyone while he was away and had children whose fathers were unknown.
‘Even that’s not enough, though,’ Cousin goes on, ‘d’you realize why our men are always being caught by the Fascists? Because the place is full of women acting as spies, of wives denouncing their husbands; why, at this very moment all our women are sitting on the Fascists’ knees cleaning their guns for them to come and kill us with.’
The others are beginning to have enough of this now, and shout at him to stop; it’s one thing his being unlucky with his wife and her denouncing him to the Germans to get rid of him and forcing him to take to the woods, but that is no good reason to insult everyone else’s women.
‘You see,’ Cousin goes on, ‘a woman only has to arrive in a place and … you get what I mean.’
Now the men don’t contradict him because they understand what he is referring to and want to hear how far he’ll go.
‘… a woman has only to arrive in a place and some fool at once loses his head over her …’ says Cousin. Cousin is a man who likes being friendly with everyone, but he has a sharp tongue and when he has something to say he doesn’t care who he says it to.
‘… it doesn’t matter when the fool is just anyone, but if he’s a fool with responsibilities …’
The men look at Dritto; he’s a little way off, but certainly listening. The men are a little afraid that Cousin may go too far and cause a terrific row.
‘… and ends up by setting fire to a house because of a woman …’
There, he’s said it, think the men, now something will happen. It’s better this way, they say, someone had to say it some time.
But at that moment a roar is heard above them and the whole sky is filled with aeroplanes. All attention shifts to them. It is a big formation of bombers; soon some town will be left gutted and smoking beneath them, while they vanish into the clouds. Pin feels the earth vibrating under the roar and thinks of the tons of waiting bombs passing over his head. At that moment the Old Town must be emptying and people crowding into the muddy tunnel. From the south comes the deep sound of falling bombs.
Pin sees that Dritto has gone up on to a rise and is looking down into the valley through his binoculars. He joins him. Dritto is smiling his evil sad smile, as he turns the lenses.
‘Can I have a look too, Dritto?’ asks Pin.
‘Here you are,’ says Dritto, and passes him the binoculars.
Through a coloured confusion in the lenses gradually appears the crest of the last hills before the sea, and a big white cloud rising. More explosions can be heard down there; the bombing is still going on.
‘Fine, destroy everything!’ shouts Dritto, beating his fist against his palm. ‘My own house first! Fling everything down! My own house first!’
Chapter Nine
Towards dusk arrive Ferriera and Kim, the commander and the commissar of the brigade. Mist is rising outside in wisps, like dust from a series of slammed doors, and in the barn the men crouch round the fire with the two from brigade headquarters. These hand round a packet of cigarettes until it is empty. They are men of few words. Ferriera is a sturdy young man, with an Alpine cap, a small blond beard, and a pair of big cold clear eyes with which he constantly glances up through half-closed lids. Kim is skinny, with a long reddish face, and moustaches which he is continually chewing.
Ferriera is a workman, born in the mountains, and is cold and clear by nature; he listens to everything with a slight smile of assent and has meanwhile already made up his mind on his own – how the brigade is to be deployed, where the machine-guns are to be placed, when the mortars should go into action. For him partisan warfare is as exact and precise as a machine; he has taken the revolutionary impulse matured in factories up into the mountains where he was born, and his courage and cunning is now used in places every yard of which he knows.
Kim, on the other hand, is a student; he has a great yearning for logic, for certainty about cause and effect, and yet his mind is apt to crowd at every second with unanswered questions. He has an enormous interest in humanity; that is why he is a medical student, for he knows that the explanation of everything is to be found in the grinding, moving cells of the human body, and not in philosophic speculation. He will become a mental specialist, a psychiatrist. The men do not like him very much because he looks them fixedly in the eyes as if he were trying to discover the source of their thoughts; and then he comes out suddenly with point-blank questions that have nothing to do with the conversation, about their childhood or love-life. For him also, behind human beings, there is the great machine of class progress, the machine that is fed by little daily gestures and in which other gestures burn away without leaving a trace; the machine of history. Everything must be logical, everything must be understood, both in history and in men’s minds; but there is still a gap between one and the other, a dark area where collective motives become individual motives, forming monstrous deviations and unexpected combinations. And Kim goes round the detachments every day with his slim Sten-gun hanging from one shoulder, talking to the commissars and commanders, studying the men, analysing the position of each one, breaking every problem down into its component parts; ‘a, b, c,’ he says; everything must be clear, clear in others as it is to him.
Now the men are crowding round Ferriera and Kim, asking for news of the war; of that distant war on the military fronts, and of the threatening one nearby, their own. Ferriera explains that they should not expect any help from the Allied armies, he is convinced that the partisans will be able to cope with the enemy on their own. Then Ferriera tells them the great news of the day: a German column is advancing up the valley, to comb the entire mountain-range; they know where the partisan camps are and will burn houses and villages all around. But at dawn the whole brigade will move up on to the crest of the mountains, and will also be reinforced by other brigades; the Germans will suddenly find themselves exposed on the main road under a hail of fire and will be forced to retreat.
Then the men all break into movement; their backs ripple, they clasp hands, jerk out words through clenched teeth; it’s the battle already starting in them, their faces are already tensed and hardened into fighting expressions, their hands groping for weapons to feel the touch of steel.
‘They saw the fire, that’s why they’re coming: we knew it,’ says someone. Dritto is standing a little apart, the flickering
flames lighting his lowered lids.
‘The fire, yes, because of the fire too, of course. But there’s another reason,’ says Kim, slowly blowing out a mouthful of smoke; the men stand there silently; Dritto also raises his eyes.
‘We’ve been betrayed by one of our own men,’ says Kim. Then the atmosphere becomes tense, as if a wind were cutting into the men’s bones; the wind of betrayal, cold and damp as a wind off the marshes, a wind which strikes them every time news like this reaches the partisan camp.
‘Who was it?’
‘Pelle. He went to the Black Brigade. Just like that, on his own, without being captured. Thanks to him four of our men who were in prison there have already been shot. He takes part in the interrogations of anyone caught and betrays them all.’
This is the kind of news that clogs the men’s blood with despair, and prevents them thinking. Pelle was there with them, only a few nights before, saying: ‘Listen, I’ll tell you an action we can carry out!’ It seems strange not to hear his wheezy breathing behind them as he greases a machine-gun for the next day’s action. Instead of which Pelle is now down there in the forbidden town, wearing a big death’s head on his black cap and carrying beautiful new weapons, no longer frightened of round-ups, and driven as always by that inner frenzy of his which makes him blink his cold-reddened eyes and lick his parched lips flecked with saliva, a frenzy now turned against his former comrades, but without hatred or rancour, as if he were playing a game with friends in which the stake is death.
Suddenly Pin thinks of his pistol; perhaps Pelle has found it, as he knows all the paths by the river-bed from taking girls there, and now he is wearing it oiled and gleaming all over, as his weapons usually are, on his Black Brigade uniform. Or perhaps he was just lying when he said he knew the place where the spiders make their nests, and had used the story as an excuse for going down into the town to betray his comrades and get issued with those new, almost silent German weapons.
‘We must kill him now,’ the men say to each other, as if they were accepting a necessity; perhaps, secretly, they would prefer to see him return next day, loaded up with new weapons, and continue his private war with and against them in that grim game of his.
‘Red Wolf has gone down into the town to organize the Gap against him,’ says Ferriera.
‘I’ll go too,’ various men say. But Ferriera says that now they must concentrate on getting ready for next day’s battle, which will be a decisive one. The men scatter to prepare their weapons and apportion jobs.
Ferriera and Kim call Dritto aside.
‘We’ve had a report on the fire,’ they say.
‘It was just one of those things,’ says Dritto. He has no desire to justify himself. Nothing matters now.
‘Is there anyone else responsible for the fire?’ asks Kim.
And Dritto says: ‘It was all my fault.’
The two gaze seriously at him. Dritto is thinking how much he would like to leave the partisans and hide away in a place he knows of, till the end of the war.
‘Have you any excuse to offer?’ they ask him, with a patience that gets on his nerves.
‘No. It was just one of those things.’
Now they’ll either say: ‘Leave’ or ‘We’ll shoot you.’ Instead of which Ferriera says: ‘All right. We’ll talk about this another day. Do you feel up to it, Dritto?’
Dritto’s yellow eyes are on the ground. ‘I’m ill,’ he says.
‘You must try to get really well for tomorrow,’ says Kim. ‘It’s very important for you too, the battle tomorrow. Very, very important. Think it over.’
They do not take their eyes off him and Dritto feels a mounting longing to let himself drift.
‘I’m ill,’ he says, ‘I’m very ill.’
‘Now,’ says Ferriera. ‘Tomorrow you must keep along the crest of Mount Pellegrino from the pilon to the second gorge, d’you understand? There you’ll get orders where to move to. Keep the squads well apart; the machine-guns are to go with the gunners and riflemen so that they can move together when necessary. Every single man must go into action, without any exception, even the quartermaster, even the cook.’
Dritto has followed all this with little nods of assent, and occasional shakes of his head.
‘No exceptions,’ he repeats, ‘not even the cook?’ and he listens attentively.
‘You must all be up on the crest by dawn, d’you understand?’ Kim looks at him, chewing his moustache. ‘Are you quite sure you understand, Dritto?’
There almost seems a tone of affection in his voice, but perhaps it’s just persuasion, as it’s such an important battle.
‘I’m very ill,’ says Dritto, ‘very ill.’
Kim and Ferriera are walking along the dark mountainside towards another encampment.
‘Surely you see now it was a mistake, Kim?’ says Ferriera.
Kim shakes his head. ‘No, it’s not a mistake,’ he says.
‘But it is,’ says the commander, ‘it was a mistaken idea of yours to make up a detachment entirely of men who can’t be trusted, with a commander who can be trusted even less. You see what happens. If we’d divided them up among the good ones it might have kept them on the right lines.’
Kim continues to chew his moustache. ‘For my part,’ he says, ‘this is the detachment I’m most pleased with.’
At this Ferriera nearly loses his calm; he raises his ice-cold eyes and rubs his forehead. ‘But Kim, when will you realize that this is a fighting brigade, not an experimental laboratory? I can understand your getting a scientific satisfaction from watching the reactions of these men, all arranged as you wanted them, proletariat in one part, peasants in another, then “sub-proletariat”, as you call it … The political work you ought to be doing, it seems to me, is mixing them all up together and giving class-consciousness to those who haven’t got it, so as to achieve this blessed unity we hear so much about … Apart from the military value, of course …’
Kim, who has difficulty in expressing himself, shakes his head.
‘Nonsense,’ he says. ‘Nonsense. The men all fight with the same sort of urge in them … well, not quite the same, … each has an urge of his own … but they’re all fighting in unison now, each as much as the other. Then there’s Dritto, there’s Pelle … You don’t understand what it costs them … Well, they too have the same urge … Any little thing is enough to save or lose them … That’s what political work is … to give them a sense …’
When Kim talks to the men and analyses the situation for them, he is absolutely clear and dialectical. But when he is talking like this just for one other person to hear him, it makes one’s head spin. Ferriera sees things more simply. ‘All right, let’s give them this sense, let’s organize them the way I say.’
Kim breathes through his moustache. ‘This isn’t an army, you see, they aren’t soldiers to whom one can say: this is your duty. You can’t talk about duty here, you can’t talk about ideals like country, liberty, communism. The men don’t want to hear about ideals, anyone can have those, they have ideals on the other side too. You see what happens when that extremist cook begins his sermonizing? They shout at him and knock him about. They don’t need ideals, myths, or to shout “Long live …” They fight and die without shouting anything.’
‘Why do they fight, then?’ asks Ferriera. He knows why he does, everything is perfectly clear to him.
‘Well,’ says Kim, ‘at this moment the various detachments are climbing silently up towards their positions. Tomorrow many of them will be wounded or dead. They know that. What drives them to lead this life, what makes them fight? Well, first, the peasants who live in these mountains, it’s easier for them. The Germans burn their villages, take away their cattle. Theirs is a basic human war, one to defend their own country, for the peasants really have a country. So they join up with us, young and old, with their old shot-guns and corduroy hunting-jackets; whole villages of them; they’re with us as we’re defending their country. And defending their country beco
mes a serious ideal for them, transcends them, as an end in itself; they sacrifice even their homes, even their cattle, to go on fighting. Then there are other peasants for whom “country” remains something selfish; their cattle, their homes, their crops. And to keep all that they become spies, Fascists … there are whole villages which are our enemies. Then there are the workers. The workers have a background of their own, of wages and strikes, work and struggle elbow to elbow. They’re a class, the workers are. They know there’s something better in life and they fight for that something better. They have a “country” too, a “country” still to be conquered, and they’re fighting here to conquer it. Down in the town there are factories which will be theirs; they can already see the red writing on the factory walls and the banners flying on the factory chimneys. But there’s no sentimentality in them. They understand reality and how to change it. Then there is an intellectual or a student or two, very few of them though, here and there, with ideas in their heads that are often vague or twisted. Their “country” consists of words, or at the most of some books. But as they fight they find that those words of theirs no longer have any meaning, and they make new discoveries about men’s struggles, and they just fight on without asking themselves questions, until they find new words and rediscover the old ones, changed now, with unsuspected meanings. Who else is there? Foreign prisoners, who’ve escaped from concentration camps and joined us; they’re fighting for a real proper country, a distant country which they want to get back to and which is theirs just because it is distant. But, after all, can’t you see that this is only a struggle between symbols? that to kill a German, a man must think not of that German but of another German, with a substitution technique which is enough to turn his brain? that everything and everybody must become a Chinese shadow-play, a myth?’
The Path to the Spiders' Nests Page 13
