by Pete Ayrton
33. We carried on towards Caporetto, coming across a few straggles of people here & there. When we got to the bridge, we saw that it had collapsed into the river’s gorge with two lorries. The wrecked bridge had halted a line of lorries heading for Drezenca (!!!!!). The narrow road prevented them from reversing. The lorries looked as if raped by the violence of the blast: there were also some tractors laden with various crates. By the bridge were the corpses of two chauffeurs, face down, their clothes & flesh torn, swollen, blotched with incipient putrefaction. And planks, crates, debris. That was how I saw for the 2nd time the beautiful bridge which I had admired as I crossed it a few days earlier with intense satisfaction of sense & feeling. Down below, the Isonzo was roaring away in its deep bed. A little way ahead a few officers’ cases were scattered in the road: some victuals, some wine kegs – German loot by now. At the fork, where one road leads to Caporetto & the other carries on to the left along the river, we took a moment’s rest. One of our soldiers was drunkenly tapping wine from an open keg, part of the contents spilling out to stain the dust of the road a dull red. Some others were calling one another to the feast, despite the yells & threats of the German guards: all that stuff belonged to the Germans by now. So I asked Sassella to please fill my canteen with wine & took a few greedy swigs. Cola & I, deprived of the most basic things, took some vests, a uniform & some bandages from an open case: nearby was a cart laden with clothing for the troop, & another with a reserve of food. Though I could foresee what hunger we would suffer, I preferred clothes to food. Wrong decision, for the clothes ended up with Sassella & the food we could have eaten on the way. But I was brain-numbed. Unfortunately I didn’t think to fill up with biscuit & food. What atrocious hunger I am suffering now. My soldier Gobbi, a fine man who had carried himself very well, gave me a coat that he’d found in the road. I took it, since everything was German loot by now, but never used it, since it stayed with Sassella together with my sack.
We carried on across the left side of Caporetto in the mellow autumn weather. Here & there houses were already being occupied by the Germans who were setting up offices etc. Some civilians were still around, scavenging. Soldiers, some German some ours, the former armed, the latter unarmed, many of them, of both sides, reeling drunk, were wandering the streets. We also came across several cars, some that had belonged to our HQ’s & had already been taken & put into service by the Germans, plus some cars of German make, order carriers, motorcyclists etc. The troop, as we were told, was already advancing full on towards Cividale, and this was a new knife wound to my heart, though I was hoping that Cadorna would be able to fill the breach & push them back to the Isonzo.
At the entrance of the town, and in the houses as well, dead mules and corpses (including, inside one house, an officer’s), all asphyxiated: some caught in the act of taking their masks off. In the fields, pits full of grenades (one I remember was a 305) but all considered nothing like Magnaboschi, let alone the Faiti. Fact is, those grenades fell on untrained people (chauffeurs, civilians, HQ’s) & they were full of asphyxiating gases, causing more panic than damage. Two cocottes oozing syphilis & coarse servility begged De Candido to recommend them to some German officers. He & Cola asked them what their fate would be & stopped to chat: I was impatient & hurried them on – we carried on. I remember the shameless, cheerfully spoken words of the smaller of the two strumpets: ‘Italian or German, it’s all the same to us!’ At another fork in the road, where one side continues to Tolmino & the other goes to Cividale, we felt the last wish to attempt an escape. We stopped for a moment & I asked: should we break for Cividale? The others did not think that feasible: the fear of any German reprisal against the four of us, wholly unarmed, also weighed against us trying. And the guard was coming. Onwards to Tolmino, then. Me, Cola, Sassella, De Candido.
So ended our life as soldiers & good soldiers, so ended the wildest dreams, the most generous hopes of our youth: carrying inside us the image of our torn-apart homeland & the shame of the vanquished, we began the calvary of harsh prison life, of hunger, of mistreatings, of dire need, of filth. But this is part of another chapter in my wretched life, & this martyrdom is of no interest to others.
Finished writing on December 10 1917 in Rastatt.
Widely recognized as one of the most important 20th-century Italian writers, Carlo Emilio Gadda was born in Milan in 1893. Following some reckless business decisions on the part of his father, and the latter’s death in 1909, Gadda (who had started writing at fourteen, leaving high school in 1912 with top marks for literature) agreed to study engineering with the prospect of a career that would relieve the family’s economic problems. Having joined the war effort as a volunteer, he was called to the front in June 1915 and served as a lieutenant in the Alpini arm until October 1917, when he was captured during the battle of the Isonzo and interned until January 1919 in two different German camps, including Rastatt. Gadda left an extraordinary record of those years in his Journals of War & Prison: part personal diary, part officer’s logbook, part indictment of the criminal inadequacy of the higher levels of the military hierarchy, the journals, written by Gadda between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, show the poised balance of deep complexity and stark simplicity that would later characterize his famous novels, including That Awful Mess on Via Merulana and Acquainted with Grief. After his return to civilian life, Gadda worked as an engineer and curated a weekly cultural programme on national radio. He devoted himself fully to writing from 1955 until his death in Rome in 1973.
PREŽIHOV VORANC
AT DOBERDOB
from Doberdob*
translated by Ana Jelnikar and Stephen Watts
THE BATTALION WAS PUSHING its way through the dark of night towards the fiery line that lay ahead of it to the West. – Battalion might almost be putting it too strong, for the first company of a hundred to have left the barracks hardly even knew who they were any more. Nobody could care less about the fate of the other four companies and the more the darkness crept in, the more the thought of their comrades vanished from the consciousness of each and every one of them.
The day before, the Italian army’s November offensive had started on the front. And then for two days the earth thundered under the assault of thousands upon thousands of shells, which the fiery jaws on the other bank of the river Soča were incessantly spitting out towards the East. For a whole day the battalion was able to eavesdrop on this hell, until on the second day at dusk the command came: ‘Forward!’
A horrific sky of heavy, blackened clouds – out of which a fine and unpleasant rain was drizzling down – hung above the Vipava valley. In the East the shimmering dawn of the Front was reflected high up beneath the sky. Tufts of bursting, birthing cloud blazed in the East from the shelling at the Front, while on the Western side, they sank down into frightening, elongated shadows. The whole of the East was one high fiery wall that pulsed with wide flaming to the South and the North. And low on the wall’s horizon – the murky, treacherous silhouettes of some mountain range that seemed at each moment about to merge into the fiery glow of the blazing wall behind and above them…
The ground was slippery, though the road was still hard and straight, so it was possible to march on. The glow of the blaze cast its light across the open fields, easing their march through the night. The fields and the banks were cut across by tongues of dark, repressive shadow that stole their way there from god knows where. It was possible to see the surroundings: trees, white houses, some village with a tall, blunted belfry. But nobody was looking at the surroundings, the eyes of everyone were pinned on the fiery wall to the East.
There towards the wall the battalion was marching…
Eyes couldn’t differentiate anything; legs, of their own accord, picked the way through. Even though the wall seemed so close you could touch it with your hand, it was still some kilometres off. The path along which the battalion marched wasn’t yet in range of the artillery fire.
Štefanič pinned his gaze on Barfuss, who,
head lowered, was marching alongside him.
‘Was it also like this in Galicia?’
Barfuss raised his head, but didn’t answer right away; his gaze first took in the fiery hell before him. And only after some time did he come back in a hollow voice:
‘No, there was nothing, nothing like this in Galicia…’
Before they’d departed everyone’d got a flask of rum, with the instruction that no one was to touch it before they got to the trenches. But no sooner were they on their way than the smell of rum rose into the air. And the longer the route, the stronger was the smell. Until in the end it seemed that the whole company was being accompanied by a low rum-filled cloud.
Under the fiery wall, a bright silhouette of something flat and elongated shimmered.
‘What’s that over there?’ Palir asked.
‘St. Michaels’ Hill…’ somebody muttered from behind.
They hadn’t managed to take two further steps when the silhouette again merged with the wall into a single shooting tongue of flame, and the earth under their legs shuddered ever more fiercely.
Suddenly Demark was gripped by a gulping insight; he laughed, as if an owl had hooted, and said:
‘Up there’s where we’re headed.’
The hundred men had been walking for some three hours, if not more. Meanwhile they’d left the main road and turned toward the left bank of the river, which, despite the rain and autumn, was barely murmuring its way towards the fiery wall. She too it seems… From then on the path became slower, but safer. The soldiers soon noticed that the main road ahead was already under artillery fire. With every step they could more clearly hear the explosions that were detonating all around the road. Occasionally a shell strayed closer to them, though none fell on their side of the river. But the wailing of iron and stones was distinctly audible through the air.
A bit further on and the company quit the valley and took a left turn towards the Karst. The path was becoming worse and worse, slippery and full of pot holes. Since it wound along the bottom of large sink-holes and along their rims, it was becoming increasingly exhausting with every step. For a good hour the soldiers held out without as much as a murmur, but because there seemed no end to the path, consternation and displeasure began to break out all round.
‘What kind of a world is this?’ Segal was the first to grumble. He – who for sure was carrying a double load on his back – had the right to protest.
It was all getting too much for Pekol too, even though he had the patience of Jove. But Held, furious with himself, was quick to challenge him right away:
‘Ach! It was better in Karlau, wasn’t it?’
And in the meantime Holcman fell down a second time on the rocks. This time his neighbours had to help him clamber back on his legs. He could hardly stand up and cursed loudly:
‘I’ll be damned if anyone hollers at me: heart and hand for the country… I’ll smash his face…’
Amun, Štefanič and the others laughed into their hands. Palir prodded Štefanič under the armpit and whispered:
‘Do you hear that?’
‘I hear it alright, I hear it!’
But they were also heard by sergeant Rode, who was marching up front and who clattered back in his crass & coarse voice.
‘Shut it! Who’s already shat their breeches?!’
No one could counter that. The hundred were getting ever closer to the line of fire. Even though the world through which they marched was lying below the one ahead of them, they could nonetheless make out the clangour of shells shattering against the rocky plateau towards which they were moving. Shards of hard matter were clattering back and forth with a disgusting noise around the dark sinkholes and without exception brought on feelings of sickening cold.
The Karst world was treacherous. When the men thought they were within a breath of reaching the expected plateau, where the Front’s fire was spewing forth, a new depression showed up in front of them, into which they had to disappear. Whereas before they had been marching along in solitary desolation, now they suddenly stumbled upon people. The pathway led through an open camp. The basin provided excellent shelter, at least from the side that bordered on the East. In the semidarkness it was possible to make out columns of carts, the horses for the most part harnessed, some laying down beneath their wooden swivels, while others calmly chewed from their nose-bags. It seemed they didn’t hear the artillery fire that ra-ta-tat-tatted right above the edge of the basin, or they were so used to it that it didn’t bother them anymore.
Soldier-like figures also loomed up out of the dark, but none of them so much as looked at the marching ‘hundred’. The soldiers clearly had their own chores to attend to. Something snagged up at the front and the line couldn’t carry on. Barfuss took advantage of the situation and turned to the dark figure standing to his right:
‘And where might we be now?’
‘Where – at Doberdob!’The soldier’s voice was both astonished and derisive.
Barfuss was expecting to hear something entirely different. When he could see that he wouldn’t get anywhere like this, he began to think:
‘You’re safe here from the barrage.’
‘Safe, until the shit starts hitting the basin.’
The soldier disappeared into the dark. Meanwhile they started moving again up front and Rode’s voice could be heard: ‘Left!’ and no sooner had he said that, than they had to march on. Now they found it much easier to progress. It seemed they had turned directly towards the fiery plateau. Even so their feet did not protest. They’d had enough of this wandering around in the Karst labyrinth! But instead of reaching the plateau, the line descended into another, even deeper and darker basin. This presumably was even safer than the first one, since from somewhere out of the darkness at the bottom there were some small lights shimmering. They went past a steep wall and saw two brightly-lit entrances that were only half-covered. A soldier was on watch from one of them. Palir quickly asked him:
‘Have you got water?’
The soldier was a Croat and luckily could understand.
‘Water? You must be joking!’
Strange and somewhat corpse-like was the sound of these words in the night. Again something had stuck, up at the front. Half the soldiers slumped down on the stony ground. The figure of one crawled up from out of the dark background. When he came right up to the line, it became apparent that his head was bandaged in white. A wounded man…
‘Have you seen the hospital carts?’ he asked in a barely audible, exhausted voice. He was German.
‘What hospital carts?’ three, four voices asked in surprise.
‘But you’re coming from the back-country, aren’t you?’
Oh, yes, now they understood the question.
‘No, we haven’t seen them…’
A pause. Beside the wounded German other figures soon appeared. They were all bandaged.
‘You waiting for transport?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are there many of you?’ a voice from somewhere up ahead asked. It seemed to be Segal’s.
‘Many. But even more are still there at the front…’
The questioners fell silent as if on command. Their throats were tongue-tied. Only then did they notice the stench of bandaging, iodine, Lizol and something else that they hadn’t smelt before and that had a deep, unpleasant odour. Like clotted blood, like rotting flesh… In the meantime their eyes became accustomed to the dark and slowly they realized that they were at the edge of the scattered stalls of the field hospital. The wounded lay in front, in the open air, even though it was drizzling. Most likely those lightly wounded who were waiting to be transported. Out at the back were some tents and through the cracks lights shimmered, and through the blurry reflection, moving figures of the hospital corps could be seen. Yes, there a canvas cover with the red cross was fluttering as well… Didn’t they hear some kind of groaning too? But it was impossible to make that out clearly, since the artillery went on with its constant bombardm
ent.
