A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  As time passed, the pressure continued to mount: the cannonades were continuous and the Austrians were forever attempting to cross the river; in the end, they succeeded, managing to establish two bridgeheads on the right bank of the Piave.

  One day, Captain Cavallotti, who had struggled to set up a tent which provided some semblance of an administrative office, gave his men orders to pack up everything and send all the documents over to the engineers’ headquarters.

  “We have to take up our rifles, Bruni,” he told Floti, “all of us, down to the last man, because if we don’t push them back this time, it’s over. Venice will fall, and all the rest with it. Do you know how much sacrifice it took to create Italy? We’ve been fighting for almost one hundred years. We have to finish the job once and for all, and then we’ll be done with it. I know what you’re thinking: ‘France or Spain, who gives a damn, as long as there’s food on our plates,’ but only a nobody reasons that way. Only animals and slaves have masters: are you an animal, Bruni? No, you’re not. Are you a slave? No.” He was answering all of his own questions. “Now we can finally afford to be free men, all of us, cost what it may.”

  “To tell you the truth, sir, I do have a master back at home. He’s a notary named Barzini. We work his land, he does nothing and takes more than half of everything.”

  “We’ll take care of that, too, Bruni, but now let’s worry about this army that’s invading our country. I’ve armed even the members of the band, Bruni: guns instead of trombones and clarinets.”

  That was true. Floti had seen the guys from the band in the trenches, and they weren’t half bad as shots.

  From the two bridgeheads, the Austrians were battering Mount Montello and Mount Grappa incessantly, and from his post Floti could see hell being unleashed over the dominion of those two peaks. Cannons rumbled in the distance and columns of smoke rose with fire inside. The volcanoes in the south of Italy must be something like this, he thought. Everyone was expecting the Italian front to collapse all at once, like at Caporetto, and then that would be the end of everything.

  Instead, that’s not the way it went.

  Assault after assault, the Austrians were pushed back. Could the fear of a firing squad alone be a sufficient explanation for all of this, Floti wondered. Why didn’t all those proletarians rebel and start shooting at the carabinieri instead of at their comrades of the Austro-Hungarian proletariat, as Pelloni would have suggested. Apparently this whole thing was not very easily explained, but Floti had come up with his own idea while fighting at the front: he’d seen that the Neapolitan general who was commanding now and whose name was the same as his brother’s didn’t send his men to the slaughter, his soldiers; he asked them to hold fast but not to get themselves massacred by charging the machine guns bare-chested. The food was better, the shoes were sturdier, the grappa and the cigarettes were better quality. It didn’t take much, all told, to stop them from feeling like cannon fodder: a little respect and a bit of consideration. And then there was the river, so big and so beautiful, that had to be defended at all costs, and before you knew it you ended up believing in it and doing your part.

  One evening Floti crawled over to a derelict building near the riverbank to see if he could see for himself any traces of this offensive everyone was talking about. But it had become too dark and he couldn’t make out much at all. Then he heard a light lapping of waves along the shore, and saw dark shapes intent on sliding small boats into the water; one man to a boat, they stretched out inside and used their arms as oars. There were a number of them: two, three, five, all dressed in black. Maybe half a dozen in all. They were crossing the river to the opposite side, where Franz Joseph’s empire began. Well, not his any longer, the old man was dead, so his son’s empire. They were using the current to their advantage, cutting across on the diagonal until they touched land.

  All at once, as he was getting ready to turn back, he felt a boot crushing down on his back and something hard like a gun barrel pressing into the nape of his neck.

  “What are you doing out here, handsome? Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

  “Listen,” replied Floti. “I’m from the thirty-eighth. I just wanted to take a look because I heard there was going to be a big offensive.”

  The man with the boot, a big burly fellow, black as ink, flipped Floti over with his foot and planted the rifle in the middle of his chest instead. “You wouldn’t be a spy, would you? Figuring how to make it across? If I wasn’t afraid of making noise, I’d shoot you here and now just to be on the safe side.”

  “Are you crazy? I can’t swim and all I know how to say in German is kartoffen.”

  “It’s kartoffeln, you cunt.”

  “Right, okay, but let me up, will you? I have to get back to my unit. My commander is Captain Cavallotti, I’m Corporal Raffaele Bruni and I’m no cunt.”

  “Then get the hell out of here. Let’s say you were lucky this time. If I catch up with you again I’ll put you to bed with a shovel. Got that?”

  “You bet,” replied Floti. He got up, dusted himself off and headed back to the camp.

  He told the captain what he had seen as he was bringing him a cup of coffee the next day.

  “Those were Arditi. Special assault units,” the officer explained. “They more or less swim across the river and when they get to the other bank, they take out the sentries with their daggers, lay mines and blasting gelatin, sow terror and mayhem, and then cross back over. You saw the Caimans of the Piave, Bruni, not everyone can say that,” he concluded.

  Time passed. Days and months. Whole seasons. The trenches filled with muck up to your knees became dusty instead as spring turned into summer, but Floti still had no news of his brothers. He received a letter from his parents once, three months after they’d asked the parish priest to write it, saying that they hadn’t heard from anyone and that his father Callisto could find no peace, could think of nothing but where his sons were, whether they were alive or dead. Floti wrote back, but got no answer. Who could guess at the destiny of a single sheet of paper in this hellish situation.

  One day at the beginning of June, Captain Cavallotti told him that something was in the air, another offensive, most probably, starting very soon. The Austrians already had five bridgeheads on the right bank of the Piave and were trying to consolidate them. The rumor was that they wanted to push all the way through to the Po.

  In the following hours, one courier followed another and soon the whole camp was seething with activity. A great number of airplanes began to cross the sky—it was astonishing to see so many all at once—and armored vessels could be seen on the river. The groundwork for land, water and air battles was swiftly being laid. They had never seen anything like it.

  Then the attack began in earnest, on June the 15th: the Austrians, from their bridgeheads, opened their big guns to prepare the way for their infantrymen who were meant to storm Mount Grappa and Mount Montello, the Italian strongholds which stood in the way of their advance and still had the firepower to hammer thirty kilometers of territory all around.

  In a short time the din from the mouths of twenty thousand cannons made the air quiver all along the flow of the Piave, and two hours after the start of the offensive Floti’s unit was sent to the attack, with rifles first and then with their bayonets. Once, twice, three times on the same day. And again the next day. They returned at night with barely enough energy to force down some cold rations. Three days later, Floti could not believe he was still alive. It was a miracle he was still steady on his feet, because he hardly ever slept. He would nap when he could, leaning on a tree or propped behind a wall, when there was a lull in combat. The Austrians had crossed at a number of points, by laying footbridges on the shores of the river, and they launched wave after wave of powerful, head-on attacks in an attempt to break through, but the front continued to hold fast.

  That evening there was an assembly of the regiment and the colone
l told them that their mates on Mount Grappa and Mount Montello had fought like lions, driving back the enemy and putting them to rout. As long as the mountain strongholds held, the whole line of the front could count on being protected from behind. The enemy had suffered tremendous losses, because the air force had done its part by machine gunning the fleeing soldiers from the air. The French and English allies had made an important contribution on the high plateau of the Seven Communities, and had seen for themselves how bravely the Italian soldiers were fighting.

  “We can do this, boys!” shouted the colonel finally. “We can do it! All of Italy is talking about you. Your families will learn of your valor and they will be proud of what you’ve done here.”

  The troops responded this time with shouts of enthusiasm, and Floti was surprised to find himself yelling with the others. “There’s no accounting for what’s in your heart,” he thought to himself as the officers gave the order to fall out.

  The Austrian offensive continued incessantly until the 20th of June and then little by little began to wane. By the 24th, the enemy army started to retreat. The Italian aviation and artillery gave them no respite and then even the infantry set off in pursuit of the Austrian troops as they attempted to flee over the footbridges they themselves had built to cross the Piave. It was a massacre.

  Corporal Raffaele Bruni played his part, leading the company into the attack. He strove forward, his strength unbelievably holding out until, suddenly, he felt a burning pain on the left side of his chest and fell to his knees. His vision fogged over into a red cloud and the roar of the battle ended, all at once.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Checco had dropped out of sight ages ago; no one in the family had received any word of him. No one knew that his regiment had been transferred to France to provide support for the French who were having a hard time of it. His unit had taken up quarters at Bligny, and Checco, an artillery private assigned to ammunition provision and transport, drove a Fiat 18 BL loaded with mortar rounds and 320s, machine gun belts, and tubes of gelatin for blasting holes in the German barbed wire entanglements.

  He knew that he could be blown to high heaven at any moment: all it would take was a gunshot, a stray bullet, a deep pothole taken at high speed and goodbye Checco. But he hugely preferred this work to serving guns, loading rounds into barrels, breathing in cordite fumes day and night under an unrelenting downpour of metal and flames as the thunder of artillery fire rent the air. He thought he’d been lucky. If it was his turn to die it would be in a single go; he wouldn’t even have the time to realize what was happening. And at least this work gave him plenty of time to gab with the fellow assigned to drive with him, a bricklayer who had emigrated to France. Sitting next to a friend, listening to the rumble of the engine and enjoying the scenery: not a bad job at all. At just twenty kilometers or so from the front, the countryside was just beautiful. The land dipped up and down in gentle slopes covered with vineyards lined up in perfect order, the grapevines low to the ground and much smaller than any he’d ever seen. How many grapes could they grow with such small vines? They certainly must have been easy to harvest, not like those back at home, more than two meters high, with shoots so long you had to keep moving the ladder to make sure you got everything, down to the last cluster.

  What made him most curious was that there were no houses to be seen no matter how far you looked, and there weren’t even any hedges marking boundaries. Where were the farmers? Just how big could those properties be? And how many harvesters would they need to pick all those grapes?

  His travelling companion told him that the wine produced from those grapes was called ‘sham-pane’ and that it was so precious that the row on the border between two plots, marked with a red rose bush, was harvested one year by one neigh­bor and the next year by the other. ‘What you can learn by travelling the world!’ thought Checco.

  He realized that sooner or later a replacement would arrive and he’d be sent up to the front line, where every day the war was killing thousands, and wounding or maiming thousands more who’d have to spend the rest of their days hobbling around on a wooden leg or hiding the stub of an arm in their shirtsleeve, unable to work and bring home bread for themselves and their families.

  And this is exactly what happened, not two months later. He got an order signed by Captain Morselli, a Tuscan who was full of piss and vinegar but had a heart of gold, transferring him to a field battery twenty kilometers from his supply base.

  “Oh, you,” said the captain when he reported to headquarters with the order in hand, “you have to take turns like everyone else, Bruni; everyone wants to drive the truck and no one wants to serve the guns. But cheer up, the Austrians and Germans didn’t succeed in breaking through at the Piave. Our men are holding the line and not letting those bastards make a move. If things continue this way, we may have good news soon . . . who knows, maybe even before Christmas.”

  Checco wasn’t sure what the captain meant by that last phrase, but he thought of his brothers there holding down the bank of the Piave. If they were still alive, that was. Who knew how many of them were left. And whether his parents knew anything, or were in the dark like him.

  The next day, at five in the morning, he was already at the front with his battery. The cannon rounds were so big it took four of them to pick each one up and load it. Then the gunner pulled the lever on the breech block, everyone covered their ears and off went the shot. The deflagration was so powerful it shook the ground under their feet and knocked the gun carriage backwards. Then Checco counted one, two, three, four and there was a second explosion as the projectile made contact, producing a blast even louder than the first, a blaze of fire then a huge cloud of smoke and dust that rose for dozens of meters. Cannon shot was falling thick and fast all around them, making the earth shudder painfully as if wounded to its deepest core. Maybe, before the war, that desert of holes, that black­ened mess of stones that he saw before him, had been a field of wheat dotted with poppies or a pretty vineyard, like the one he used to drive his truck past every morning, down the little dirt roads that crisscrossed the countryside.

  This went on for ten or twelve days, with continuous salvos from both sides, a rain of fire that never left him; it kept thundering in his head even after he’d returned to camp for the night.

  Then, one day, he saw the advance of the tanks, iron monsters as tall as a house that spit flames and fire and roared and groaned so loud it burst your eardrums and turned your blood to water. A scene that he’d never forget, for as long as he lived. There was a space perhaps three hundred meters wide between the two battle lines, bombarded from one side and the other by an incessant artillery barrage. A heavy cloud of smoke hung there permanently, but that morning, from inside that cloud, Checco—who was on forward guard duty—could have sworn that he was hearing an intermittent sound that was getting closer and clearer with every passing moment. He could barely believe it, but he was listening to the words of a song, warbled out at a full yell:

  “My darling Spanish songbird

  Lovely as a flower in bloom . . . ”

  Then the source of those notes appeared and Checco was sure that he was seeing things. A two-wheeled wooden cart drawn by a pair of mules was lurching forward, sinking left and right into the holes left by the bombs, at risk of being overturned at every bump. The unlikely vehicle was being driven by none other than Pipetta, a carter from his town who worked transporting gravel for making roadbeds and who was now approaching his position, getting nearer and nearer to the tanks and the no-man’s-land being pounded by the artillery.

  As soon as he had gotten over his shock, Checco took advantage of the dense curtain of smoke covering everything; he jumped out of the hole he’d been crouching in and ran over to a burnt-up tree stump. As Pipetta continued to wail his song, Checco started calling out: “Pipetta! Pipettaaaa! Stop, for god’s sake, it’s me, Checco!”

  Pipetta tugged at the reins o
n his mules and, just as if they had run into each other one Sunday morning in the town square:

  “Well, well, well. It’s good to see you, milord!”

  “Pipetta, what are you on about?” replied Checco. “Can’t you see we’re at the front?”

  Pipetta had a laugh at this and turned his cart towards the tanks, in the midst of the crashing bombs, singing his song.

  Checco started shouting: “Stop! Pipetta, stop, you idiot!”

  But Pipetta wasn’t listening anymore. He continued singing about a beautiful Spanish maiden at the top of his lungs and heading, completely unawares, into the mouth of the dragon. Checco left his shelter and dashed off behind him, but a grenade exploded almost immediately between him and the cart, and Checco was buried under a hill of debris. He had just enough time to think that at least he’d be making the journey to the next world with someone from his hometown.

  Gaetano took part in the counterattack of Pederobba with his regiment, and since he was hefty and strong as an ox they had paired him up with others like him to lay the planks on the pontoon bridge being installed to allow the Grenadiers of the Sixth Army to cross over to the other side of the Piave. They were mounting a counterattack and the word was that the Austrians were in bad shape. They had also heard that the Duke of Aosta, the king’s cousin, was launching an offensive on the other side of the river with the Third Army, the troops who had taken Gorizia the year before and had kept everyone hoping they would reach Trieste.

  The weather was getting worse as the autumn neared, but who cared about the weather? Gaetano had fought four battles on the Isonzo, the battle of Ortigara and then Mount Montello. Two of his comrades had completely lost their hearing thanks to the pounding of eight thousand cannon mouths. Another had lost his sight, and now his eyes were only good for crying.