by Max Hennessy
“They’ll ruin the march past,” he said gallantly. “Everybody will be too busy looking at you.”
“Our father said she wanted a new coat and hat especially for you,” Marie-Gabrielle pointed out.
Nicola tried to shoo her away but she refused to go, a miniature version of Nicola herself and, like all the Aubrey children, attractive to look at.
“Blue suits her,” she pointed out in matter-of-fact tones. “Last year she went in for red. Our father said it was because she was a bit gone on a French officer who wore red trousers.”
Despite the close proximity of Venice, they were not allowed to fly within five miles of it because the Italians there didn’t want to fire their anti-aircraft guns in case the vibrations damaged the fragile buildings. They had already discovered at Issora that the Italian gunners weren’t very particular and shot at anything that appeared. The Italians were nervous in every way about Venice, in fact, and cameras were not allowed, even in Issora, and the sending home of picture postcards which might fall into Austrian hands was forbidden, as was the purchase of spirits, wine or bread from local shops because of the shortages.
Despite the blue skies and the beauty of the countryside, Italy seemed in the end to have less to recommend it than they’d expected. It was riddled with rickets, tuberculosis, illiteracy, inertia, corruption, unemployment, charms, churches, absentee landlords, bailiffs, floods, debts, bad sanitation, malnutrition and infant mortality. But the Italians themselves were warm-hearted, gregarious and quick to rejoice. But they liked to be dramatic about things and their sudden glows of warmth had their reciprocals in sudden bursts of histrionic rage, though they soon caught on to the fact that British troops delighted in egg and chips, and small cafés opened all along the road to Capadolio, each with its little group of tables and its wired-in chicken run with laying hens.
Even Italian humour was different, uproarious and bawdy, and they seemed to spend a large part of every day singing. Foote’s gramophone was of a type they had never seen before and the air was full of “Oohs” and “Ahs” and “Mamma mias”, and from then on they were constantly on the doorstep with records they wanted playing – all of them, to Foote’s disgust, opera. Even the Italian infantrymen camped across the road edged nearer, joining in to outsing the record and indignantly stopping the carts which rattled past so they could hear better.
Without doubt, the war in Italy was a happier, more naïve affair than the war in France where everything was deadly, adult and in earnest. In Italy there wasn’t the same intensity. The Italians had been known from time to time to hang their washing on their barbed wire, and when the Austrians had advanced to the Piave they hadn’t even cut off the telephone across the river.
“Ma naturalmente,” Occillotti explained. “The people there are Italians and they have paid their subscriptions.”
They were not fools, however, and their uniforms, surely the ugliest in Europe, were also the least visible. “Their wearers don’t even make a shadow,” Occillotti said proudly.
Because of the tree-clad slopes where they fought, they wore what they called grigio-verde – grey-green – known to the British as rat-grey, and it was quite uncanny how difficult it was to see them against the background.
“Take mud from the Nile,” Foote said, “rub in a couple of pounds of ship-rat’s hair, then paint a roan horse with it and you’ll understand why the Austrians can’t see an Italian at fifty yards.”
The bersaglieri were always popular and were always being asked to swap headgear, but the carabinieri, their famous cocked hats covered with grey linen for the war, were totally uncompromising. You didn’t argue with them and you didn’t ask them to change hats.
Seeing what was provided for off-duty British troops in the way of YMCA canteens and bars, Occillotti was indignant that the Italian politicians had done nothing for their men.
“Because we can sing,” he said, “they expect us to sing all the time.”
For the celebration of the arrival of the allies, British infantry appeared from the north, to be followed shortly afterwards by a battery of artillery and a French alpine battalion. Drawn up on a patch of empty ground outside the town, they shivered with the rest of the squadron as they waited for the word to march in. Having arrived first, 28 and 45 Squadrons had opted out with a claim that they were too busy defending the sacred soil of Italy.
An Italian band marched up, resplendent with brilliant uniforms and cocks’ feathers in their hats, and while the musicians licked the mouthpieces of their instruments, a civilian photographer with a camera on a three-legged stand manoeuvred blindly under his black cloth.
As they approached the Town Hall the streets were crowded. Bunting had been hung up and there were banners at every window – Italian, British and French – but, with the band playing an impossible marching tune, it was difficult to keep the step.
“I think it’s a valeta,” Foote murmured out of the corner of his mouth.
The crowd seemed to love it nevertheless. Schoolchildren waved miniature flags and the streets were full of cheering. Every window was crammed with people and photographers were stationed at every corner. Among the crowd around the mayor were delegations from all three countries, and among the British contingent Dicken could see the Aubreys, Nicola in her bright blue coat and hat.
They remained at attention while the band played “God Save the King”, the “Marseillaise”, the “Marcia Reale”, the “Brabançonne”, “Tipperary” and the “Marcia del Alpini”. By the end of it their knees were trembling with the effort of standing still.
As the band finished, there was a yell of “Evvivano i Liberatori! Evvivano gli Inglesi! Evvivano i Francesi!” and everybody began to sing “La Campana di San Guista”, the song of the Italians who had fought for generations to free Northern Italy from Austrian domination.
“O Italia, O Italia del mio core,
Tu ci vien’ a liberar’.”
The mayor made a speech, to which a British staff officer replied in halting Italian. The crowd was entranced.
“They speak the language of Dante,” the mayor crowed.
For some reason, an elderly man with long white hair delivered an oration on behalf of the Italian Teachers’ Association. Speaking a little English, he bored them silly with references to Gladstone, Palmerston, Garibaldi and Cavour, and announced that he was proud to see them there because his wife was also “an Englishman”. Italian banners were presented to the commanding officers, to be flown alongside their national flags, and women moved along the lines of men, giving short lengths of red, white and green ribbon for good luck. Among them was Mrs Aubrey, who handed Dicken not only a red, white and green ribbon, but also a red, white and blue one.
“My brave brother in France,” she announced, “has always worn one as a good luck charm and he is still safe after three years of fighting.”
Since he was Railway Transport Officer at Dieppe, his safety, Dicken decided, probably owed less to his scrap of ribbon than to the fact that he was eighty miles from the front line.
He had been informed by this time that in future he was to live with the rest of the squadron on the airdrome and the Aubreys decided that the parting merited another dinner. It was the usual mixture of solemnity and gaiety, with prayers for Dicken’s safety alongside Mrs Aubrey’s boasts that 1918 would see the end of German domination in Europe.
“By then,” she said, “gallant France will have asserted her mastery over the treacherous Boche.”
While the younger children were whipped off to bed and Aubrey disappeared to his study to work on papers for the next day, Nicola played the piano softly for Dicken. He sat alongside her, trying to turn the sheet music when she nodded. As their fingers touched, her playing faltered and, as she stopped, he leaned over and kissed her cheek.
For a second she stared back at him, her eyes huge and s
tarry with long dark lashes.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because kisses have meaning.”
“They’re supposed to have.”
“But it’s dangerous. We’re Catholics. You’re a Protestant.”
He smiled. “Nothing like variety.”
She frowned. “You’re making a joke of it.”
The smile faded. “Aren’t you?”
She was silent for a long time, then she shook her head slowly. “George has decided that instead of university, he’s going to enter a seminary and become a priest. His religion’s very important to him. So it is to me.”
Dicken wasn’t quite sure what to say. He couldn’t imagine Zoë getting steamed up about anything as illogical as religion, and as far as he could remember, he’d never seen her going to church.
From a girl who appeared to have no religion at all, he seemed to have progressed to one with too much.
Nine
The next day, as the Italians had predicted, the weather shut down. The sky became a steely grey sheet and blizzards began to claw at the hangars. Because there was no coal, the stoves wouldn’t have warmed a rat and the mechanics were having to place braziers filled with wood near the aircraft to prevent the oil freezing.
Snow was shovelled from the landing area and the machine that was sent up to check the weather took off dragging a veil of snow, the slipstream blowing rime off the wings into the faces of the men holding down the tail as it swung. It returned with its pilot in agony with frozen hands and feet.
Ice hung on the trees, the sky remained dark, and the wind coming from the mountains cut like a sword. The roads froze so that lorries had difficulties on the hills and for three days Issora was shut in. As it grew colder, they started digging trenches in case the Austrians tried another bombing raid, and huts were sandbagged by soldiers who, finding how much better the Flying Corps lived than they did, tried in droves to transfer as observers and machine gunners.
The fortifications were erected just in time because the next night Austrian bombers, which had been busy for some time over Padua, returned to Capadolio, black-painted machines flying low across the airfield to fill the air with the iron throb of their engines. Wheeling in succession over the hangars, signalling to each other all the time with Morse lamps, they left huts burning, men without equipment, and the field pitted with holes.
On New Year’s Eve, to organise the co-operation of the Italian anti-aircraft gunners, Dicken and Foote went with Trenarworth to the front. After the grimness of Flanders, Italy seemed a little unreal. Occillotti drove the car through a wild rugged country strewn with boulders and crossed by rushing torrents, stopping in the villages they passed through to let them see the churches. Each with its own campanile, they all seemed a little dark, seedy and tumble-down, but at one of them a funeral service was in progress and the interior was ablaze with candles.
“From Caporetto,” Occillotti explained. “I due fratelli. Two brothers. Both die of wounds.”
As they came out, watched by a gloomy-looking policeman and a fat Franciscan friar in a mudstained brown habit, a woman trudged by with a bundle of twigs high on her back and two girls slapped at washing in a stream, despite the fact that the air was so thin it caught at the breath and the ground was covered with a coating of ice that made it difficult to walk.
In that sector of the front, the roads were well-engineered but contained a great many hairpin bends all of which Occillotti took at speed despite the ice, cheering himself every time they rounded one safely.
“Bravo,” he cried. “Bravissimo!”
The troops were living in huts and shacks they’d built with wood from the thick forests that covered the front. In one sector a whole saw mill had been set up to provide planks, logs and fuel for their fires and they looked well established with their own cows and chicken runs. The guns were concealed in bowers of acacia trees whose branches were clipped back to give an arc of fire, there was a waterfall handy, and the area was incredibly beautiful after the stark landscape of the Western Front.
The slopes were festooned with telephone lines and an artilleryman pointed out the problems of communication and supply, gesturing to where they could see the snout of a gun among the rocks above their heads and a long wire reaching up to it. “Cable railway,” he explained. “To carry the ammunition.”
Horses were brought forward and they climbed higher. On the Italian side of the Piave, the Montello rose in steep ridges from the river, its forward face exposed to the enemy view so that the slightest movement produced shell-fire. It was explained that guns on this slope were too easily found by the enemy but on the rear slope they couldn’t range on enemy positions and only howitzers with their high angle of fire could be used. Shallow breast-works had been erected on the summit for observation posts and covered with turf to make them invisible. From them they were able to look down on the river, with its pebbled bed and stretches of stony islands that stood out against the steely water in patches of sharp black and white.
“When the snows melt,” the Italian officer said, “the river becomes a roaring torrent.”
There was an immense silence about them and the trees below looked like dark cotton wool, falling away from the mountains which rose, ridge on ridge, spire on spire, until the summits pierced the sky. It was ghostly in the stillness, and awesome away from the sound and movement of the streams.
As they watched, the same black and white Aviatik Dicken had chased away flew along the river bed out of sight of the anti-aircraft gunners on the reverse slope, and the Italian artilleryman’s eyes bulged with his fury.
“Always,” he said. “Always he is there!”
They dined with the artillerymen, and as they returned down the steep winding roads, a storm started with unexpected suddenness. A tremendous wind began and the trees started to sway, scattering snow in showers from the branches. On Occillotti’s suggestion they halted at an inn and sat drinking while the thunder rolled around the mountains and the lightning lit up their faces. When they continued their journey, the night was bright with millions of stars and mountain air clear as crystal wafted across their faces. Foote and Trenarworth were chattering happily with Occillotti but Dicken was silent. It seemed harder to accept death and mutilation in an area of such outstanding beauty, and the war suddenly seemed a vast conspiracy between the generals to kill everybody off.
Work started on the second day of the new year when orders were received for five Camels to escort a raid by ten RE8s on the Austrian Army headquarters at Vittorio. Air battles in Italy, it seemed, were not fought above the trenches as in France but close to where the staffs lived and worked in comfortable quarters.
“I like that,” Foote said enthusiastically. “Staff against staff. Pity they don’t do it more often. Put ’em all in a field with clubs, for instance. If they did, someone might get the idea of calling it a draw and sending us all home.”
It was Trenarworth’s view that not enough was being done to win the war on the Italian Front and he decided they would shoot down a captive balloon which hung in the sky five miles inside the enemy lines at Campo Sordo. It seemed he had a cousin with the artillery who’d been complaining it could see everything they did.
Dicken didn’t like the sound of it very much but the bombing raid was made without loss. As they drew away, Austrian fighters attempted to attack and Dicken managed to get his sights on a DIII which flew through his fire and continued on without wavering into the mountainside near the town, where it burst into flames and rolled down the steep slopes into the valley, starting an avalanche which roared down after it, bringing down trees, telegraph lines and huts until it swept over a line of trenches.
As the RE8s reached the safety of the British lines, Trenarworth fired a red Very light, and leaving three Camels to see the RE
8s home, dropped almost vertically out of the sky with Dicken alongside him. Ears crackling after the descent, they shot across the lines to hedge-hop back to Campo Sordo. There was no machine gun fire as they approached and they could see the men at the winch of the balloon trying to haul it down. The two observers jumped as they roared up and Dicken saw his bullets stitching the surface, then the grey repulsive bag gave off a puff of smoke and slowly dissolved as the gas inside ignited, and began to wriggle down out of the sky like a gigantic diseased caterpillar.
As he lifted his machine away, getting a lung-full of acrid black smoke, he heard the clatter of a machine gun just behind him and saw two lines of tracer pass through the gap between his wings. Wrenching the Camel to the right, he found himself following an Albatros around in a frantic ring-a-roses. The Camel’s faster turn brought him nearer to the Albatros’ tail and the Austrian pilot lost his nerve and pushed his nose down to dive away. Dicken was only fifty yards away when he fired, and the Austrian pilot threw up one arm and the machine immediately nosed over and dived into a field.
Trenarworth was holding up both hands and waving, and just behind the Austrian lines they found an Austrian staff car on which they swooped one behind the other. Instead of stopping dead and allowing them to pass overhead, the driver accelerated, and they caught him as he approached a curve on the hillside. It was Dicken’s impression that neither of them hit the car but it careened across the road, smashed through a wooden fence and made a tremendous leap into the valley where it burst into flames.
It was late in the day now and as they reached Capadolio Dicken saw that one of the sudden fogs that infested the northern plain had risen. It was impossible to see the airfield in the shadows below and he visualised them circling until their petrol ran out.
Seeing a pink glow near the top of the fog, he realised that someone below had heard their motors and was firing Very lights to indicate the position of the field. A moment later, one of the flares burst through, shining and pink, to cast a rosy light on the upper surface of the bank of mist.
