G.

by John Berger

  8

  Each day fresh rumours circulated in the city about Italy’s impending declaration of war against Austria. It seemed scarcely possible for Italy to maintain her neutrality any longer—not because of any international incidents which had occurred, nor because of any official declaration by the Italian government, but because of the public campaign in favour of war which was being mounted in all the large Italian cities. It appeared that the will of the people was for war.

  The Irredentists in Trieste prepared for the hour of glory. Many young Italians who had often talked of crossing the frontier illegally to join the Italian army but had put off actually packing their bags and setting out in the direction of Gorizia, realized that they must go now or never at all. Early in the evening they made their last caminada; the least prepossessing among them could now approach the girl who had never deigned to acknowledge his existence and force tears to her eyes by saying knowingly and gravely: If you do not see me on the Molo tomorrow, do not forget me. The prepossessing, having hinted at their departure in a similar way, advanced like standard-bearers with the tricolour above them, whilst whole clusters of girls followed them with their eyes and squeezed each other’s hands so as not to cry out or throw themselves on their knees. The older Irredentists went about the drab city on light feet for they foresaw a radiant Trieste and their life-long struggle achieved before the year was out.

  Other Italians among workers and clerks and small shopkeepers listened to the rumours and scanned the newspapers with misgivings. They had much to fear: the reaction of the Austrians in the event of war: fighting in the city: the eventual economic collapse of Trieste under Italian rule. (None of them for one moment imagined that the Austrians would defeat the Italian army.) Yet the very language in which the fears of these Italians had to be expressed made these fears seem shameful. They felt that their mother tongue, as they spoke her, chastised them.

  On the Thursday they read in the newspapers about the event which everybody had been awaiting, the unveiling of a statue to commemorate the departure from Genoa of Garibaldi and his Thousand. It was said that the King might attend the ceremony. At the last moment he sent a telegram apologizing for his absence but blessing the occasion.

  The principal speaker at Genoa was Gabriele d’Annunzio, self-elected poet of Italian nationalism. He looked like an old hungry fox—but a fox mounted on an invisible horse, a fox so charismatic that he could ride to hounds and lead the hunt. He believed that the aviator was the ideal modern hero. (He had contemplated writing a poem for Chavez.) The crowd applauded him with limitless enthusiasm. His scraggy face seemed to be a proof of the profundity of what he was saying:

  ‘Blessed are those who have much, for they will be able to give much; blessed are those who despise all sterile love, for they will come as virgins to this their first and last love; blessed are those who spoke out yesterday against this event (i.e., the proposed war: the reference may have been censored), for they will accept in silence the law of necessity and will wish to be not the last but the first; blessed are the young, happy and thirsty for glory, for they will be satiated; blessed are the merciful, for they will have pure blood to wipe away and radiant pain to soothe; blessed are those who will return victorious for they will see the new face of Rome.…’

  It looked as if the will of the Italian people was propelling Italy towards war. But the truth was somewhat different. On 26 April the King and Prime Minister had signed a secret treaty committing Italy to enter the war on the side of the Entente within one month. At that time Parliament was conveniently adjourned, but it would need to be recalled for the actual declaration of war, and it was known that a large majority would be opposed to intervention, as also were most of the peasants, the left wing of the socialist party, many trade-unions and the Vatican. Within one month the nation, and especially the cities, had to be roused in such a way that all opposition, parliamentary or otherwise, would crumble. This was the task allotted by the King and his two chief ministers, who were the only three men in the secret, to interventionist politicians and agitators like D’Annunzio.

  At the same time as Britain and France and Russia were negotiating the terms of the secret treaty with Italy, Germany and Austria were making counter-offers in order to persuade Italy to maintain her neutrality. One of the principal differences between the two sets of offers made to the King and his ministers involved the future of Trieste. The Central Powers proposed that Trieste should become a Free City; the Entente proposed that it should become Italian.

  Towards the end of the week there was a rumour that Prince Bülow, the Kaiser’s negotiator, had suddenly left Rome for Germany with all his staff. Italians who had passports began to leave Trieste sooner than intended. Austrians who had been in Italy hurriedly returned. In this atmosphere of increasing suspense, G. pursued his own interests. It did not occur to him to leave the city. Wolfgang von Hartmann and his wife were away in Vienna and were not returning until the weekend. With every day that passed the proposal to enlist Austrian sympathy on behalf of the young man arrested on the frontier became more blatantly absurd. G. had no intention of speaking of the matter to anybody until the return of von Hartmann and his wife; then, for his own reasons, he would be prepared to plead that absurd and impossible case.

  Sunday, 9 May, appears to have been a sunny day all over Europe. Wolfgang von Hartmann made a habit of rising early and, since he did not believe in exceptions, he also got up early on Sundays. By seven o’clock he was dressed.

  Four thousand men had already been killed along a line of two and a half miles in the Western Front. At 5am the British artillery had begun a bombardment of the German lines. At 5.20 a strong breeze blew across the southern edge of the battlefield dispersing momentarily the clouds of smoke and dust. The German breastwork could be seen with alarming clarity to be almost intact. Ten minutes later the first wave of three infantry divisions clambered over the parapet and began to advance in line into no-man’s-land. The diary of the opposing German regiment describes the attack as follows: There could never before in war have been a more perfect target than this solid wall of khaki men, British and Indian side by side. There was only one possible order to give—Fire until the barrels burst! The German machine guns fired. Some of the attacking soldiers tried to stumble back into their trenches, but they were prevented from doing so by the second and third waves of the attack already climbing out.

  Wolfgang von Hartmann’s wife slept in the same room. She had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to suggest that, given the onerousness of his work and public duties, it would be better if they had separate rooms. You would always be welcome, she added with a smile that was too eager to be happy. No, he replied, if that is what I had in mind I would not have married you and you could have been my mistress.

  A handful of men advanced, no longer aware of who they were; if their mothers had called them by name they would not have answered. A little before the German lines they saw a ditch where they hoped to take cover. When they reached it, they discovered it was full of barbed wire. Some, in their desperation, threw themselves on the wire. The others, one by one, were shot and fell. A second attack, to be preceded by a forty-five-minute bombardment, had been ordered for 7am. This time the gunners were instructed to concentrate their fire on the wire in front of the German breastwork. Those British and Indian soldiers still alive in no-man’s-land, who had crawled to find shelter in craters or in small holes which they had frantically scraped out with their own bayonets, were now being killed by the shells of their own supporting artillery.

  Von Hartmann paused to watch Marika sleeping. She no longer slept with her hair loose. He was proud of being able to see the expression of his wife’s face in repose for what it was. She looked greedy. Yet her greed was not gross, it was a lean greed. And this was what pleased him, for it demonstrated, since she had stayed with him for eight years, how much he was capable of supplying. (She was the daughter of an impoverished Magyar landowner and had mar
ried Wolfgang when she was twenty-seven.) A more easily satisfied woman would by now have taken his wealth and power for granted. This had been the case with his first wife. She had trusted him as she unthinkingly trusted the sun to rise each morning. Marika could not afford such complacence, for her next demand might prove inordinate and be refused. Bending over her, Wolfgang pressed his thumb against her teeth which opened a little in her sleep so that mouth and hand were like those of a child who bites on his thumb so as not to cry out.

  On an adjacent sector of the front a number of survivors from the Irish Rifles were making their way back under heavy German fire to their own lines. In the British trenches, in which men were milling round like slow dancers, with dead or bleeding partners in their arms, a rumour sprang up that the Germans were making a counterattack disguised in British uniforms. Men began firing on the returning survivors of the Irish Rifles.

  At the railway station in Rome several hundred young men were waiting to meet the train from Turin. They kept peering along the lines which, outside the station, shone like silver forks in the early-morning sun. In the train was Giolitti. He had resigned as prime minister the year before and he was coming to Rome because he believed that the government had not yet reached a decision about entering the war (he knew nothing of the Secret Treaty) and he was determined to use his influence to support the neutralist party. Four years earlier he had championed and organized the colonial war against Libya: but today he feared that in a European war the gains for his country would not justify the cost. The young men had read of his intention to come to Rome in yesterday’s morning papers. As the train drew in, they were whistling and shouting: Down with Giolitti! Down with compromise! Long live war! They were trying to climb on to the train before it stopped. The man who had ruled Italy for twelve years was tempted to address them from the train door. They were not having him. Long live Italian Trieste! Down with Austria! War! War! The old man was quickly dissuaded from trying to speak. It was only an hour ago that he had woken up. He wanted a second cup of coffee. An aide suggested he should get out of the train on the far side and so slip away, avoiding the demonstration. He refused. He was unable to take his eyes off the young shouting men. They do not realize, he was saying, that it is not Libya, not Libya.

  Each time during the day that Wolfgang von Hartmann finished considering a subject, his thoughts returned to his wife. He asked whether the latest Austrian victory in Galicia on the Russian front was significant. He concluded that it was not. He did not think of his wife as he had left her in bed. He thought of her as she would appear that evening in front of G. He asked whether the initiative undertaken by His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s ambassador to persuade the Pope to declare that, in the event of war with Italy, the Holy See would remove itself to Spain, would have the faintest chance of success. He decided that it had not. He had noticed Marika’s interest in G. the very first time that G. had come to the house three months ago. Since then G. had been a fairly regular visitor and his wife had not disguised her feelings. He wondered what repercussions were likely to arise from the sinking of the Lusitania, four days ago. He feared the Germans had made a mistake. The Germans understood U-boats and nothing else. He had no patience with the hypocritical cries of horror emanating from the Entente; the ship had been carrying munitions and the British had been repeatedly warned that if they persisted in using passenger liners to transport war cargoes, the responsibility for the outcome would be theirs. Nevertheless the sinking had established a bad precedent. It extended the area of war, and by the same token it seriously reduced the area in which common interests of law, insurance, re-insurance and finance could continue, even as between belligerents, to be assumed. According to various enquiries he had made, G., unlike the musical conductor of last year, was a man who could be depended upon to leave Trieste quickly and definitely.

  At midday Nuša went to Hölderlin’s garden in the hope of finding G. Nobody was there.

  Von Hartmann considered that most people wasted energy trying to find absolute answers to transitory questions. Every question, he argued, should be examined in relation to its own time span. One of his favourite examples was that of death. For how long, he asked, do we actually experience death?

  Packed together in the assembly trenches, listening for their officer to blow on his whistle which, like the sound of a demented parrot, scarcely audible in the din of bursting shells, was meant to be the signal to go over the top, battalions of men were waiting whilst the German shells exploded around them. When they heard the rush of a shell coming directly at them, they could do nothing but stay standing where they were and close their eyes. There was no space to fling themselves to the ground. Many were packed so tight that they were unable to raise their arms to shield their faces. The wounded could not collapse. Pieces of shrapnel cut through one body to enter a second or a third. It was under these conditions in the forming-up places that between 1.15 and 2pm a further two thousand men were being wounded or killed.

  Von Hartmann argued that his wife’s adventures and extravagances should be appraised in their special relation to her lifetime with him. The licences he had granted her had to be so graduated that she did not exhaust the possibilities of his compliance until she was too old to find another man. This stratagem was aimed at something more subtle than the preservation of his marriage. He had no doubt that if Marika left him, he would not lack a presentable wife for long. He had no reason to fear solitude in his old age. (He glanced in the mirror above the fireplace. He was rich, a little stout but not bald.) What he wanted to establish and maintain was administrative control of his wife’s appetites. He no more believed in absolute insatiability than he believed in infinity. His wife’s appetites had to be encouraged and yet never fully met. In this way her apparent insatiability could be preserved and at the same time be subject to his control. The conjugal scene that afforded him most pleasure was the play-acting whereby she tried to deceive him about the money she had lost gambling or a rendezvous she had arranged with an admirer. She was a very poor actress. At any moment of his choosing he had only to look at her gravely, with scepticism, for her to abandon her protests of innocence and to entreat him silently, passionately, with her eyes to allow her to continue. If he consented—his consent communicated by the smallest change of facial expression (they never exchanged a single word on these subjects)—she continued: continued with the performance and the adventure it was meant to hide. If he refused with a frozen expression, she left the room, swearing the vengeance she would never take. The entreaty in Marika’s eyes at the moment of one of her broken performances was what made Wolfgang believe that he loved her. On the one hand, it was something very simple: a look of entreaty such as he had often imagined as a child in an animal’s eyes: on the other hand, it was the perennial fruit of a complex and unique marriage which he had arranged in detail but which would not have been possible with any other woman except Marika.

  At 4pm along the entire attack frontage new lines of men were staggering across no-man’s-land, following the pipes of their band. The sound of the mad pipes was a continuation, far beyond music or reason, of the shrill parrot-cry of the officers’ whistles. As they were falling, they appeared to fall in heaps rather than lines. This was because, in their last minutes, they were trying to crawl towards each other. The effect was of a crop, cut down, forming itself into stooks.

  Marika’s infidelities did not disturb Wolfgang von Hartmann because the sexual act (the act which constituted infidelity) was, like the experience of death, so absurdly short-lived. There was of course the obvious difference that death is only experienced once. But if his wife’s amorous adventures were considered in gross, it was he, not she, who consented or refused. Her lovers entreated her: she entreated him. Wolfgang viewed Marika’s gambling in the same way as he viewed her love affairs. She thought her gambling was wild: he ensured that it never exceeded economic prudence. Every time she drew from her account, he was informed. (This was the least of his pr
ivileges as a director of the Kreditanstalt Bank.) In both fields, the amorous and the financial, his control was based on the same principle. His wife must receive continual increments, but the rate of increase, the initial payment and the likely terminal payment were calculated to guarantee that, while always encouraging her to expect more and more, her demands remained easily within his resources, these resources thus appearing to be almost inexhaustible.

  Since dawn in the battle of Auvers Ridge, more than eleven thousand men and nearly five hundred officers had lost their lives. Very few were killed instantly and outright. The majority died in an agony which, however great its terror and annihilating pain, offered a relief from the burden of hopelessness induced by the orders they had obediently carried out until the moment they fell.

  In the drawing-room after dinner Wolfgang von Hartmann received G. as he received all visitors, politely. It was a large room with a white tiled stove in the form of a Greek temple at one end. On the walls were paintings and heavy mirrors. Before the mirrors were candelabra. Each candle burned in a glass, the size of a leeching glass but with a toothed rim. These glasses which reflected the light of the flames around them and glittered like fish-scales, prevented the flames from flickering as they had flickered in the cathedral at Domodossola. Although the large room was dark in places, the mirror and glasses gave the impression of thousands of candles having been lit.

  Marika made her entry five minutes after G.’s arrival. She walked like an animal. I find it hard to describe her walk because the resemblance was not to one animal but several. She resembled a composite animal like a unicorn, but at the same time there was nothing mythical about her. She was no apparition among flowers on a tapestry. Her legs were large-boned and very long. Sometimes I have the impression that they began at her shoulders and that, like the four legs of a horse, they were triple-jointed. As she walked she held her head very still; her neck was thick and muscular; she held her head like a stag; above her red-deer hair you might see invisible antlers. And yet she moved unsteadily, she swayed from side to side, her foothold never appeared quite sure enough for her height and bulk—and in this she resembled a camel.