The town had always considered Domenico (16) a solid sort, a happy chap who took things in his stride. The crueller among them treated him like a buffoon and made fun of him, but he never complained because he saw no ill intent in their remarks. Those who didn’t know him were always surprised by his irrepressible smile, which made him seem a fool, but was really just a sign of his guileless contentment. As a boy, at home, he was regularly beaten because he was so easily distracted. The teachers at school also often caned him, due to his inability to concentrate. Eventually, all gave up on him and stopped trying to reform him with either whacks or slaps.
As he grew older, they discovered that he wasn’t as simple as he appeared and that he was a tireless, highly capable worker, particularly in the fields, or among the olive trees: he was strong as an ox; patient as the day was long; and the more he worked, the happier he seemed. In the war he also proved himself. He volunteered for the most dangerous operations, never questioned orders and was never afraid. In fact, the idea of dying never crossed his mind. So when the time came for combat, everyone wanted him by their side. In the evenings, in the barracks, he would think about his grandfather, who had always taken him with him to the olive groves and treated him as he would have treated anyone else. He missed him.
‘Looks like we’ll be heading out to dance again today!’ was all Cambrone, Domenico’s bunkmate, said in greeting when he strode into the barracks after his guard duty. ‘They called the captain to the command post. It looks like the Alpenjäger are preparing another attack before the bad weather hits,’ Cambrone concluded, as he stretched out for a rest.
Domenico had already lost count of the times they’d won or lost on those lousy positions high in the Alps, between Venice and Trento. When he saw Cambrone looking at him from his bunk with a frightened expression, he had no idea of the carnage awaiting them. His bunkmate, however, had noticed some unusual movement on his watch and already sensed that on that morning, 4 December 1917, the assault from the Austrian Alpine battalions wouldn’t be just another run-of-the-mill attack.
‘Let me have a look at your girlfriend for a little while,’ his bunkmate said, his voice trembling in anticipation of the battle.
‘You’re going to wear her out,’ answered Domenico with a nervous laugh. He had bought a postcard of a naked lady in Bari, right before boarding the train that would bring him to the front. After two years at war he knew that woman by heart, and he had shared her with half the company. She was posed completely nude, sitting elegantly on a flowery stool, beside an inviting bed with velvety drapery. She had the body of an angel and she had extended her left arm back elegantly, to make her breasts stand gracefully to attention.
‘Always picture perfect!’ said the boys as they assiduously reviewed the girl’s bosom.
Her hair was wavy black silk. It was just long enough for the ringlets to cover the nape of her neck and a big curl also coiled over one ear. Her face rested gently on her right hand, which lay on her shoulder. She had a sweet gaze, focused on some point beyond the camera’s lens. No one in the whole company had ever seen a girl as lovely as her. They all called her Palmisano’s girlfriend.
When the great grey wave of Austrian Alpine troops arrived, the orders and counter-commands came rapidly, and were increasingly contradictory. Soon it was clear to the Italians that the defence of their position would end in disaster, and they began a fully fledged exodus that only bolstered the already overwhelming victory of the attackers and the extraordinarily high death rate among those fleeing. Domenico, however, defended his position for hours, along with Cambrone and another bunkmate, Campana. The three of them had become inseparable and always fought together on the front line. They retreated only when they saw that they were about to be surrounded, and to their shock they discovered that their commanding officers had long since abandoned their positions.
Fleeing down to the valley, there they found the dregs of the battalion that had fled en masse hours earlier. Campana and Cambrone joined what remained of their company, but Domenico kept walking. After two years of fierce combat on the front line, he’d had enough. He’d decided to go home.
It was complete chaos on the roads, and no one bothered to ask him for his papers. Nor did they check that he had tickets or identification on any of the journeys he made by train. But eight days later, when he reached Bellorotondo, the military police were waiting there to arrest him as a deserter.
The next day, when they were taking him to their headquarters in Bari, a few hours from Bellorotondo, he saw his grandfather for the first time in years, standing on the other side of the avenue.
‘Nonno, Nonno!’ he shouted, unable to comprehend why the guards wouldn’t let him go to his grandfather. The young man seemed crazed, he kept screaming. The older Palmisano couldn’t bear it and turned to go, desperate at not being able to hug his grandson or make him understand what was going on. When Domenico saw his grandfather leaving he let out a scream that echoed in the clear air of that frozen winter morning.
‘Nonno!’
The soldier guarding Domenico rammed his rifle butt into Domenico’s stomach, knocking him out with a second blow to the head. Only then was silence re-established and were they able to get into the car.
The next day he saw his grandfather again at the military court in Bari where he was being tried. He couldn’t understand why his grandfather didn’t speak, but he reasoned that if he was there it meant he still loved him, and he again gave his famously irrepressible smile, which didn’t flag even when the military judge sentenced him to death.
‘Don’t cry, Nonno. The war will be over soon!’ Domenico shouted to him when they pushed him on to the train that was to take him back north, to return him to the custody of the officers of his company. His grandfather watched him from the other side of the platform. It seemed to Domenico that he had shrunk.
The trip back to the mountain plateau was much faster than the route he had taken down to Bellorotondo. Two days after leaving Bari he reached Vicenza, and by the next day they had already taken him to Asiago and from there to the Col del Rosso, where they had sent what was left of the troops decimated in the disaster of 4 December. A new captain quickly assembled the firing squad from the few survivors in Domenico’s unit, including Campana and Cambrone.
When the captain gave the order to fire, the members of the firing squad found themselves faced with Palmisano’s innocent smile – he still didn’t understand what was going on – and they shot into the air.
‘Fire!’ shouted the irate captain for a second time.
Again they intentionally missed their target.
The officer threatened the firing squad with a revolver, but the soldiers stood up to him.
‘For the love of God, Captain …!’ protested Campana. ‘Domenico has saved our lives a thousand times. Less than a month ago, he took out two machine guns that had us cornered in Valbella, all on his own …’
‘Shoot, damnit! Shoot! I am following orders. If you don’t fire immediately, I’ll have the lot of you court-martialled!’
They started to cry and shoot at the same time, and when Domenico collapsed, they could still hear him saying goodbye: ‘I’m tired, Nonno. Take me home.’
Curled up on the ground, he shook violently, the sight sending a shiver down the spine of every soldier watching. Then, finally, he stretched out his legs and stopped twitching. His comrades surrounded him and lowered their heads to bid him farewell respectfully.
Cambrone was the first to break the silence. ‘Son of a bitch!’ he shouted, staring straight at the captain. He started shooting, in a rage, at Domenico’s inert body. And as he fired he thought about the many contemptible officers who had led them from defeat to defeat through the Alps and who had now forced them to execute their best friend, who had died without understanding what was happening to him.
When the circumstances surrounding the death of Domenico Palmisano – that good egg – reached the town, his grandfather hanged himself
from an olive tree.
Giuseppe Fu Francesco (17) had convinced himself that nothing more could happen to him, and he spent the night arguing his theory to his fellow soldier on watch as they shared the eagle’s nest from which they had to control that particular Alpine pass. The January full moon lit up a crystal-clear night and the snow of the last few weeks refracted the light, sending it up to all the mountain peaks. It would have been a magnificent sight if not for the fact that Giuseppe was terrified at the piercingly low temperatures that the north wind further sharpened. He had never imagined that the cold could be so painful.
‘If there is divine justice, then I’m untouchable,’ he declared with conviction. ‘At the start of the war we were twenty-one Palmisanos and now there are only nine left! We are protected by the other twelve’s misfortune.’
They had hidden Domenico’s execution from Giuseppe Fu Francesco, and they also hadn’t said anything to him about his other three cousins felled at Caporetto, so he still didn’t know that he was now one of only five survivors; for him the last family death had been Cataldo’s (12). The other young man on watch didn’t answer. When earlier they had been walking to their post, Giuseppe Fu Francesco had realized that his companion for the watch wasn’t much of a talker, so he turned the conversation into a monologue that went on through the entire night. He couldn’t come up with a better way to combat the cold and sleepiness.
When the day began to dawn he said, ‘We can rest easy. They won’t be back today.’
He went over to his companion, who still wasn’t responding. When he grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him to wake him up, the soldier’s body slipped from his hands and fell to the floor of the trench; only then did Giuseppe Fu Francesco notice the dried blood around the wound left by the bullet that had pierced the man’s neck. It must have been from the attack they had fought off the evening before: he’d been talking to a dead man all night long.
He didn’t even know his name. He closed his eyes, crossed himself and looked at the soldier meditatively, the way the officers did during funeral ceremonies. Then he picked up his rifle, slung his rucksack over his shoulder and started to walk down the mountain, because they should have been relieved hours ago. When he reached the camp there was no one there. His unit must have fled in such haste that they hadn’t even alerted them. He continued walking all alone, searching for points of reference between peaks that were completely foreign to him. In Bellorotondo, every hill, gully and bit of terraced land had a familiar name, but here he was lost. Ever since he had been sent to the Alpine front, he’d moved from one mountain to another, but he’d never known their names. Suddenly, he heard someone shout, ‘Halt!’
He had just been taken prisoner by an Austrian patrol.
A week later Giuseppe Fu Francesco reached a prison camp to the east of the small Austrian town of Mauthausen, and he discovered to his horror that the Italian captives there were dying by the thousands in horrible pain and suffering. The guards rationed the food and gave the prisoners only what was sent from their own countries via the Red Cross. The Italian top brass considered those who allowed themselves to be captured cowards and traitors and refused to send them any supplies.
In the camp, he found his cousin Michele (18), who was dying from Spanish influenza. He was one of the more than a hundred thousand Italians who had been taken prisoner in the disaster at Caporetto. Giuseppe Fu Francesco had time only to hug him and close his eyes. A week later, he himself succumbed to starvation, without understanding why his people had abandoned him.
Angelantonio (19), who only had sisters, missed home the most of all of them. And he was the one sent the furthest away, to the Champagne region of France. On the front at the Marne he was so homesick that he started to lose his mind. The Italian soldiers in General Albricci’s 2nd Army Corps had trouble understanding what the hell they were doing there, on a French front. No one had explained to them that after the Caporetto fiasco the Italian Supreme Command had asked the Allies for help: five French and English divisions had come to Italy’s aid and, in return, to symbolize the reciprocity of the alliance, close to forty thousand Italians were sent to Champagne and the Chemin des Dames.
That was how Angelantonio found himself in a hellish trench in the Vrigny forest, near Reims, surrounded by magnificent vineyards, charged with defending Point 240 to the death, as it was bombed non-stop by the German artillery’s howitzers. From his trench, turned to mud by the horribly bad weather, Angelantonio saw columns of civilians evacuating the capital of Champagne, fleeing from the collapse of the cellars where they had taken shelter from the German bombardment since the start of the war. He also saw his trenchmates fall one by one, flattened by shells or poisoned by gas, from which the masks the Italian army provided – merely some gauze soaked in a sodium carbonate solution – were no protection.
Soon he began to display strange behaviour, and around the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1918, he lost his mind. One night when he was on watch and everyone was trying to take advantage of the artillery truce between the two armies to get some rest, he confused the rats running between the sets of barbed wire with an attacking enemy detachment. He ran, shouting, to wake the company. Disconcerted, the Italians and the French, who were sharing a trench, started to shoot at the enemy lines and soon after, the German positions returned fire, without really knowing what was going on. After an hour of exchanging gunfire, in a manner more hysterical than effective, Captain Monfalcone called for them to cease firing.
‘Go back to sleep. I don’t see any movement, and it doesn’t look like they’re preparing an attack.’
The next night, Angelantonio mistook an owl for the covert signs of another surprise attack and he woke the company up again. Half an hour after a fierce shootout, in which no one was killed but the nerves of the soldiers on both sides were shredded, the Italian captain decided again to call for a ceasefire. Calm settled over the Vrigny forest, but few of them were able to get back to sleep.
On the third night, before curling up under his blanket, Captain Monfalcone, a philosophy student from Lucca who was also unsure as to how he’d ended up in Champagne, called Angelantonio over.
‘Look, Palmisano, if you think they’re attacking us, let me know. But unless you want me to have you executed right here, don’t wake the whole company up again.’
The captain hadn’t even closed his eyes before he heard a shout. ‘For Italy!’
He leapt up and saw Angelantonio running, all by himself, towards the enemy positions. Since Angelantonio had been told not to wake the others, even if he thought they were being attacked, he’d decided to launch his own counteroffensive. The German sentries sounded the alarm and when the soldiers saw a single man approaching with his gun drawn, they aimed their weapons, concentrating all their rage on to that madman who wasn’t letting them sleep. They riddled him with bullets. Angelantonio shuddered in a macabre dance, and when the Germans stopped shooting he fell to the ground. An expectant silence hovered over both trenches. Both sides were wondering what would be the next twist in that outlandish succession of events.
‘Thank you!’ shouted Captain Monfalcone to the German trench, in a burst of sincerity. He immediately sensed that he shouldn’t have said it, but it was already too late. He ordered his men back to bed.
‘Tomorrow we’ll try to recover the poor chap’s body. Now let’s try to get some sleep.’
On the night of 29 June 1918, the company of Ignazio (20) – the youngest of the Palmisanos, not yet eighteen – was asleep in a clearing in the woods at the foot of the Col del Rosso, just above the patch of land where six months earlier they had executed poor Domenico. Unaware of his proximity to his brother’s remains, at dawn, he played a decisive role in the reconquering of the highest and most symbolic of the Tre Monti. Ignazio died a hero, victim of a stray bullet just as he was reaching the peak and the Austrians were about to surrender their position.
The Last Palmisano
VITO ORONZO PALMISANO, the
last Palmisano, had survived the eleven battles of the Isonzo river one after the other, and he’d fought heroically without suffering the slightest injury over the three and half years since the war began. He seemed destined to be the family’s only survivor. He was a vocal opponent of Italian participation in a conflict that had nothing to do with the peasants of Puglia, but even so he hadn’t tried to avoid conscription. He had a strong sense of duty, always fighting bravely, but also never lapsing into recklessness or excessive zeal. In fact, he was the most prudent of his family and the one in whom war inspired a cautious respect.
On the front, he lived in the moment and carefully focused on his actions with an extraordinary survival instinct. He always acted on the idea that you shouldn’t take any more risks than absolutely necessary on the battlefield, but that it was even more dangerous to hesitate or let yourself be overcome by fear. It wasn’t that the pain and misery of war didn’t affect him; in fact, he felt keenly the remoteness, hunger and panic of the trenches. And especially he missed Donata, who seemed only half his wife, having been, in a promise of lifelong fidelity, wed in a rush on the morning that he set off for war; the marriage had yet to be consummated. For more than three years now, the soldiers of the 164th Company had been his only family.
For the past few months he had shared a trench with a wealthy chap from his home town, Antonio Convertini, and they had become inseparable. Fate had brought them together – first in the same battalion, and finally, right before the changes brought about by the defeat at Caporetto, in the same company. Their wives, Donata and Francesca, were first cousins, both from Matera, a two-day trip from Bellorotondo, and had been best friends since early childhood. The men received notification on the same day that they had been granted leave, their first leave since the start of the war, thanks to an initiative by the new Chief of Staff, General Armando Diaz, who was looking to improve morale among his dispirited troops.
The Last Son’s Secret Page 2