Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Ah, the Stukas,’ agreed the chaplains, who also did not know anything about it, but were adept at nodding wisely with the air of men of the world.

  (6)

  ‘So we’re going to lay down our arms and go home?’ asked one of the boys.

  ‘Yes, my son,’ said the unit’s chaplain. ‘Thanks be to God.’

  Carlo came running in, ‘Listen, lads, the garrison on St Maura surrendered, and the Germans took them prisoner and shot Colonel Ottalevi.’

  ‘Puttana,’ exclaimed Corelli, drawing his pistol and slapping it down on the table. ‘That’s it. Let’s take a vote.’

  ‘It’s probably only a rumour,’ suggested the chaplain.

  ‘We should have a vote in the whole division,’ said Carlo, ignoring the cleric. He had never had any time for the Church and its representatives, since realising that in his absence he had been condemned to hellfire for being born as he was.

  ‘Right, boys,’ said Corelli, ‘I am going to talk to every battery officer I can find, and we’ll get a vote organised. Agreed?’

  ‘What about Gandin?’ asked a young lad from Naples.

  The men looked from one to the other, and all had the same thought. ‘If we have to,’ said Corelli, ‘we’ll arrest him.’

  (7)

  In the morning General Gandin sat on his hands. He gave no orders, even though a command had come from Brindisi to take the Germans prisoner. He spent the day going through his paperwork and looking out of the window with his hands behind his back. His mind seized up, and all he could think about was what he should have done instead of being a soldier. He cast his mind back over the halcyon days of his youth, and realised that even they had not amounted to anything much. He felt like an octogenarian who looks back upon an empty life and wonders if any of it was worth the while.

  Colonel Barge, on the other hand, had been struck by a most excellent brainwave. He knew that the Italians did not trust him, and he therefore set out to divide them by affecting some exemplary behaviour. At dusk he sent an Oberleutnant and a company of grenadiers to surround an Italian battery in secrecy. Captain Aldo Puglisi had no choice except to surrender peacefully as soon as he realised what had happened. His men were disarmed and sent away without the firing of a shot. On their way they passed the military brothel, but did not have the heart to enter. A wave of optimism and relief, of home-talk and peace-talk, passed through the ranks of the Acqui Division, just as the colonel had planned. It was a deception, a confidence-trick, of masterly proportions.

  On the following morning an Italian sergeant shot his own captain, who had wanted to surrender, and Tiger tanks appeared out of nowhere and sat like ominous monsters at the crossroads, their hulls perspiring with the inhuman smell of oil and heated steel. Many of the Italian battery commanders ignored them as though they were anachronistic pelagic rocks that had appeared fortuitously and might just as arbitrarily disappear, but others, like Captain Antonio Corelli, traversed some of their guns away from the sea and retrained them, having grown tired of waiting for orders that never came.

  (8)

  For the attention of Colonel Barge; Direct Order from the Führer; Enclosed is the code word upon whose receipt by telegraph in encrypted form you will begin the assault on, and total liquidation of, all Italian anti-Fascist forces in Cephallonia. In the meantime, continue negotiations in such a way as to gain their confidence. All bodies to be disposed of thoroughly, preferably by means of barges ballasted and sunk at sea. Since there has been no formal declaration of war by Italy, all opposing Italian forces are to be treated as francs-tireurs, and not as prisoners of war.

  (9)

  General Gandin seemed visibly to have aged in the space of a few days: ‘Gentlemen, the situation is this. I have before me Memorandum OP44, of September the 3rd. It instructs us that we are to act against the Germans only if we are attacked. I also have order no. N2 of the 6th, which states that we are to make no common cause with any forces resisting the Germans. This last order contradicts the terms of the armistice signed by Castellano, so what are we to make of it?’

  ‘General, it means quite simply that the Allies will not trust us. The order is foolish. Are we aware of any Allied preparations to help us?’

  ‘No, Major. They have had over forty days and have done nothing, and neither has the War Office. There is reason to suspect that they know of the Germans’ intentions and have not informed us. There are apparently no plans for co-operation.’

  ‘But General, the Germans have hundreds of planes on the mainland, and we have nothing. Why have the Allies abandoned us?’

  ‘A good question. Furthermore, I have this order, no. 24202, which says that we must negotiate with the Germans to gain time, and that German requests for us to move should not be regarded as hostile acts. As you know, we have co-operated in this, but the result is that they now have all the most important strategic and tactical positions. Do you think that we should cease to obey this order, on our own initiative?’

  ‘Is the order legal, General? Doesn’t it contradict order no. OP44?’

  ‘But which one takes precedence? I can’t get clarification. With the relocation of the War Office from Rome to Brindisi, everything is in a state of confusion. And now we have this order from Vecchiarelli to lay down our arms. It says that General Lanz will repatriate us after fourteen days, but I cannot get confirmation of this from Brindisi. So what do we do? Vecchiarelli believes General Lanz, but do we?’

  ‘I for one do not, General. In any case the men are one hundred per cent against it. They have had a vote, and three officers who recommended it to their men have been shot. It would be most unwise. In any case we have the order from the War Office last night, telling us to treat the Germans as enemies.’

  ‘For that reason I telegraphed Vecchiarelli that we could not obey the order. By the way, it is my duty to inform you that I have been offered command of Mussolini’s little army in his new so-called “republic”. I have declined the offer, as my prime loyalty is to the King. I trust I have done the correct thing.’

  ‘The correct thing, General, is to avoid confrontation with the Germans. They were our allies until a few days ago, and it is an intolerable dishonour to the Armed Forces to be obliged to turn against them. Many of them are our personal friends. I also think that the Allied insistence upon unconditional surrender is to them just as dishonourable as the German insistence upon the same thing. It is better to die than to submit to either of these demands.’

  ‘I agree with you entirely, Major, and I have demanded that Colonel Barge be replaced by a full general in our negotiations. It will give us valuable time until General Lanz arrives, and if the worst comes to the worst it will save us the dishonour of ceding our arms to a mere colonel.’

  (10)

  ‘I say, chaps, the order has come through from Berlin for the show to begin in Cephallonia. Sergeant, be a stout fellow and take this through to Jumbo.’

  General Jumbo Wilson read the message through, and decided not to do anything. He had plenty of men, ships, planes, and matériel at his disposal, all ready to go. But it wouldn’t do to let Johnny Kraut know that he knew how to decode their messages, would it?

  53 First Blood

  The Acqui Division voted to resist the Germans but had no time to set in place an effective leadership to co-ordinate its actions. After battle had already begun, orders finally began to arrive from General Gandin, and some obeyed them and some did not. Of the exact order of events little is known, but two things are certain. One is that the Communist andartes of ELAS took no part, seeing no reason to shake themselves out of their parasitic lethargy, and the other is that the Italian resistance owed nothing to the military hierarchy. It was a spontaneous blossoming of courage and determination in the hearts of individual men who knew obscurely that the time had finally arrived for them to do something right.

  Who knows what it was that truly motivated Captain Fienzo Appollonio to open fire without orders on a flotilla of Germa
n landing craft?

  Perhaps he was an honourable man who could no longer bear to play an ignoble and acquiescent part in the history of a half-baked and fallen empire. Perhaps he felt a genuine sympathy for the Greeks with whom he had lived so long, and wanted now to expunge the shame he felt at their subjugation and the deprivation that he had helped to inflict. Perhaps he was ashamed of the dismal military record of the army in which he had served, and now wanted to wrest control of his little portion of it out of the hands of the complacent incompetents and sycophants who, from the safety of their bunkers, had led it to so many sanguine and pointless calamities, who, time and again, had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Perhaps it was merely that he saw only too clearly that there was no choice but to fight for survival.

  Whatever the emotions and thoughts that circled upon themselves in the recesses of his mind, his men shared his conclusions. They had already loaded and aimed the howitzers whilst he was still watching the landing craft cutting clumsily through the swell with their cargo of vehicles and palefaced soldiers. He noted the superfluous but strangely meaningful discipline in the manner that they bore their weapons exactly alike, slung vertically upon a shoulder so that they bristled together like the spikes arranged in the bottom of a trap. The captain squinted through his binoculars and divided the intervening space of sea into units of a hundred metres. He accounted for the hidden ground between his battery and the sea, and with a confidence that he did not feel, he ordered the gun nearest to him to set the range he had determined and to fire a single shell.

  With a metallic crash the gun leapt backwards, its base hopping on its bed like an excited dog jumping for a titbit. After all these years Captain Appollonio had still not adjusted to the painful ringing of metal in his ears, and he winced as he watched that tiny black dot wing at an incredible and incalculable speed, so fast that he wondered whether or not he had really seen it, high into the air. He lost it, and then seconds later saw the plume of water rise up from the sea not fifty metres from the place he had estimated that it would fall. There was a frenzy of activity on the boats that struck him as almost comical, and then he ordered an exact range and gave the command to fire at will.

  The men were exhilarated. At last they had a leader, someone whose courage would mysteriously flow into the ground beneath his own feet, travel subterraneously, and spring up as if by miracle in their own hearts, filling them with the wild freedom of men who have at last discovered that they are soldiers after all. The men smiled at each other, their eyes glowing with pleasure, with a pride that they had never felt before, and they watched in wonder as spectacular spouts of water obliterated the regular and somnolent patterns of the waves. The air grew heavy with the sweet stench of cordite and the ineffably virile and infernal smell of red-hot barrels and smoking, aromatic oil. The creases in the palms of their hands filled up with grime, and their faces blackened so that their lips seemed oddly pale and pink where they had wetted them with their tongues. The sweat of their turbulent excitement drenched the hair beneath their caps, and they threw down the half-finished cigarettes that formerly had been a comfort but were now an impediment to action and to breath.

  Stunned by their own success, by the incredible and unprecedented efficacy of their bombardment, the men of the battery stopped firing as the last of landing craft disappeared beneath the waves. They clenched their fists in satisfaction as they watched two rescue launches put out from Lixouri and make their way towards the carnage and the flotsam of the dismembered and splintered boats. None of them felt like firing on a rescue operation, and they began to shake each others’ hands and embrace. They would always remember this day, they told each other. It had been a rite of passage, like being confirmed or getting wed.

  A seaplane flew out over the ridge towards Argostoli, laying an indiscriminate but lethal stick of bombs that blew out the roofs of one humble and innocent house after another in a perfectly straight line. Machine-guns and anti-aircraft guns opened fire as other commanders spontaneously ignored their orders and threw themselves into battle. In the streets of Argostoli Italian infantrymen, some without their officers, advanced behind the shelter of light tanks towards the Panzers, inspired by a heroism that they had never shown when fighting for the Fascists and the ludicrous dictator.

  The Panzers opened fire on the battery, and their thunderous noise echoed round and round the confines of the narrow streets, shaking the walls and causing flakes of loose distemper to rain down as dust in the interiors of the houses. Appollonio’s gunners retrained their barrels, and not far off the battery of Captain Antonio Corelli also opened fire. The tanks advanced, their feeble and unnecessary camouflage of brushwood falling from their flanks like the clothes of a drunken whore. Their engines roared and whined, they lurched at each change of speed, and black clouds of exhaust belched out of them as though already struck by shells.

  Shells fell amongst the Panzers, raising gouts of red earth and white dust, and they all stopped dead, as though their occupants were too amazed at finding themselves opposed, as though it were inconceivable that Italians should resist. Incredibly, a German armoured car appeared on the old British bridge that ran across the shallows of the bay, and above its turret there fluttered a large white flag. The bombardiers of the batteries were triumphant, vindicated; perhaps the Germans were going to go and ask Gandin for the terms of surrender.

  The troops waited and smoked in the sunset, the oil of their fingers impregnating itself acridly but somehow appropriately into the paper of their cigarettes. A large flight of Junkers flew overhead, bringing reinforcements for the Nazis, and Captain Appollonio threw his hands into the air with exasperation, ‘Why don’t the anti-aircraft batteries fire? What’s wrong with those cretins?’ He had not risked so much, only to lose everything through the vacillation of others. Vainly, but to his own satisfaction, he fired a carbine at the distant and disappearing planes, the crackling of the shots sounding oddly polite and diffident by comparison with the recent salvoes of the guns.

  The field telephone rang. General Gandin, instead of opportunely demanding a surrender, had agreed to a truce. Appollonio rolled his eyes in disbelief, and yelled so loudly at the operator that it was some time before he realised that he was cursing down a closed line. ‘Mad son of a bitch,’ he shouted, as he slammed down the receiver, and he was consoled only a little when a runner arrived bearing a message from Captain Antonio Corelli: ‘If you are court-martialled, I shall demand the honour of being tried alongside you.’

  54 Carlo’s Farewell

  Antonio, my Captain,

  We find ourselves in bad times, and I have the strongest feelings that I shall not survive them. You know how it is, how a cat creeps away to die, or a man sees the ghost of his own mother beside his bed when he is sick, or even meets the ghost of himself coming the other way at a crossroads.

  You find with this letter all my writings that I have done since I came to this island, and if you read them you will discover what kind of man I am. I hope you are not disgusted, and I hope that, because you have a big and generous heart, you will be able to forgive me and remember me without contempt. I hope that you will remember all the times that we have embraced as comrades and brothers, and that you will not shudder with retrospective horror because they were the caresses of a degenerate. I have always tried to show you the affection that I have felt, without taking anything from you and without giving you anything that you did not want.

  When you read these pages you will see that in Albania I was desolated by the loss of my comrade Francisco, and I wish to tell you here that the wound that I received in that war was a wound that I inflicted on myself. I am not ashamed. I did what was right. When Francisco died, I wanted to die too. All the beauty went out of my life and everything was meaningless, but I lacked the unnatural courage that a man needs to blow away his own brains. I came to this beautiful island with nothing but a grey fog in my mind and an aching and empty heart that was inconsolable, bursting with grief
and bitterness. What is a man who has a chest full of medals but a heart beneath it too disconsolate to beat?

  My dear Antonio, I want you to know that in return for your inextinguishable laughter, your great music, your incomparable spirit, I have loved you with the same surprise and gratitude that I see in your own eyes when you are with Pelagia, and I shall remember you always, even when I am dead. You removed the sorrow from my breast and made me smile, and I have accepted and rejoiced in your friendship, always conscious of my own unworthiness, always struggling against any impulse to debase it, and I trust that for this you will not despise me as some might think that I deserve.

  Antonio, I have so many memories of these few short months, it makes me weep to think of them now that they are gone. So many happy memories. Do you recall how you nearly blew yourself up with that mine, and I carried you back to the doctor’s house? I knew then that if you had died I would have gone mad, and I now thank God that I shall die before you, so that I shall not have to bear the grief.

  Antonio, I speak to you from beyond the grave, in seriousness. I have loved you with all my shameful heart, as much as I once loved Francisco, and I have conquered any envy that I might have felt. If a dead man may have a wish, it is that you should find your future with Pelagia. She is beautiful and sweet, there is no one who deserves you more, and no one else worthy of you. I wish that you will have children together, and I wish that once or twice you will tell them about their Uncle Carlo that they never saw. As for me, I hoist my knapsack on my shoulders and buckle the webbing, I put my arm through the sling of my rifle, and I open the veil to march into the unknown as soldiers always will. Remember me.