The Longest Winter

by Mary Jane Staples

‘Looks?’

  ‘As if one is inferior,’ said Pia.

  ‘Ah, that’s it,’ said her mother and became excited. ‘That’s it, but it isn’t inferior he finds you, it’s idiotic. He’s right. There’s no sense in your attitude, none.’

  ‘I am not idiotic!’

  ‘You’re as close to it as you can be!’

  ‘I’m not going around kissing him, if that’s what you think I should do!’

  Signora Amaraldi’s laugh was short and exasperated.

  ‘Well, if I were your age,’ she said, ‘I’d rather go around kissing a man like that than have him look at me as if I were a stupid donkey.’

  ‘Oh, so now I’m a donkey!’ Pia was flushed and angry.

  ‘Like your father, as I’ve told him to his face more than once.’ Exasperated mother and angry daughter squared up.

  ‘Stop it,’ cried Pia, ‘you’re upsetting me.’

  ‘Listen to me, girl. Major Korvacs has been kind, he’s bringing a doctor to Mariella. That’s enough for me to know I’m not going to be distant with him any more.’

  ‘Well, you’re still a handsome woman, Mama,’ said Pia, ‘so perhaps you could go around kissing him. That would make him feel very much at home.’

  ‘Girl, girl!’ Signora Amaraldi threw up her hands again. ‘You are hopeless, hopeless.’

  Pia vibrated, her mother shook a finger at her. Suddenly they laughed and the confrontation collapsed.

  The army medical officer confirmed tonsillitis. He provided Mariella with more medicine and a draught to make her sleep. Signora Amaraldi was grateful, demonstrably so. She conversed amiably with Carl over the evening meal. Pia made an effort too. Carl did not make the mistake of thinking they had taken a sudden liking to him. Simply, because of Mariella, he was less unacceptable. He was tempted to be frank towards the end of the meal.

  ‘You’re Italians?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pia firmly. Her black hair, her dark eyes, and her skin which tanned so easily, proclaimed her ancestry.

  ‘You were born in Italy?’ said Carl.

  ‘We were born here,’ said Signora Amaraldi, ‘our family has always been here.’

  ‘Then you aren’t Italians but Austrians of Italian descent,’ said Carl. ‘Has no one pointed this out to you?’

  ‘We should not argue about these things,’ she said.

  ‘Signora, that isn’t argument,’ said Carl, ‘it’s fact.’

  ‘We are Italians,’ insisted Pia.

  ‘Pia,’ said her mother, ‘it’s better—’

  ‘We are not Austrians,’ declared Pia.

  ‘I see,’ said Carl. ‘You’re saying that the Normans who settled in England from the time of William the Conqueror are still French?’

  ‘That is not the same,’ said Pia, wishing he would not give himself such an air of cold superiority.

  ‘You mean it doesn’t suit your argument,’ said Carl. ‘You wish the Trentino to join with Italy?’

  ‘It is right it should,’ said Pia, ‘the population is mainly Italian.’

  ‘You mean that if the population of America should become mainly Italian, then America must become part of Italy?’ Carl was caustic. ‘You mean that if enough Hungarians were to emigrate to Australia, then Australia must accept Hungarian ownership? I should think such Hungarians had an obligation to become Australians. You obviously think otherwise.’

  The logic was unassailable. Pia knew that to say no was to invite ridicule and to say yes was to destroy her argument.

  ‘The Tyrol is not Austrian,’ she said.

  ‘It has been for six hundred years,’ said Carl, ‘and it has never been Italian. You have settled here. Now you want to take it from us. Do you think you have a good argument?’

  Pia’s expression was almost fierce with frustration. Her mother smiled a little. Pia had never discussed the matter with Austrians, only with Italians whose points of view coincided with her own.

  ‘It is not the same,’ she said again.

  ‘What isn’t?’ said Carl.

  ‘What you have said about other people and other countries.’

  ‘Naturally, you must stick to that or you have no argument,’ said Carl. ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, signorina, I’d not want Austria to keep you. You may shout your slogans, draw your knives, throw your bombs and cheer for Italy. But you will take a long time to grow up. You will excuse me?’ He put down his napkin, stood up, gave Signora Amaraldi a little bow and left the room.

  Pia burst into anger.

  ‘There, now do you say he isn’t arrogant? Did you hear him? Everyone else is wrong, only he is right!’

  ‘He’s right about one thing. You will never grow up.’ Signora Amaraldi shook her head. ‘Your father never has. He’ll still be making bombs when he’s a hundred, if one doesn’t blow him up first. I’m going up to look at Mariella. She’s the sensible one in this family.’

  Just after dawn the vibrating thunder of guns woke Pia. She sat up, listening to them. They heralded another fierce battle for the pass. The rumbling was cavernous, it made the house feel as if it was standing on trembling earth. She heard a hammering on the front door. She got out of bed and slipped on a warm dressing gown. Agitatedly she emerged on to the landing and met Major Korvacs in trousers and shirt. In the dim light her hair was a loose black curtain of softness about her shoulders, her eyes big in her startled face. But her warm Italian beauty was lost on Carl as he made for the stairs.

  ‘Who is it, what do they want?’ She was alarmed.

  ‘I think they probably want me,’ he said.

  It was a runner from Headquarters. Major Korvacs was to assemble his company and march at once to reinforce Lamonte Ridge. The Italians were mounting an offensive. He had thought it was their turn.

  He had his officers and men assembled and on the march forty minutes later. They reached the series of snow-covered ridges in an hour and in single file climbed tracks slippery with ice. The air was freezing, the morning grey and bitter, the dawn sun blanketed. They saw the gun flashes like tiny sparks of light far to the south, and the fire and smoke of shells bursting among the Austrian positions. The Austrians had their heads down. The reverberations travelled, rolled back and came again. The dull white slopes high above the valley were smitten by the shock waves of sound. Dislodged snow slowly spilled and banked, tumbled free and poured downwards in white masses. Above these masses, avalanching and roaring, powdered snow rose and hung like clouds. With the Italian guns reaching a crescendo of aggression, the scream and explosion of shells assaulted the outraged mountains and tortured the human ear.

  Carl, at the head of his company, halted on a high ledge. Lamonte Ridge lay a little way beneath them, the long broad pass far below. Shells were bursting around the ridge, a wide rocky bastion of positional advantage manfully fortified with sandbags and stone, the sandbags now as hard and solid as the stone.

  ‘We’ll wait,’ he said to Captain Freidriks. To climb down now would be suicidal. The shrapnel would blow them off the mountain.

  ‘It’s damn cold, waiting,’ said Captain Freidriks.

  ‘Frozen feet or shot-off head,’ said Carl, ‘we’ve got our choice. We’ll wait.’

  They waited. Their frosted breath hung until the icy shock waves fractured it. They watched the barrage, the running flashes, the flying snow, the splintered ice. The Austrians, dug in, kept their heads down as valley, heights and emplacements were pounded by the flame and steel of bursting shells. The Alps shuddered and bellowed like outraged giants.

  The barrage eased, the flashes ran back. The guns became silent. The frozen sky brooded. In the south the Italians began to emerge like dark tiny spiders from the scarred lines of their redoubts. They came over their ridges, over their slopes, manoeuvring to outflank the broad frontal defences of the Austrians. Carl took his men down. Nailed boots bit into ice and snow, each man watching his comrade in front, to pull him back or rope him back if he slipped. The immensity of space and silence afte
r the numbing, confining roar of the guns was an awesome assault on the nerves. One anticipated, after such a barrage, that an inferno of new noise would follow. Silence seemed the last thing the war could offer. The sudden sharp cracks of rifle fire that broke it were always conducive to absurd light relief.

  Out they came from their cold holes, the Austrians, to man their sandbag trenches, culverts, blockhouses and emplacements. Carl had his men in position. Woollen-gloved hands beat together to make the blood flow and bring life to trigger fingers. Numbed toes squirmed around in woollen socks and cold boots.

  They watched the distant Italians. Through his binoculars Carl saw them dark against the white, for even those who wore the camouflage of the mountain fighter could never, in movement, match the white of the snow. Their advance looked neither quick nor purposeful. They seemed to appear, disappear and reappear, creating constant patterns of changing movement. The desultory rifle fire stopped. The Austrians waited. Rifles opened up again, bullets flying from the south. Useless, thought Carl, from that distance. What were they playing at? His nerves began to crawl. The silence became complete again, and ominous. He knew what it might mean, that the Italians had drawn the Austrians out into the open, if those ledges and ridges and redoubts could be called open. Lamonte Ridge could.

  He ordered his company back. There was one advantage about mountain fighting. You were not locked in a trench as on the Western Front. If you needed to move, and if you could, you had freedom to initiate a change of position, providing it did not constitute a retreat or the makings of one. He had the 3rd scrambling back off the ridge when the Italian guns opened up again. The shells began their whistling and screaming, and the thunder to roll. Shrapnel ranged over valley and heights, Austrians diving for holes and fissures, or walls of protective snow and ice. That was when a man hated the enemy. When he departed from the accepted formula and played tricks.

  Carl, at the rear of his withdrawing unit, was still on the ridge when a shell burst behind him. The blast hurled him forward, lifting him from his feet. He felt as if a great hand had plucked him up and thrown him. He landed in snow, his head pointing downwards, and the space below was a limitless whiteness except for grey, jutting crags that the wind kept coated with ice but naked of snow. They whirled, those crags. He blinked his eyes. He was over the edge, with nothing before him but space, and the snow was already a warm wet bed under him. His lungs whistled to retrieve the air that had been driven from them. He felt no pain, only a loss of physical ability. His mind returned to work. It told him that if he moved he would begin his slide into the white void.

  The guns roared, the slopes vibrated and the snow quivered and trembled. He heard exploding shells. Beneath him the snow lost all crispness as it yielded to the warmth of his body. It began to move. A rope came and landed softly by his head. He did not know if he could use his arms. He felt a wetness on his right jaw. He knew it was blood. He looked at the rope as the snow sank under him. Above the noise of the gunfire he heard Captain Freidriks call.

  ‘Carl! For God’s sake!’

  It was his body that was slowly moving, not the snow. His numbed nervous system awoke. He reached for the rope just as his legs began to swing sideways from above. The rope frictioned through his gloved hand. He gripped hard, brought his other hand over and held on. He looked up. He was fifteen feet below the ledge. Captain Freidriks and several men, exposed to the gunfire, hauled him up, the rope twisted around his right wrist and both hands clinging to it. They brought him to the top. He was shaken but unhurt, and he moved quickly with the men into cover behind a sloping shelf above the ridge. The rest of the company were higher up.

  Carl brushed snow from his greatcoat. He looked at Captain Freidriks and the men.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ he said and wondered if fortune was calculating the favours it had granted him.

  ‘Our pleasure,’ said Captain Freidriks. As Carl put a hand to his face Freidriks added, ‘You’ve a small cut, Herr Major, that’s all.’

  The fiends of hell seemed to be sundering the mountains as the red flashes of fire peppered the endless white.

  ‘Have we cognac to spare?’ asked Carl.

  They knew it was an admission of necessity. They shared a frank consciousness of fear. Bravado was acceptable only in young recruits, who soon grew out of it. Flasks were produced, thrust at Carl. He extracted his own and passed it round. They each took a mouthful. He took two. The cold knot retreated from his stomach. The Italian guns hammered away. The Austrians had their heads down again. Some who had been caught by the second barrage were already stiffening, awaiting their white shrouds, which would not be long in forming today. The grey clouds massed, the dull light making the fire flashes redder. The snow came, the flakes huge, and the wind began to blow bitter. The guns stopped and the war around the pass stopped for the thousandth time, suffocated by the blanket of new snow. It whirled as it fell, hiding the dead from the living and the living from each other.

  What use had it been, thought Carl, what purpose had it served, that assault by the guns? The profligacy of expending thousands of shells to hammer mountains and kill a score of men could only be put down to the curious self-delusion of generals, who saw grandeur in it and always thought one more attack would do it, although they knew it never did.

  He stamped about. The shelf was full of white-misted figures doing the same. One could fight in the snow, one could lie in wait in the snow, but one did not let a snowstorm bury one. He felt he had spent years fighting a thousand engagements of this kind, with the weather as hostile as the enemy, and he did not know, any more than his men did, why the instinct for survival was so strong when all other feelings seemed dead.

  The wind died. The storm of snow thinned and perished. Minutes later the sky was a clear, fresh-washed pale blue and in the sunshine the purity of the new mantle of white was beyond reproach. Carl took his company back into position again. Around the heights the figures of moving men were minute to the eye as other Austrian units manned their defences again. The sun cleaved the silence with brilliant light.

  They waited. And then the Austrian guns opened up, battering at the mountain and valley positions of the Italians in a prolonged and revengeful bombardment. Angry at not being allowed to settle, the new snow slipped softly and wetly downwards, gathering weight and impetus that took it in plunging, white-foaming billows to the carpeted floors of chasms and gorges. Its booming descent muffled the noise of the guns.

  Now the nerve-shattered Italians waited, but when the Austrian barrage lifted there was no attack. And no Italian assault materialized. The Italian commander had changed his mind. The snowstorm had reduced the will. Sensibly he let the battle rest. But the Austrians stayed on the alert all day, and when night fell they bivouacked in bleak and pitiless conditions. It snowed again a little after midnight. When morning came Carl and his company were withdrawn and allowed to return to Oberstein. The sun was out again as they marched in. Carl saw his men into the barracks and then made his way to the Amaraldi house. He had been away thirty hours.

  Maria opened the door to him. She bobbed plumply. He nodded brusquely. Pia appeared in her white blouse and black skirt.

  ‘Major Korvacs?’

  ‘You must excuse my boots, signorina.’

  She was not used to men like him. Most Austrian officers did not give a fig for her Italianism. All attractive women were fair game, especially in wartime. She avoided them as much as she could, although some could be useful in these days of severe shortages. It gave her perverse satisfaction to make use of them. They were so gauche in their assumption that they only had to flirt with her, to flatter her, for her to find them irresistible. If other women, Italian and Austrian, found them charming because they were still gallant, despite alarming setbacks, she resolutely refused to be impressed. They were Austrian and she was her father’s patriotic daughter. Major Korvacs had come into the house that first day like the most arrogant of overlords. He was neither gauche nor charming,
he was icy and formidable. But at least, unlike many other officers, he did not spend his time trying to put his arm around her waist.

  What was he worrying about his boots for? She met his eyes. Their blueness was grey and there were lines around them. He looked tired, drawn, unshaven, and there was a cut on his cheek. An unexpected little tug of compassion weakened her.

  ‘We are pleased you are safely back, Herr Major,’ she said.

  ‘Are you?’

  Her mother came into the hall. It made him smile a little. They were always there in one way or another whenever he entered the house. Did they imagine he was going to make off with their silver?

  ‘I am glad you are back, Major Korvacs,’ said Signora Amaraldi, ‘and if you would be so kind, when you are rested, Mariella would like to see you. She has been asking where you were.’

  ‘She’s better?’ asked Carl from the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Yes, she is, thank you.’

  ‘We are grateful, please believe us,’ said Pia.

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Carl and went up to his room. He wanted only a warm bed and a few hours of dreamless sleep. Corporal Jaafe, who had arrived in advance of Carl, came up from the kitchen with a hot drink. He suggested he might take Carl’s boots.

  ‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘No, wait a moment,’ He went to Mariella’s room and knocked. Her soft voice answered and he entered. She was lying peacefully in her bed, her head resting on heaped pillows. She gave him her shy smile. He sat down. ‘So there you are,’ he said. Her temperature was normal, her youthful resilience triumphant. She looked warm and cosy.

  ‘I am better,’ she said.

  ‘So you are.’

  ‘I am having soups,’ she said informatively.

  ‘Soups are good for tender tonsils, Mariella.’

  ‘Oh, yes, better than medicine,’ she said. She looked earnestly at him. ‘I heard the guns firing.’ Everyone in Oberstein was used to the sound of guns.

  ‘Noisy things,’ said Carl.

  ‘You were there,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, looking on.’

  Wisdom was in her brown eyes. The cut on his cheek was a little raw. Pia, drawn by the sound of voices, arrived in the doorway. She listened as her sister and Major Korvacs chatted. He looked round and saw her. He got up.