by Gay Talese
But no pride would be evident through the first week of November, fourteen days after the beginning of the blitzkrieg. The war news continued to be disastrous. Of Italy’s original army of sixty-five divisions, only thirty-three were now militarily functional. Although the French would send six divisions to the Italian front in reaction to Caporetto, and the British five, nobody knew exactly what to do with these troops when they finally arrived. There was no organized plan of cooperation among the Italian, French, and British officers in the field, and as a result the incoming troops were not integrated into Italy’s frontline resistance.
Seeing the inadequacies of his army in correlation with his ever-declining opinion of the Italian officer corps, General Cadorna continued to downgrade or dismiss his commissioned subordinates. He would evict no fewer than 217 generals and 255 colonels in the course of the war. But on November 7—the day the Kerensky government fell to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia—General Cadorna himself was dismissed by the new prime minister. Cadorna was replaced by General Armando Diaz, who had been born in Naples and was respected as both a military leader and a man who could communicate with the common soldier. But the war situation was gloomier than ever. The battered Italian army had been driven back more than seventy-five miles since the assault on Caporetto. It was now lined up behind the Piave River, with General Otto von Below’s forces charging forth from the other side. The attackers were now less than twenty miles from Venice.
But as one military historian, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, wrote: “Nothing concentrates the mind like the imminent prospect of being hanged.” The Italian army and its nation, which had for weeks been disgraced by inept officers and men, and by a disgruntled but insufficiently supportive citizenry, and which now seemed on the verge of surrender, suddenly established the Piave River as the locale of a dramatic turnabout, a point from which Italy would retreat no further.
26.
Released from the hospital in early December 1917, Antonio Cristiani hitched a ride to Milan and walked through the crowded corridor of the main railroad terminal toward a southbound train that would bring him home in time for Christmas. It would be his first visit back to Maida in more than two and a half years. He had tried to inform his family that he was coming, but he doubted they had received his wire. There were few enough telegraph offices in the south, and all were currently overburdened with the handling of top-priority messages of the sort he was thankful the government was not sending in his behalf.
Yet reminders of death and tragedy were everywhere around him now as he continued along the stone floor under a high ceiling amid the sounds of whistles and hissing steam. Caskets were stacked at loading ramps. Groups of tearful civilians dressed in black lingered along the platforms. Hundreds of bandaged soldiers, many moving with the aid of canes, crutches, or wheelchairs, proceeded slowly within the lines of passengers headed toward dozens of trains bound for every part of Italy.
Carrying a small duffel bag, Antonio climbed the steel steps and entered a car in which all the seats were taken and some people were standing in the aisle. Except for two nuns and a half-dozen elderly people dressed entirely in black, the car was totally occupied by young soldiers in gray-green uniforms. Several windows were open, but there was a pervasive smell of disinfectant, medicine, and sweaty woolen fabric. The bandages wrapped around some soldiers’ heads were slightly bloodstained. Many pairs of crutches lay horizontally along the overhead baggage racks on both sides of the car. As each newly arrived soldier entered, he was met with discreet glances that appraised his condition. If he seemed too disabled to stand or balance himself on an armrest in the aisle, a seated soldier who was less infirm would rise and offer to exchange places. Even the elderly women and nuns tried to yield seats to ailing servicemen. Except in the cases of the severely injured, the women were politely refused. Never was a crowded railcar more abundant with courtesy and concern.
Antonio made his way slowly up the aisle and stood in the rear next to a metal door that, as the train began to move, resounded with a loose chain banging against it from the outside. Near him stood three other apparently healthy servicemen. One was an airman, the others artillerymen. After greeting one another briefly, they stood in awkward silence for several moments as the train pulled out of the station and daylight streamed in to make more obvious than before the extent of the injuries suffered by many of the passengers. Half of the legs stretched out in the aisle bore casts or metal braces secured with leather straps. At least a third of the seated servicemen had cloth bands knotted around their necks to support the slings that held their damaged or partially amputated arms. There were a few groans now and then from soldiers in pain, and Antonio was reminded of his time in the hospital. He thought of Muffo, Branca, and Conti. The engineer moved the train very slowly, as if stalling for time until the soldiers’ tender flesh could become adjusted to the motion.
The airman standing with Antonio suddenly became quite talkative. He was a stocky round-faced man in his mid-twenties with a trim moustache and a cap that was too small for his head. He announced he was from Avellino, near Naples. He had served in the air force for two years and was part of the ground crew, not a flier. He said that he could fly planes very well, but that his instructors, all of them from Genoa, had given him failing grades whenever he took the pilot’s examination. In his voice there was little doubt that he had failed because he was not from Genoa. He had most recently been stationed at an air base near Udine that had been shelled and captured by Austro-German troops after the breakthrough at Caporetto. During the past summer, he said, he had helped fuel the squadron that Gabriele D’Annunzio had led to bomb the Austrian port of Pola in the Adriatic. The Austrians had placed a price of twenty thousand crowns upon the poet’s head, the airman said, but he added that they would never catch him alive. As the airman continued to talk about D’Annunzio’s heroics and the war in general, Antonio and the two artillerymen mostly listened. One of the latter, who held on to his companion’s arm whenever the train took a sharp turn, listened intently while staring fixedly into space. Antonio soon realized that the man was blind.
The slow-moving ten-car train stopped at every station, and at each station one or two servicemen hobbled off. By the time the train arrived in Livorno, along the Tyrrhenian Sea, there were enough empty spaces in Antonio’s car for him and the other standees to sit down. Antonio sat next to a skinny eighteen-year-old who had lost his right leg below the knee during the big battle before Caporetto, the one on the Bansizza Plateau, when General Cadorna had been in command. The young soldier, who was returning home to his village just north of Naples, said that half the people in his unit had been killed by Austrian artillery, and that he had survived probably because the stray horse of a dead cavalry officer had fallen on him during an explosion—crushing his right leg, but protecting the rest of his body from the destructive impact of the shell.
After a night in which many passengers remained awake to the sounds of one another’s nightmares and physical suffering, the train pulled jerkily to a stop at yet another station. The sign bearing the name of the station was so weatherworn that Antonio could not read the lettering. In the middle of the platform, several feet from the track, stood three military policemen and hundreds of civilians of all ages, two-thirds of them women, straining against ropes trying to get a closer view of the troops seated in the train. Since the train had left Milan, every station had been jammed with people who apparently had received word that a spouse, son, or other relative would be returning home from the front during the day or night. Never knowing precisely on which train the persons expected would be traveling, the crowd waited with rising anticipation and hope as each train came and went. Every town’s station house was now the site of around-the-clock vigils, a place where people congregated for hours, noisily or in silence, until some among them yelled that they heard a whistle in the distance, or saw the smoke of a locomotive rising above a hill. Then all the others would hurry out to the platform, t
heir heads all facing northward, their eyes transfixed upon the narrowing gauge of the tracks as they wondered if the train they had yet to see was the one they were waiting for.
People had been known to become uncontrollable in such gatherings. Newspapers had recently reported that the mothers of two returning servicemen, overly eager to greet the train they assumed was carrying their sons safely home, tripped while running along the platform and died after hitting the tracks.
As a result of such incidents, the crowds were now cordoned off at all stations and overseen by the military police and local authorities. But Antonio could see that the police were having difficulty with this crowd. It was a dark, rainy morning, and after the train had stood idle for several minutes and no soldier had gotten off, many people began to push against the ropes and to direct their anguished cries toward the open windows of the train, calling out the names of the men they were waiting for. “Giuseppe Nardi! Giuseppe Nardi!” screamed one middle-aged woman, her sodden cloak hanging heavily over her gaunt features, while a younger woman next to her called out louder still: “Andrea De Marco, Andrea De Marco!” Two teenaged boys brandished their fists at the military policeman who had given them a hard push backward with his club after they had climbed under the ropes; an elderly woman at the end of the line, after calling out someone’s name, fell to the ground in a faint.
None of the soldiers in Antonio’s car said anything to those held behind the ropes. The people were detained at a distance too remote for conversing, and most of the soldiers were now asleep or were too incapacitated and weary to speak after a harrowing and painful night. With a sound of the whistle and a pump of steam, the train began to move away from the station. Antonio could see the people’s shoulders slacken, and he sensed their deepening disappointment. Many of them had undoubtedly been waiting all night and had seen too many trains come and go without bringing home any men from this town. But Antonio was also aware that the train had not brought home any caskets.
It did deliver caskets to eight of the next twenty towns it stopped at that day, and the farther south the train went, the more caskets it released. Soldiers, too, left the train at most stops, but whatever joy Antonio saw in the reunions along the platform was overshadowed by the forlorn figures who stood near the undertakers’ wagons waiting to claim the bodies. As the names were read aloud by the two quartermaster sergeants who accompanied the caskets in the freight car, Antonio saw wailing women collapsing to the ground, and men cursing while looking scornfully at the sky. He saw priests trying to console the mourners, and flicking holy water upon the caskets, and waving in the air brass containers smoldering with incense. He saw mule carts filled with flowers in the background, and young women draped in black silk veils carrying children not yet old enough to walk. But Antonio could watch very little of this. It made him too self-conscious about being alive.
Having survived battles that killed his friends, and having now spent hours riding with soldiers disabled for life, he was haunted constantly by the question: Why them, and not me? To what do I owe my life, my limbs? He had begun to put these thoughts in his diary, but he had resisted. Such thoughts were better not written, he decided. Even thinking them might bring him bad luck. And yet it had been impossible to avoid them ever since he had seen Muffo, Branca, and the others cut down in front of him during the ambush. Unconsciously he now often behaved in ways that reflected what he wished to repress. He had slowed the pace of his walk, had even affected a slight limp, after he had entered the Milan terminal and crossed the corridor surrounded by soldiers who relied on canes and crutches, wheelchairs and stretchers. He had looked straight ahead in the railcar as he moved up the aisle past the seated victims, searching for a place to stand in the rear, behind the backs of his unfortunate comrades. When there finally were empty seats on the train after many hours of riding, Antonio had been the last of the standees to claim one. What was he resisting? What was he ashamed of? Never during his time in the army, including this trip on the train, had anyone encouraged these feelings. Never once had he detected in the facial expressions of injured soldiers, or overheard in their comments, anything that should give him reason to suspect that he was envied or resented.
On the contrary, and especially since Caporetto, the mere act of wearing his uniform in public had brought him signs of respect and cordiality from every soldier and civilian he met along the streets or elsewhere in Italian-occupied towns behind the frontlines. The truck driver who had gone miles out of his way to take Antonio into Milan; the waiter at the café near the terminal who would not let Antonio pay for breakfast; the middle-aged men and women waiting to board the train who insisted that Antonio move to the head of the line—all these people, and others, were showing respect for the Italian uniform, and deference to the men wearing it, making no distinction between soldiers who had been badly wounded and those who appeared to be perfectly healthy. Respect is what a soldier deserved and appreciated—not sympathy. Antonio knew this. He knew it rationally. But within him stirred ancient warnings against ever appearing to be better off than his neighbor, ever taking comfort in his sense of well-being, ever assuming that what was good about his life would last for very long. He had been reared among pessimists, mystics, people shaped by earthquakes, plagues, and other calamities beyond their control. Nothing was a sure thing in his village, nothing could be counted on. Maida was a warm, bright place in the mountains where nobody truly saw the sun. People wore black there when they had nothing to mourn. They mourned in advance. In that place the most casual of compliments could be construed as a curse.
Antonio remembered as a boy of five or six playing along the road near his house one afternoon when a stranger who was strolling through the village paused nearby to rest. He was a white-bearded, emaciated man in his seventies, wearing a sackcloth tunic and sandals, and he carried a walking stick and had a leather bag slung over his left shoulder. He had a kindly face, and, after settling himself under a tree, he called Antonio over and asked him to find water for the empty bottle he held. After Antonio returned with it filled from a nearby fountain, and the stranger had drunk from it sparingly, he looked around and asked Antonio the name of the town, and the distance between it and the next village to the north, and a few other questions about the area. Antonio spoke freely and politely, prompting the man to compliment him on his manners and to ask what he hoped to do with his life when he became older. Antonio had given it no thought; but imagining what would please his religious mother and her father, Domenico, he replied that he wished to become a priest.
“You seem to be a very nice boy,” the man said. “You would make a fine priest. And even if you do not, I see many wonderful things happening to you in the years ahead.”
Soon the man was on his way, and later at home Antonio told his mother about the man’s favorable prediction. Immediately alarmed, Maria speculated that this stranger may have been trying to place a hex on his future. She hastened to consult with her father across the courtyard; then she returned and told Antonio that he must pursue the man at once, look directly into his eyes, and declare that he had given him false information. If the man asked further questions, she warned, Antonio should say nothing more and come directly home.
Confused but obedient, Antonio ran out the door and up the road the old man had been following. But there was no sign of him anywhere. Antonio passed the outer boundaries of Maida, and continued northward a few miles more in the direction of the next town, Nicastro. Losing hope of ever finding him, since none of the people he questioned along the route reported having seen him, Antonio turned and headed back to Maida. He wanted to get home before dark. Along the way he met his concerned parents and grandfather, who feared he had gotten lost. Reassured that he was all right, they then revealed their disappointment on learning that Antonio had not made contact with the old man. His mother and grandfather seemed to be particularly upset, although they did not scold him or verbalize their disappointment. They merely talked quietly between th
emselves on the way home, staying a few paces behind Antonio and his father, who had his arm around Antonio’s shoulder and said comforting things while keeping him distant from what was being discussed behind them—Maria’s voice rising now and then to reveal her concern over the consequences, the possible consequences, of what had happened. And what had happened? Antonio did not know. And he never would know, exactly, since nobody in his family could or would adequately explain it. All that he understood was that something had been visited upon him, something that was pleasing in sound but possibly evil in intent. Because he had been unable to confront the man and take back what he had said, an ill omen was now adrift, a prognosis that (though positive) could bring negative results even if it fulfilled itself. It could bring, at best, pride and conceit; at worst, the envy of others, their contempt, perhaps their vengeance. It could have disadvantageous results, in any case. And yet it was part of Antonio’s psychic burden, part of his boyhood inheritance from Maida that he had carried with him to France, and that he had lived with for almost three years in the most enlightened and sophisticated city in Europe. Now, back from the battlefield, he was returning home with this burden, limping with it along a platform at the Naples train station, several feet from where a group of people fell screaming to the ground as caskets were unloaded from the train.
Antonio sat at a back table in a café within the noisy rotunda of the Naples terminal, with a view of the station’s clock hanging high on the stone wall. His own train was currently sidetracked, not only to allow time for the removal of the many caskets but also to permit mechanics to service the malfunctioning locomotive. Moments before the train had pulled into Naples, the chief engineer had entered the car to announce apologetically that there would be a two-hour delay due to slight compression problems with the engine. Antonio had been delighted with the announcement. He could finally get off the train for a while. There was a telegraph office in the Naples terminal, from which he could send another message to Maida. There was also the café, where in the past he had eaten well and where the bar held a vast assortment of wines and whiskeys, the latter traditionally stocked for British travelers. Since leaving Milan, he had eaten only what the vendors sold through the train windows, and very little of that.