At Bassano the proprietor of the small hotel - entitled, somewhat excessively, Hotel Mondo - welcomed us with sympathetic enthusiasm, and offered to show us the position of the battlefields while his cook prepared an early luncheon. From the village we looked across the sweeping Brenta Valley, with its dark cypresses, its sun-drenched, shuttered houses and its sulphur-hued spires, to Monte Grappa and the Asiago Plateau, that huge grey shadow of a mountain with its abruptly flattened summit, as though, after the Creation, some Titan had taken a gigantic sword and sliced off the top. The characteristic silhouette of that truncated peak still has a shattering effect upon me after all these years. Only the other day I discovered that the husband of a novelist friend at whose house I was dining had been for a time liaison officer with the French on the Italian front; at my request he showed me some of his war maps and pictures, and when he turned up a photograph depicting the familiar outline, I found myself as near tears as I was when I first saw the Plateau twelve years ago.
By the time that we had finished our luncheon the car was ready. We looked, no doubt, younger than we felt, for the hotel proprietor - one of the most truly courteous gentlemen that I have ever met in any country - decided that he couldn’t allow two such youthful Englishwomen to go off alone into the mountains with an unknown and rather fierce-looking chauffeur (though it had never occurred to either of us to feel any anxiety on that account). Moreover, he explained, in the erratic mixture of Italian and broken French of which our mutual conversation was composed, the roads were steep and rather frightening, perhaps, to strangers; just to show that there wasn’t any real danger, might he bring his little son as well? The bambino would enjoy the ride, and there was plenty of room in the car.
So we started together for the Plateau with the red-moustachioed chauffeur in the powerful Fiat - Winifred and myself, the kindly, plump hotel-keeper, and the brown six-year-old child, who resembled a tiny, dark-eyed Jesus wearing a beret. Villages that grew thinner as the ascent became steeper clustered at intervals round the first few miles of the route; at length the sheer mountain-side towered above the car, and my heart jumped at every hair-pin bend of the unwalled road. At each corner we seemed about to drive straight over the edge into the deepening precipice; thousands of feet below us, Venetia and the Brenta Valley lay unrolled like a map, with the river - a streak of silver in a blue-green mist - flowing in a great curve towards Venice.
After a climb that seemed to have lasted for hours, the road became more level. Villages and vineyards had long disappeared; the air was cold, and the narrow track began to wind between granite rocks and pine-forests that seemed to stretch to infinity, very dark and strangely sombre in contrast to the sunny, fertile plain below. We saw no heather and very few flowers; the whole world was green and grey, and still as a lost country fathoms deep below the waters of the sea. Suddenly, in the midst of the forest, we came upon the rusty ruins of tin cans and barbed-wire entanglements, stretched across the fallen entrances of dug-outs and the half-obliterated remains of shallow trenches. We were now driving, said the chauffeur, through the old Austrian lines, to which the enemy had advanced after the victory at Caporetto in 1917.
It was not at all the kind of ‘devastated area’ so characteristic of Flanders and France; the shells had merely deepened the curves of the hillsides, splitting the rocks into sharp stones and adding a few more scars to those already made by time and weather. Once they had evidently torn screaming through the pine-woods, as the thin broken tree-trunks piled in hundreds beside the road bore witness, but the pines could still have been counted only by that omniscient Mathematician who alone can number the hairs of a man’s head. Now and again a rough tangle of barbed wire climbed like an alien plant over the rocks, or the gleaming surface of a mountain tarn disguised the rude disfigurement of a shell-hole, or a trail of Austrian trenches wound serpent-wise across a distant hill. But those incongruous traces of strife seemed only to emphasise the silent scorn of the Plateau for war’s feverish folly; they did not detract from the grim, imperturbable grandeur which guns could not annihilate nor the tramp of armies deface.
As we crossed the former No Man’s Land and reached the old British lines, the pine-woods became darker and thicker, and the ground more like that of a battlefield; could this, I wondered, with thumping heart, be the scene of Edward’s final hour on June 15th? The road, torn with shell-holes, presented a baffling problem to the car, and we lurched dizzily from side to side as we sought vainly for Granezza. None of the scattered gangs of workmen still gathering together the broken pine-trunks seemed to know where it was, and we stopped first at a tiny cemetery which we afterwards learnt was called Balfaconte. In it a number of missing found during the clearing of the battlefields must have been buried, for it seemed to be half full of stones inscribed: ‘Here lies a British soldier - known unto God.’
At last, in the depths of the forest, past a rough track marked ‘To Asiago’, we came upon Granezza; not even a village shared the name with the cemetery, which seemed to be near no human habitation except a mountain inn about a mile away. The little graveyard, half hidden by rocks, stood high above the road at the foot of a green hill covered with pines; so much did its white stones seem a part of the grey and white Plateau that at twilight it would have been indistinguishable. Going through the small gate fastened with a leathern thong, I found only sixty graves enclosed within a white wall; through the middle of them a straight green path ran to the foot of a cenotaph surmounted by a cross. In front of each stone a miniature fern was growing; only wild flowers, hardy and sparse, pushed themselves through the barren ground, but the cemetery looked well kept and the grass path was mown. The afternoon sun, dipping westward above the low hills opposite, shone direct upon the graves; had they faced east they would have looked straight into the pine-wood and never had the sun upon their carved inscriptions.
‘How strange, how strange it is,’ I reflected, as I looked, with an indefinable pain stabbing my chest, for Edward’s name among those neat rows of oblong stones, ‘that all my past years - the childhood of which I have no one, now, to share the remembrance, the bright fields at Uppingham, the restless months in Buxton, the hopes and ambitions of Oxford, the losses and long-drawn agonies of the War - should be buried in this grave on the top of a mountain, in the lofty silence, the singing unearthly stillness, of these remote forests! At every turn of every future road I shall want to ask him questions, to recall to him memories, and he will not be there. Who could have dreamed that the little boy born in such uneventful security to an ordinary provincial family would end his brief days in a battle among the high pine-woods of an unknown Italian plateau?’
Close to the wall, in the midst of a group of privates from the Sherwood Foresters who had all died on June 15th, I found his name: ‘Captain E. H. Brittain, M.C., 11th Notts. and Derby Regt. Killed in action June 15th, 1918. Aged 22.’ In Venice I had bought some rosebuds and a small asparagus fern in a pot; the shopkeeper had told me that it would last a long time, and I planted it in the rough grass beside the grave.
‘How trivial my life has been since the War!’ I thought, as I smoothed the earth over the fern. ‘How mean they are, these little strivings, these petty ambitions of us who are left, now that all of you are gone! How can the future achieve, through us, the sombre majesty of the past? Oh, Edward, you’re so lonely up here; why can’t I stay for ever and keep your grave company, far from the world and its vain endeavours to rebuild civilisation, on this Plateau where alone there is dignity and peace?’
But when at last I came from the cemetery, the child, who had been playing with his father near the car, ran up to me holding out a bunch of scabious and white clover that he had picked by the roadside.
‘For the little signorina,’ he said.
14
Four days later, en route for Florence, a pandemonium at Bologna, where we had to change, demonstrated to us the rapidity with which, in Latin countries, the sublime is apt to descend into the ridiculous
.
Nobody seemed to know why the station was so crowded and everybody so excited, but foreigners had the worst of it in that struggling uproar, and we should have had little chance to escape from one train and find the other, had not an agreeable young Italian helped us to transfer our luggage. Having completed his service to us he noticed an elderly American lady staggering up the platform with an enormous hat-box; standing before her he bowed, took off his hat, and, knowing no English, gently laid his hand upon the strap.
The lady, no doubt well-primed by warnings from Middle Western neighbours, turned furiously upon the would-be cavalier.
‘If you try to take my things I’ll knock you down!’ she exclaimed.
The Italian, nonplussed, turned to us with hands outspread, and we shook with helpless laughter as we took the places that he had found for us. Our neighbours in the carriage - also, I regret to say, Americans, but the pure accident of their not being English was probably designed by Providence to preserve our self-respect - conceived an immediate antipathy to us, for there had been a rush for seats and they objected to our occupation of the corners preempted by our rescuer. But they detested the Italian railway officials even more.
‘Animals!’ chattered one of the elderly ladies to her crushed-looking companion-secretary. ‘Nothing but animals! No order on the station! No porters, no station-master, nobody who could even speak English!’
No doubt, I remarked sotto voce to Winifred, she would have been equally scandalised had a Florentine countess arrived at one of her own junction towns - Buffalo or Columbus or Kansas City - and complained bitterly that no one spoke Italian!
We liked Florence so much that we stayed in that incomparable city in our pension beside the Arno for ten divine days.
‘Venice is all sea and sculpture,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘and this is mountains and fir-trees and white houses with red roofs . . . Somehow Venice is like a great mausoleum; there is plenty of life in it but the life is not the life of Venice, which one feels to have died ages ago. Whereas in this place the spirit of the Renaissance seems to have lived on; it is more of a personality and less of a museum.’
So we walked around the town and did not spend much time in the picture-galleries; I never had expected to find any spiritual affinity with the placid Rafael Madonnas in the Uffizi, but I fell in love, in the Pitti, with the little Murillo Madonna holding the brown curly-haired Baby with the big dark eyes. Seven years afterwards Miss Heath Jones sent me a post-card of this picture, for she thought that my son, then a few months old, was the image of Murillo’s painted Child. But in September 1921 the surface of my mind was not at all concerned with the possibility of future sons, or husbands; it was pleasantly preoccupied with the preparations for the Dante Festival.
This celebration of the sexcentenary of the poet’s death transformed the city into a mediæval bazaar, although on the day that we saw the King of Italy, grandiosely attended by General Diaz and Baron Sonnino, being officially received by the Signoria at the Palazzo Vecchio, a note of incongruous modernity was introduced by an aeroplane which dropped coloured leaflets on our heads. It had disappeared, however, by the next day, when we watched the Dante pageant from the upper window of a flower shop near the Piazza del Duomo, and found ourselves able, by half-closing our eyes, to imagine that we were witnessing the Florentine Army - with Dante marching in it as a young officer - returning in 1269 from the Battle of Campaldino after its victory over the Imperial troops. Had the Austrians at Caporetto, I wondered - having learnt now that seven hundred years was not too long for the working out of time’s inscrutable purposes - been inspired by a subconscious impulse to avenge that defeat? Had Edward’s death lain so long ago in the logic of history?
Meditating thus, I found myself able to speak to Winifred of Asiago and my sudden desire to remain there, secluded from the tumultuous pettiness of these post-war days—
. . . the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
Here - here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosed,
Stars come and go! . . .
But Winifred told me that the voice of the pine-trees had seemed to her to hold a promise of tranquillity and peace even among ‘the multitude below’; they reminded her more, she said, of some lines by Walter de la Mare:
Not a wave breaks,
Not a bird calls,
My heart, like a sea,
Silent after a storm that hath died,
Sleeps within me.
All the night’s dews,
All the world’s leaves,
All winter’s snow
Seem with their quiet to have stilled in life’s dream
All sorrowing now.
A day or two later we left Florence for the hill towns. Strangely enough, my first contact with the swiftly gathering momentum of Fascism occurred in the drowsy semi-darkness of an evening motor’bus between Florence and Siena. In the course of that four-hour journey over the Apennines we got into conversation - in bad French on both sides - with our next-door neighbour, a student from the University of Florence. He was very young, and resembled, with his cherubic and transparently innocent countenance, an Italian version of Beverley Nichols; his name, he told us, was Oswaldo Giacomo. Hailing us enthusiastically as fellow-students, he talked to us earnestly about ‘Fascismo’, a word then unknown to us and rather puzzling. His political diatribes were enlivened at intervals by outbursts of protesting cackles from the hens in the basket of an old peasant woman on the opposite side of the ’bus; disregarding these irreverent interruptions, he spoke excitedly of a coming revolution, in which we felt too lazy to believe. There certainly weren’t many signs of it at present, we thought; nobody in Italy appeared to want a change of circumstance, and none of the trains started on time.
The next day, at Siena, we returned from exploring the black and white cathedral and counting the familiar names of the Popes whose sculptured heads looked down over the arches like faces gazing from a balcony, to find Oswaldo, who was staying with an uncle in an adjacent village, waiting for us at our pension. He insisted upon taking us that afternoon to the top of the tower of the Palazzo Communale - which swayed alarmingly in a howling wind that nearly blew me off altogether when the huge clock just over our heads suddenly struck two and I jumped about three feet into the air - and afterwards gave us ices at a café. Over these ices, constituting himself the protector of our maidenhood, he warned us with all the solemnity of his eighteen years against making chance acquaintances.
‘Signorine,’ he began, ‘the soul of the Italian is as clear as crystal!’ - but the designs of this noble-minded national upon unprotected young females were not, apparently, always so innocuous. In spite of this moral homily, Oswaldo himself did not appear in the least interested in our sex; no doubt, like a good little Black Shirt, he was merely fulfilling instructions to ‘put over’ Fascist propaganda to foreigners at every possible opportunity. After we had gone to Perugia, where a stormy autumn gale blew down from the heights across the wide Umbrian plain to Assisi nestling beneath the gaunt curve of Monte Subasio, he sent us a picture post-card of Dante meeting Beatrice; with discreet impartiality it was addressed to us both.
At Assisi we found a Festival of St Francis in progress and the ground floor of our hotel was crowded with ‘pilgrims’, amongst whom the proprietor gesticulated in helpless frenzy. About them hovered an affluvia which lingered on to remind visitors of their insistent presence even when they had departed. In a walk across the hills to the Carceri, a small monastery in the ilex-grove where St Francis used to pray, we temporarily forgot them, but they reappeared on the long journey to Rome, crowding us into the third-class corridor with their bundles and their baskets and the crumby exuberance of their garlic-scented repasts. Rome seemed a very different city from the tense, austere capital of 1917; so completely was my week there eclipsed by the subsequent days in Paris and the melancholy journey from Amiens through the battlefields,
that I remember now only the red, sweet-scented roses blooming against the grey ruins of the Forum, and the tall pomposity of Trajan’s Column, the enclosure of which, judging from the number of its vociferous occupants, had apparently become a maternity home for cats.
At Amiens, with a sense of having strayed into the heart of an old, tragic legend, we stood in the dimness of the once threatened Cathedral; everything had deliberately been left, we were told, as it was just after the 1918 offensive, and we looked up with reminiscent melancholy at the still-boarded stained-glass windows smashed by German shells. How long will this bitter hatred continue? I wondered, thinking what æons ago seemed the Retreat in which that damage was done, and realising with sudden surprise that in my own mind the anger and resentment had died long ago, leaving only an everlasting sorrow, and a passionate pity which I did not yet know quite how to use or to express. But then, I reflected, I have only a personal and not an historical memory; the Germans didn’t really mean to kill Roland or Victor or Geoffrey, but they did intend to hold on to Alsace-Lorraine.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 57