A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  Floti realized that he had no children, no fiancée, no wife, and that the crops and the house belonged to notary Barzini. He felt a lump in his throat and tears rose to his eyes unbidden.

  Caselli, a young man with a child’s face, noticed him and came close: “What’s your name?”

  “Bruni, Raffaele. Lieutenant, sir.”

  “What do you do in your everyday life?”

  “I’m a farmer, sir.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The sergeant shot him a threatening look, as the officer paused to consider the sincerity of that answer.

  He continued: “I’m afraid myself, Bruni, but if we can become a free country, united from the Alps to the sea, if we can show the world that no one can trample what is ours, we will be respected and there will be peace and prosperity for all. Ours is a worthy cause. And you should all know,” he raised his voice so even those farthest away could hear him, “that every time we’re sent to attack, I’ll be there leading the way.”

  Floti lowered his head without a word, but something about the boy had already impressed the young officer: his intelligent black eyes and thick prickly beard and even more so, his Italian; it was very rare for a farmer to speak correctly without a dialectal twang. And so it was that Floti often found himself at Caselli’s side for administrative duties, when the lieutenant needed to dictate letters to headquarters or pass on the day’s orders. The officer usually spent his evenings alone, reading or writing. Maybe he had a girlfriend, maybe he was writing to his parents who lived in Perugia and had a fabric shop there. He was their only child. And Floti realized then that having only one son was a mistake, because if he dies, that’s the end of you, too.

  One evening he found the lieutenant’s room empty, although the light was on. There was a book open on the table, entitled The Birth of Tragedy. The author’s name was so complicated Floti couldn’t even sound it out; he must have been a foreigner. He thought it might be a book about war.

  “Are you looking for something?” asked the voice of the officer behind him.

  Floti spun around and saluted. “Excuse me, sir, I wasn’t . . . ”

  “That’s all right, you haven’t done anything wrong. Being curious about culture is a good thing: it means you want to learn. I’d explain what the book is about, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. Go now, Bruni. There’s something you must give to the sergeant. In three days’ time, we’ll be leaving for the front. This is really it, Bruni.” A look of melancholy shadowed his eyes as he spoke.

  Floti brought his hand up to his cap and took his leave.

  He made his way to company headquarters and delivered his commander’s orders: “This is from Lieutenant Caselli.”

  The sergeant practically ripped the envelope from his hands and tore it open. He gave it a quick read and sent Floti on his way. “What the hell are you doing standing there! Get outta my sight,” he muttered, and Floti was happy to oblige him.

  The night sky was clear and full of stars. The breeze from the mountains carried a whiff of fresh hay and the smell made him feel at home, back at home, for an instant.

  They left on the third day at dawn, in double file: the foot soldiers of every corps of the army. The Bersaglieri with their red caps, long tassels swinging back and forth with every step, the Alpini with lavish black plumes hanging from their hats, the Lancers of Montebello and the Grenadiers of Sardegna. And then the mules, wagons, artillery pieces, trucks. Floti had never seen so many people together in one place, so many cannons or so many vehicles. He tried to imagine how much all of this could be costing, and then wondered how many of those boys would still be alive a month from now.

  He fought in the first battle of Isonzo and were it not for a God-given strength of spirit he would have gone mad. On their first attack, Lieutenant Caselli’s head rolled beneath his feet, chopped cleanly off by shrapnel. His commander’s sad eyes stared into his for a moment before they went blank.

  Hell could not be worse than what he was living through. The roaring din of the artillery, the flames, the screams of wounded men, the mangled limbs of his fellow soldiers torn from their bodies. He didn’t know where to look or how to move. At first he was practically paralyzed. Then his instinct for survival prevailed and after two weeks of battle he had become another person, someone he didn’t know was inside of him. As a child he couldn’t bear to hear the shrieking of a pig under the butcher’s knife; when it was time he’d cover his ears and burrow deep under his bedcovers. Nor could he stand the smell of blood. Now blood was everywhere and it was the blood of twenty-year-old boys. He had learned to shoot, to use a bayonet, to crawl through tall grass, to interpret the whistle of a mortar bomb. But he still couldn’t understand anything of what was happening around him. It was like being in another world or inside the nightmare of a madman. At least the umbrella mender, buried head down like they’d found him, wouldn’t be seeing any of this slaughter. Lucky him.

  Once he saw the enemy. An Austrian or Croatian soldier, blond as a corncob, white as a washed rag, stone dead at the bottom of a cannon’s crater. He didn’t look much like Floti, who was shorter, with black hair and a tough beard, but he didn’t look so terrible, either. He looked like a kid who’d grown up too fast.

  At the end of every offensive, when the battlefield was strewn with dead bodies, there would be a period of weeks on end where they’d settle into the trenches and wait for a sign of the enemy or for orders for a new operation. It was almost worse than attacking. The heat was insufferable, the stench of sweat and excrement, the flies that fed on that filth and then got into your eyes, your mouth, your ears, the fleas and lice that never let up, neither day nor night, the impossibility of washing, the futility of scratching, the revolting food and scant water . . . Floti realized that there was a lot worse in life than beating hemp in the midday sun or tossing sheaves of wheat with a pitchfork under the scorching roof of the hayloft. The worst jobs were tolerable when you knew how long they’d last and when they were followed by a dive into the Samoggia and dinner with freshly-baked bread and cold sparkling wine.

  Floti’s intelligence and his ability to read and write correctly soon helped him shift into tasks involving more responsibility and less danger. By winter he found himself working in an office, and the full accounting of that massacre began to flow across his desk: thousands, tens of thousands of deaths, boys like him mown down by machine guns, riddled with bayonet wounds.

  One of his jobs was to write the letters that announced that “first name” and “last name” had fallen in the line of duty on “day, month, year” and to send them to the army postal service, which would see to getting them delivered. Every letter finished with a stamp: “Signed by General Cadorna.”

  As if Floti were the supreme commander of the army.

  He’d write letters of his own at times, to his parents and his sisters: “Dear mother and father, I am keeping well and I hope the same is true of you at home . . . ” but he never spoke of the battles and the butchery at the front; the censors would never let his letter through. They had to safeguard the morale of the civilian population, after all.

  He thought of his brothers and wondered where they were. If they were still alive. As the ledgers of death piled up, the statistics became clear: out of the seven of them, three or four would die and one or two more would be wounded. Who would it be? Who among the seven brothers would be the only one to come through unharmed? Who would be writing up the first and last names of the others?

  He saw many requests for information from parents desperate over their missing sons, and he sorted out the bureaucratic replies of the military authorities: “Corporal Martino Munaretto does not appear on the list of soldiers killed in action.” Who was this Martino, anyway? A boy from Veneto, blond as a corncob himself? A craftsman? A shoemaker or a day laborer or a carpenter? There was a story behind that nam
e, a story that had come to a sorry end. On the other hand, the same thing could have happened to him when he was at the front. You had to try to keep going somehow.

  The bond that joined the brothers was plain and straightforward, with no room for sentimentality. Meaning that, if they could, they helped each other, but each one of them knew how to get by on his own. If Floti was partial to anyone, it was his sisters, towards whom he felt tender and protective. He doted on the younger one, Maria. He was worried that the women would be stuck with the tough jobs, now that nearly all the men in the household were gone, and hoped that they wouldn’t get hurt doing heavy lifting or using a shovel or hoe. Savino was still home, but they really couldn’t rely on him too much since he wasn’t even fully grown yet.

  He tried assiduously to contact other administrative offices in the other army corps for news of his brothers but his letters often went lost; any answers took months to get back to him, and by that time the troops had been moved, transferred, sent out as replacements to units that had been decimated. The only one he knew anything about was Checco, who was the brother he felt closest to, and that was only through their parish priest who read the boys’ letters to Clerice and Callisto and wrote back their answers.

  Floti knew well that seventy divisions with nearly a million men were deployed along the Isonzo River, from the sea to the Dolomites. Trying to find anyone was like looking for a needle in a haystack. He had made his parents promise that any message they got from his brothers be sent to him through the parish priest, since his office was stably positioned at a distance from the front and could provide a certain point of reference.

  Little by little, this strategy began to work: by the end of 1916 he’d heard from Gaetano and Armando, who had both written home with another soldier’s help. They were alive. He used any free time he had to search for them. He learned to use a telephone and to communicate with the other offices. As time passed, the slaughter only got worse, and the number of deaths could not be calculated. The troops were sent to attack the enemy in their trenches, the logic being that there had to be more soldiers than the number of rounds that their opponents’ machine guns could fire. When there were no more bullets, the survivors would take out the enemy emplacement.

  One day, when he was given the job of transferring certain papers to division headquarters, he met up with a unit of special soldiers called Arditi. Their very name meant “daring,” and he’d heard speak of them any number of times: they were shock troops, sent out on the most dangerous missions. They were trained in hand-to-hand combat with a dagger and in the use of grenades, and they carried an automatic pistol that not even the officers could boast of.

  The uniform they wore was different than his, with a high-necked sweater instead of a shirt, and a cap like the ones the Bersaglieri wore, but black. Their battle flag greatly impressed him: black again, picturing a skull with a dagger between its teeth. They spoke softly and smoked fragrant oval-shaped cigarettes instead of the strong-shag Milits the ordinary troops smoked. They never sang.

  In the late fall, a lad from Romagna was sent in to help with office duties. The dialect he spoke was a bit different than Floti’s but they managed to understand each other quite well without making themselves understood to their officers, who were from Abruzzo and Sicily.

  His name was Gino Pelloni and he came from Imola, a friendly fellow. His grandfather had stood with Garibaldi in the pine forest of Ravenna as they made their way towards Venice, besieged by the Austrians in 1849. The things he said were unheard of:

  “War is a dirty trick invented by the ruling classes to kill off proletarians while they earn a ton of money on weapons and equipment. Have you ever read Marx?”

  Floti was dumbfounded. “Who has time to read?” he protested. “I barely know who the guy is.”

  “Wait, are you telling me you’ve never heard ‘workers of the world, unite’?”

  Floti shrugged.

  “Well, he’s a guy who studied how the world of the bosses works; how they exploit the workers and use what they earn to buy new factories so they can exploit new workers and just get richer and richer, because what they earn off the labor of their workers is daylight robbery. Now do you understand?”

  “I do. I know what you’re saying. But I think that if one guy is the boss of a big factory and the other guy is a worker there, there must be some difference between them.”

  “That the boss is a thief.”

  “Would you be capable of running a company like Ansaldo?”

  “What does that matter? The bourgeoisie have the money to send their children to school, while the proletarians do not.”

  “Well, all right, but even so, there’s no saying that the son of a worker is necessarily bright.”

  Pelloni would lose his patience at this point: “Oh, come on; whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “On the side of the poor, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think it through. You, if you got rich, what would you do? Would you think the way you do now?”

  That was all Pelloni needed to hear. The conversation would heat up considerably, but their dialects were hardly the ideal instruments for speaking about such complicated economic and philosophical concepts. In any event, Floti, who had great sympathy for the socialist cause, learned over the months about industrial systems, trade unions, company profits and the organization of labor. Not that he always agreed with Pelloni. From his vantage point, the grim accounts of the war had demonstrated to him that, proportionally, as many officers died as foot soldiers, and sometimes even more. He couldn’t forget Lieutenant Caselli’s eyes as they glazed over in death, and he was convinced that even a man of humble origins, who had his wits about him, could improve his life without resorting to revolution.

  “I’ve seen enough blood in all these months,” he said. “There has to be a way to improve things without killing.”

  “You’re a fool,” replied Pelloni. “You have to fight fire with fire. Country, bravery, honor: all hogwash invented by the rich. You mark my words: their sons will find a way to hide out while ours are being sent to die.”

  “What do you do in your normal life?”

  “I’m a bicycle mechanic. Why?”

  “Then you were worse off than me, because where I live there was always plenty to eat and to drink. And yet here you are hiding out in an office while our comrades are out there charging the enemy twice a day and are dying like flies.”

  “What about you, then?”

  “Me, too.”

  And that’s when silence fell.

  In the meantime, the offensives followed one after another and the carnage grew more horrific with every passing day. Floti was afraid that they’d soon be calling up the seventeen-year olds and that meant Savino as well.

  Just before Christmas, Captain Cavallotti called Floti into his office to entrust him with a special mission. “We have no more couriers and the telephone line that connects us with the forward command is out. You have to take this message to Colonel Da Pollenzo. Can you handle a motorcycle?”

  “Nosir, Captain, sir.”

  Cavallotti had become long accustomed to doing without almost everything he needed. He stood and walked over to a gray-green Frera, laying a hand on the saddle. “I’ll try to find someone who can drive this. You’ll ride on the back.” Floti couldn’t understand why there had to be two of them; if someone else was already driving the motorcycle, he wasn’t really needed. The captain seemed to read his mind.

  “I trust you because I know you’re sharp, but you don’t know how to drive. I have to find a driver, even if he’s no genius. So the two of you together make one who’s up to the task. And if one of you dies, the other can continue, in one way or another. Isn’t your friend Pelloni from Romagna? The Romagnoli are crazy about motors. Anything that runs, runs on an engine, whether it’s a car or a tractor or a motorcycle. I’ll bet you he’s up to th
e job. Wait here and don’t move.”

  Pelloni ran up a few minutes later, saluted and belted out a “Reporting for duty, sir.”

  “Can you drive a motorcycle?” asked the officer.

  “Yessir.”

  “See? What did I tell you?” said Cavallotti to Floti, handing him a map of the area and pointing out the route that would take him to the forward command.

  “This message is of fundamental importance. It can save the lives of a great number of our boys, if you get it to him in time. If you should fall into enemy hands, destroy it immediately.”

  Floti realized, looking at the map, why the captain had said he needed someone who was sharp. He’d never read or tried to understand one before.

  “Sir,” he said, “give me a few minutes to figure this out. It isn’t easy.”

  “I know. Lieutenant Cassina will show you how to read the map: you’ll find that it’s less complicated than it looks.”

  The route was marked in red and crossed an area of rough terrain; the road was out at several points and the countryside was ravaged by bombings. Cassina pointed out that certain stretches were very close to the front lines, and they couldn’t rule out contact with enemy reconnaissance patrols on this side of the river. In all, the route covered a distance of thirty-two kilometers. The journey’s end would bring them very close to the Isonzo. In the end, that’s why Floti accepted the job. He wanted to see the river, because he imagined it flowing red with blood. There had been sixty-two thousand dead in the last battle. How much blood could pour out of sixty-two thousand boys? Did the earth just drink it all up or did it spew into the river?

  When he got to a point where the river was very close he had to get a look at it, at whatever risk.

  It was green. As green as a meadow in springtime.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The earth was devastated by bomb craters, the air poisoned by the smell of cordite that made your eyes water. The ground was a wasteland without grass or plants. The trees which had once grown there were charred stumps and the roots, burnt as well, looked like skeletal hands reaching up to curse the sky and bear witness to the hell below.