A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  As the column slowly advanced it sowed the ground with the fallen. In the ranks of the walking dead, exhausted and half frozen, one after another would drop into the snow. Some were helped up by a friend or a fellow soldier and physically forced to push on, others, most of them, were abandoned to their destiny.

  What happened in the end was that the “Tridentina” engaged the front lines of the Soviet army which had united in order to deny any route of escape to the retreating enemy. A furious battle broke out in the vicinity of a village called Nikolajewka. The Soviet strength was far superior, they were better armed and equipped and utterly determined to annihilate the enemy, which had already been cut off from all their supply lines. They opened a barrage of fire that blew huge holes in the Italian columns in marching order, taken completely by surprise. Corrado, who was advancing at a snail’s pace, in first gear, could hear the artillery rounds and the crackle of machine guns coming from the head of the column and he imagined that the end had come.

  No one could have imagined that it might mean salvation instead. Corrado could see nothing of what was happening at the head of the column but Adriano told him about it later; his friend had gone forward with a courier from the “Vestone” Alpine battalion and had seen what was happening with his own eyes. The “Tridentina” was stubbornly advancing under the crossfire of the entire Soviet front, which extended in an arc from northwest to southwest. They realized they were facing certain death, but the entire unit continued to respond to fire with all the ammunition, energy and desperation at its command. They had actually succeeded in achieving a momentary stalemate when their commander himself, General Reverberi, jumped into an abandoned German tank, started it up and drove it forward, firing with all the weapons he had on board. All the troops poured in after him, not only the Italians, but the Germans and Hungarians as well. “You should have seen these guys,” described Adriano, “they were dropping like flies, mowed down by the machine guns and picked off by the snipers, but they never stopped. If it hadn’t been for my buddy Bruni, stuck three kilometers back, I would have joined them myself.”

  “You should have,” replied Corrado, as he was fussing under the hood of the Isotta Fraschini.

  “No, no,” shot back Adriano. “You and I left together and we’ll go back together.”

  Corrado pulled his head out from under the hood. “Right, and how is that going to happen?” he answered back, as he rubbed his oil-covered hands on a rag which was even greasier than his hands were. He took the crank handle, fit it onto the bolthead on the engine shaft and pushed hard. The engine coughed, gave a couple of knocks, and died. Corrado tried again, cranking it up three or four times, and this time the engine started up.

  He climbed into the cab: “Get in. It’s warmer in here,” he said.

  Adriano climbed in on the other side and started up again: “Listen to me. As I was heading back, the battle was still in full swing. An inferno. But the guys from the ‘Tridentina’ had opened the way and they were marching behind the tank of that crazy general of theirs. Then more battalions showed up. One of their commanders was yelling like a madman: ‘Forward! Forward!’ and shooting with his carbine, his pistol, everything he had. He was pushing so hard I’ll bet you they’re still going. I’ll bet you they’re still passing through the lines.”

  “Yeah. And so . . . ?” asked Corrado.

  “I know where there’s a hole in the Soviet front. There’s a point where there’s a frozen swamp, with reeds sticking up all around; the ice is surely thick enough to support our weight. If we’re smart, we can pass at that point, look for the footprints of our men, catch up with them wherever they are and that’s that. When we’ve gotten to the other side, it’s just a question of time before we’re home. We’re going home, old man!”

  Corrado shook his head. “I can’t do that, Adriano.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? Of course you can! Come with me and tonight we’ll be on the other side.”

  “I’m the only guy that can get this wreck to work. If they need me to transport the wounded, the men who can’t walk . . . How will they do it without me?”

  “They’ll figure out a way, Bruni! They’ll figure it out, no?”

  Corrado shook his head stubbornly. “No, I can’t. I really can’t. You go. It’ll be even easier for you if you’re alone.”

  Adriano got out and before slamming the cab door shut, he said: “You really are a bonehead, you know that?”

  “Good luck, Adriano,” was the answer he got. “See you back in town. Say hello to everyone. Tell them I’ll be back. I’ll get back all right.”

  His friend couldn’t listen for another moment. He bundled himself up in his worn coat, tucked a scarf under his chin and wound it around his head and, as darkness was falling, he started walking back towards Nikolajewka.

  As promised, Adriano slipped through the reeds and crawled over the icy swamp. He reached the “Tridentina” camp and General Reverberi in a small city called Shebekino two nights later, starving and half frozen. From there they marched on, day in and day out, until they got to Italy. Of the sixty thousand soldiers who had left Stalingrad only ten thousand made it back.

  Corrado’s unit was surrounded the next day. With no ammunition, their ranks decimated by the cold and their wounds, they had no choice but to surrender.

  They were taken by the Russians to their first rest stop after a four day journey in which they lost more than two hundred comrades. It was a kind of assemblage of sheds that perhaps had been used as a clearing center for provisioning the troops at the front. From there they were transported by truck to their definitive abode: a horse stable in disuse where horses had once been trained for the czar’s cavalry. It consisted of broken-down stalls which offered no shelter from the biting winds coming from the north. The ground it stood on was freezing mud which sucked at your legs if you tried to get anywhere. The food was horrible, usually not even edible. Done in by the hunger, the cold, the tortures and continuous humiliations of their imprisonment, Corrado died four months later and was thrown, along with his companions in misfortune, into a common grave.

  At the end of the war no one knew what had become of him, and he joined the ranks of soldiers missing in action.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The war dealt immense damage to the Bruni family, snatching away both Vasco and Corrado. Not even this loss, however, helped to reconcile Dante and Checco. Common wisdom has it that when a person feels offended by someone, and then trouble happens to befall this someone, the first is likely to think that chance or bad luck has punished the second sufficiently and this would normally serve to make the first feel more magnanimous or at least, nudge him into making the first step, even if he still feels wronged. But that was not the case between the two brothers; not even the death of their own mother had brought them together and they stubbornly continued to ignore each other.

  Armando had no quarrel with anyone, but found himself more alone than ever in facing his misfortunes. His problems just never seemed to let up, especially because of the mental infirmity of his wife, who he continued to love with great ardor and attachment. His growing family might have been considered a burden as well but for him, it was the most important reason for living, and he gave his daughters all the affection he was capable of. He maintained an extraordinary capacity for tempering even the toughest hardships with irony and humor.

  Given the situation, his conflict with Doctor Munari worsened every time the doctor had to assume the responsibility for committing Bruni’s wife to the psychiatric clinic in Reggio. Armando experienced the doctor’s resolution of the problem as an act of violence. He couldn’t understand why, if he was content to keep Lucia as she was, someone else should go to the trouble of tearing her away from him and admitting her to a hospital where she was surely more poorly treated than at home and where the therapy didn’t help her in the least.

  The war
was worsening every day in every way, and the fact that the United States had entered the battlefield, with all the weight of their enormous economic and military power, had already amply overturned the balance of forces. There was practically no one who had any illusions about which side would win victory in the end. Allied aircraft passed overhead more and more often, and in addition to singling out military installations, had begun to bomb civilian targets, like factories and railway stations.

  Many families went hungry; only those who had enough money to pay the exorbitant prices of the black market were able to get enough food. Farmers were the exception, because the land never betrays those who work it. At least food was never lacking. There were two kinds of farmers: those who sold their products on the black market and grew rich, and the others, the majority, who gave generously to those who were suffering. Like Nino’s family: not a kilo of wheat, not a piece of cheese, was sold at anything but the official price, and more often than not they were given away. Nino’s mother, a minute, extremely pious woman who expressed herself in an improbable dialect which was half Emiliano and half from her native Veneto, would take care of the distribution personally. Once she was left with no more flour, not even a handful, and when a pale, spindly child stepped up to take his share, she filled his pockets with apples.

  Fonso found that he had to take on jobs which were increasingly hazardous and backbreaking, just to make ends meet. In the winter he found employment in the city, cleaning snow off the roofs, risking his skin every time. It was so easy to slip on the wet or icy roof tiles, and he was often called in by people living in three or four story buildings. There was no hope if you fell from that high up.

  Nino showed up at Fonso and Maria’s home one night to ask for Eliana’s hand in marriage. It was traditional to go to your fiancée’s father accompanied by your best man, but the friend he’d chosen to carry their rings, Pace, had been swallowed up by the war; no one had heard from him for a long, long time. Rather than replace him with someone else, which felt like a betrayal, Nino went alone.

  Fonso thought highly of Nino and was happy to give his consent. The wedding was held soon after. Times being what they were, there was no chance of a lavish celebration, but the newlyweds managed to take a short honeymoon, to Veneto, where Nino had relatives on his mother’s side who they could stay with, without spending money on a hotel. It was there, in a tiny mountain town at the foot of the high plain of Asiago, that they learned from the radio that Mussolini had been removed from office and transported to a secret place in the mountains of Abruzzo.

  “Do you think the war will end?” asked Eliana.

  “I don’t think so. The king will form a new government that will have to negotiate with the Americans. If those negotiations go well, which would basically mean an unconditional surrender on our part, we’d find ourselves fighting against the Germans. And the Germans are everywhere.”

  The facts bore out his predictions.

  When they returned from their honeymoon, Eliana realized immediately that daily life in her father-in-law’s house complied with Modenese customs, which were very different from the Bolognese traditions she had grown up with. Her sisters-in-law worked in the fields alongside the men. Not wanting to embarrass Nino in front of his father, she tried to fit in. After just one day of work, her hands, with their polished nails, were sore and bleeding. She soon got used to bundling herself up in coarse, ugly work clothing, formed calluses on her hands and feet, and kept up a punishing rate of work from dawn to well after nightfall.

  But the darkest night of them all was on the eighth of September, when she and Nino listened to the public declaration of the armistice on the radio. Italy had surrendered to an American general with a face like a mastiff’s in a small town in Sicily. The king fled to the south with his family, and his generals took off their uniforms and went to hide as well. In the following days, from one end of the peninsula to the other, the army—completely abandoned to its fate, without orders, without support of any kind, without coordination—collapsed and was overwhelmed by the Germans, almost everywhere.

  A great number of Italian soldiers were imprisoned by the Germans and sent to concentration camps, among them a cousin of Fonso’s who had just come back from the African front. Others went into hiding, hanging on to their weapons so they could form groups of armed resistance, often with the help of their officers, maintaining their uniforms and their flag.

  Many families in town were consumed by anguish since they had no notion at all of where their sons might be. Nino was torn but he decided in the end that his place was at home because his wife was expecting a child.

  In six months’ time, the country had to face a calamity that was even worse, unthinkably, than the war.

  Civil war.

  Rescued by the Germans in a parachuting operation, Mussolini established a Republic of the North and called on all young fascists willing to fight off the Anglo-American invaders to join him. At least, this was the line of propaganda used for recruiting these youths. It soon became evident, however, that these troops would be mainly used not to fight off a foreign invader, but rather to repress the actions of the partisan brigades close to home.

  In a very few months’ time, every young Italian male north of the Apennines was forced into a dramatic choosing of sides: either unite with the partisan Resistenza groups in the mountains, or put on the uniform of the fascist Republican Army, or even its extreme wing, the paramilitary Black Brigades. Since the young are rarely moderate in any of their actions or beliefs, several thousand flocked to join the forces of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, who commanded the seasoned, ferocious fascist assault corps known as the Tenth Legion MAS. Italy was split in two. The king, in escaping to the south instead of remaining honorably in Rome to fight alongside his soldiers, had forfeited the last chance he had to redeem what little was left of the country’s pride.

  “That’s what a king should be for,” thought Fonso, reading the paper in the tailor shop. “He should stand at the head of his people and die with his weapons in hand if need be, not run off with his own family while the sons of his people are fighting and dying in Russia or being deported to Siberia to die of cold and hunger.” He thought of his nephew Vasco and his other nephew Corrado, Floti’s son, and even though they weren’t related to him by blood, tears came to his eyes.

  Their own town mirrored the same divisions and tensions that were splitting apart Italy, that had not yet been conquered by the Allies. Many of the villagers, exhausted by hunger, poverty and the grievous loss of their sons, fiancés, brothers, had gotten to the point that they’d begun wishing that their soldiers would lose and be routed. Let them bomb our cities, sink our ships, they began to think, anything, so long as the war ends. Let us dry our tears and start to rebuild from the ashes.

  One evening in September, Rossano returned from Rome and he confronted his father as Nello was coming home from work to tell him that he had decided to leave. “I’m going to enlist, father, I’m going to fight in the army of the Social Republic. I’m volunteering for the Republican National Guard.”

  Nello felt his blood turn to ice. “Why would you do such a thing?” he asked. “You’re not being called upon to serve.”

  “Now is the time. We have to fight to the very last man,” replied Rossano, “to restore dignity to our homeland, invaded and humiliated, to save whatever can still be saved. As far as the reds are concerned, they are the true traitors and they’ll be eliminated without mercy. They are receiving weapons and supplies from the enemy!”

  Nello realized then what a terrible effect the fascist education and training—which he himself had desired for his son!—had had on Rossano. His only son was likely to die, in a matter of months or weeks, or even days. Nello dropped his head, searching for the words that would convince his boy to change his mind, but he found none.

  “You were the one who taught me these principles, and now that
I can do something about them, you want me to back out?”

  “You’re only twenty years old, Rossano, it’s not time for you to take up arms: you still have to study, to prepare for your future . . . ”

  “There’s no more time for such things, father. We don’t need books, we need rifles. The only thing to do is fight.”

  Nello’s wife Elisa heard them arguing and broke in, alarmed. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Rossano wants to enlist,” replied Nello. “I can’t convince him to wait.”

  “And you’re surprised?” replied his wife. “You were the one who insisted on sending him into the middle of those fanatics and this is the consequence. Remember that, if something happens to him, you are responsible. You pushed him into this. I won’t speak to you or even look at you for the rest of my life.”

  “Cut it out, mother,” said the boy. “I’m no fool; it’s not like I’m letting myself be manipulated by anybody. I’ve chosen to do this out of my own free will. No one asked me and neither you nor father can stop me. Can’t you understand that you’re offending me by speaking that way? You should be proud of me!”