by Max Hennessy
They listened with amazement. After three long years of slaughter, had someone found out at last how to do it?
As they waited, men, munitions and material passed by on the main line, the wagons and carriages crammed to capacity. A French locomotive was waiting near Amiens to haul them to the Italian frontier but on the route between they were dependent on British locomotives and everyone of them was in use.
Day after day they waited under a lowering sky full of low clouds and mist. Morton went to Candas to find out what was happening and returned with the news that, as usual, everything had gone wrong. While they’d been ringing church bells in London to celebrate the victory, which everybody had thought was the final breakthrough that was to end the war, the Germans had reacted swiftly. The infantry couldn’t keep up with the tanks and the cavalry had been destroyed by machine gun fire, and while the Germans had brought up their reserves, the British had had none available because they’d all been used up in the disastrous offensive at Passchendaele earlier in the year. The German counter-attack was already taking place and everybody expected it to recover every bit of lost ground.
“I volunteered to unpack and join in,” Morton said bitterly, “because they’re flying in the duddest of dud weather to hold the Germans back. All it did was remind them we’re here, and instead we’re being sent to bore ourselves silly on a refresher course at an aerial gunnery school, learning to do what we’ve already learned to do in action.”
Morton was eventually sent ahead and the rest of them finally left a fortnight before Christmas, moving down the Rhône via Lyons, Avignon, Marseilles and Toulon. The journey took six days and halts were made to stretch legs and eat the food which had been prepared en route. As they passed the Alpes Maritimes they saw orchards, vineyards and water of intense blue. In Nice, Foote came up with a big surprise.
“It’s not Italy we’re going to,” he said. “It’s Egypt. I’ve seen the route order. It says Cairo.”
“There can’t be much fighting there,” Dicken said. “Perhaps we’re being sent for a rest.”
The train nevertheless continued doggedly in the direction of Italy. In Nice, they decided to spend the day in town and to make sure the train didn’t go without them, they took the protesting driver with them. When they reached the border of Italy, they decided they were going to take the ship for Egypt from Genoa or Naples, but the train turned inland and they crossed the border to stop at a small station. Dicken stuck his head out of the window.
“Guess where we are,” he said.
“Where?”
“Cairo.”
Foote grinned. “There’s one in Illinois, too.”
The Italians seemed to have heard of their coming and there was a reception at every station, many of them like gardens with terraces of flowers, all the buildings decorated with red, white and green bunting. Headgear was exchanged and bersaglieri in khaki RFC caps had their photographs taken with pilots wearing Italian patent leather hats with curved feathers. The railway track was lined with people who waved flags and threw apples and oranges through the carriage windows.
The train was garlanded with palm fronds by this time and they arrived in Savona in fine style, pulled by a huge electric engine. Straw-covered bottles of wine were bought in large numbers and the cooks surpassed themselves with a feast to celebrate their arrival, so that they were lethargic with food and drink when the Italian interpreter, who had joined the train at the border, arrived to invite them to meet an Italian colonel in the station buffet.
Already replete on Italian wine and food, half of them had gone to bed and were reluctant to get up. But the Italian insisted that his compatriots would be insulted if they failed to appear, so, since he had been sitting up late writing to his mother, Dicken finally agreed to go as the only officer fully dressed. To his surprise, he found the buffet full of people, with long tables and chairs and a carpet laid out for them. Every available light was on and additional oil lamps had been set up. Piled high with fruit and flowers, the tables were dotted with small Italian flags, and women and girls stood ready to serve.
The Italian colonel who was running the affair seemed to regard Dicken as the commanding officer. He touched his medal ribbons approvingly and announced that the British had sent their best pilots. “But where are the others?” he asked in English. “Surely you are not the only one?”
Hurriedly, Dicken whispered to the interpreter to rouse all the other pilots. “Tell ’em to get dressed quickly,” he said. “Tell them the King of Italy’s here and handing out medals.”
The others arrived in a rush, their hair still tousled from sleep. It raised a cheer and the Italian colonel made a speech in English about British and Italian friendship, and glasses were filled and food passed around.
“My niece married an Englishman,” the colonel said to Dicken. “His name is Smith. Do you know him?” He seemed surprised that he didn’t.
They were still going strong when the stationmaster dashed in to announce that an express was due into the station and he must move the train.
“Go away,” the colonel said.
“Ma, Colonello mio! Excellency!” The stationmaster flapped his hands. “The express will arrive and – paf!–” he slapped his hands together “–there will be no train for the so brave British pilots. The Austrians will then not be thrown back and Italy will be defeated.”
“Go away,” the colonel said again and, as he turned once more to Dicken, the stationmaster began to dance about like a dog wanting to be let out before finally heading for the platform, shouting warnings. “Dieci minuti!” he yelled. “Dieci minuti!”
There was another speech and Dicken got the impression that, since British and French reinforcements had been passing into Italy for some time, the colonel and his helpers had become expert at conducting welcomes.
“Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour,” the colonel said. “The soul, the sword, the brains of modern Italy. Viva l’Inghilterra. Eeep, eeep, ourrah!”
The stationmaster appeared once more, red in the face. “Dieci minuti!” he screeched. “Ho sei treni chi stanno in agguato. Nelle gallerie.”
Nobody took the slightest notice and when he next appeared his eyes were bulging with his frustration. “Il treno parte! Ora! Subito!”
“What’s he saying, me dear?” Trenarworth asked.
“I think–” Dicken had worked it out carefully with the aid of a dictionary “–it’s something to do with six trains in tunnels waiting to come in, and that our train’s going. Immediately.”
They heard the screech of a whistle and the clanking of couplings and everybody was on the point of rushing outside when the colonel shouted in Italian and pointed to a spot on the carpet immediately in front of the table where he stood. The stationmaster went red and advanced. The colonel shouted at him in Italian and the stationmaster ground his teeth, stamped his feet, slapped his forehead, and departed in a fury.
“The train will be brought back,” the colonel said.
There was a lot of shouting outside and when they finally left, the officers’ carriage was directly opposite the strip of red carpet which had been laid on the platform to the waiting room. Their arms full of fruit, posies of flowers and little red, white and green flags, they climbed back into the carriages amid cheers, and the stationmaster hurriedly slammed the doors and waved them away.
Seven
The following day they passed through Verona and Castelfranco, which was packed with newly-arrived British troops, and pushed on to Treviso, where the weather changed abruptly. The train was unloaded in pouring rain and tenders trailed the Camels to the airfield at San Pelagio to be assembled.
The retreat from Caporetto had ended now but the last of the survivors were still coming back. They had fallen back seventy miles – an unbelievable distance in a war where advances were normally measured in hundreds of yards
– leaving behind nearly 200,000 prisoners and 1500 lost guns. They had been forced to withdraw from the Isonzo River front through the mountain passes all the way to the River Piave, and a tremendous amount of territory had been given up, the enemy advance halted only by the flooding of the country between the Piave and Venice.
Broken regiments were still moving south to reform, exhausted men devoid of weapons, some of them only half-clothed, wearing ill-fitting grey uniforms and helmets that all seemed too big and came down over eyes and ears. Lorries full of wounded crawled past, the men inside looking like lolling rag dolls, the unwounded in shuffling streams, wet to the skin, their shoulders draped with blankets, their dark eyes hollow and sad, their faces grey with tiredness, their ears still cocked for the distant rumble of Austrian guns. Stumbling horses struggled to keep their feet among the columns of vehicles moving nose-to-tail, in one cart a group of frightened girls who had come from a soldiers’ brothel, the whole shambling mass moving like water from a burst dam, edging around obstacles in the road, and when the road became jammed, flooding into the muddy fields to rejoin the stream further along. It was possible to hear mutterings of “A basso ufficiali!” – Down with the officers! – and “Evviva la pace!” – Long live peace! The Italian soldiers were in a dangerous mood.
They were dirty, torn and unshaven, their transport a miscellaneous collection of unmilitary carts and wagons of all sizes, crammed with bedsteads, bedding, tin baths, chairs, trussed chickens and ducks. Domestic animals were intermingled with the straggling column and soldiers with their toes showing through broken boots led half-starved horses, a calf, a flock of sheep. Ahead, men were still fighting in the rain and mist, firing at enemies who appeared as shadows between the trees, and there was still the fear of another breakthrough.
Among the moving columns were British artillerymen who had arrived in Italy earlier in the year, like everybody else wet through, miserable and cold. The tractors which pulled their guns seemed to be giving them a great deal of trouble and with them were a lot of shellshock cases with staring eyes, jumping at every noise. The medical officer was in despair because there was no food, no medicaments and little transport.
The wretched streams of humanity were still filtering past as the Camels were tested for airworthiness. Since nobody had yet flown them in action, Morton insisted they should all get plenty of practice on them and, since they were always tricky, before any of them were allowed near the Austrians, they all had to take one up and spin it over the airdrome. The Camel’s fierceness suited Dicken, who had always been a heavy-handed pilot, but it was remorseless and there was always an imp of evil in it that allowed no one to take chances. One of the newer pilots held his spin too long, and as he realised his mistake and heaved on the stick there was a ridiculously harmless sound like a balloon bursting as the machine disintegrated. The fuselage, the engine still screaming in terror, dived straight into the ground with the crunching noise of someone treading on a matchbox, the tattered fragments of wings fluttering slowly to the earth behind in the appalling silence that followed.
The Italian front had claimed its first victim.
“1917 wasn’t much cop,” Foote observed grimly. “1918 doesn’t look as though it’s going to be all that promising either.”
Just before Christmas they were due to leave for a new airdrome being constructed at Issora on the Piave front but, just as they were about to take off, the weather broke and only Dicken and Foote got away before low cloud, fog, mist and rain came down to shut out the airfield. Finding themselves in the air, they had to fly by guesswork until they found the railway line that ran from Verona toward Trieste, and follow it at tree-top height until they came to an airfield which they guessed correctly was the one they wanted. Italy, it seemed, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be – especially in winter. The Venetian Plain was a maze of small soggy fields edged with willows and cut by deep drainage ditches which would make forced landings difficult. The weather changes appeared to be sudden, too, the sunshine vanishing abruptly and unexpectedly behind thick fogs which could extend upward to five hundred feet.
Issora airdrome took its name from a group of farm buildings black with the damp weather, and lay on a flat plain alongside a wide canal with raised banks edged with poplars. As Dicken and Foote climbed from their machines, an officer of an RE8 squadron also using Issora appeared with a bottle of Strega to welcome them. He was in high spirits because two pilots from 28 Squadron, deciding on an impromptu raid on an Austrian airdrome at Motta, ten miles over the lines, had dropped a large cardboard Christmas card wishing the Austrian Flying Corps a merry Christmas from the RFC, and had then proceeded to shoot up the hangars and any personnel they could see on the ground.
“Sounds as if we might be winning the war out here,” Foote said.
Since there was little in the way of living quarters at Issora, they found that, like the pilots of an Italian Hanriot squadron which was also flying from the field, they were to live for the time being in Capadolio, a small town that lay just beyond the canal, and to make transportation simpler, a spur line had been constructed from a queer little electric tramway that circled the outer fringes.
Capadolio had arcaded sidewalks full of medieval buildings, which made Dicken think of Shakespeare, a moat, a portcullis, and an ossuary full of the bones of soldiers of the Risorgimento. Its streets were muddy and filled with refugees, but it contained a galleria where you could buy anything from cigarettes to women and one good restaurant where they celebrated their arrival with dinner. Foote made sure of good service by announcing to the manager that Dicken was a very special individual. “Take care of him,” he said. “He’s the bastard son of the King of England.”
The restaurant was full of Italian officers wearing jackets so tight they looked like the chorus from an operetta. Their collars were coloured according to the corps, regiment or brigade to which they belonged, and they were quick to introduce themselves, standing stiffly upright at their tables to shake hands. Trying to describe the fighting in the mountains, they said that more Italians were killed by avalanches than by the Austrians.
Dicken’s billet was with the family of a junior British consular official called Aubrey, and since Foote was to live with a family who owned a bar, he decided Foote had got the best of the bargain. But Aubrey had a French wife who was as dark-eyed and good-looking as her husband and they had five daughters and two sons ranging from nineteen down to ten, each an exact replica of their parents and their brothers and sisters, and things began to look a little better because the eldest daughter was a beauty in the manner of Annys Toshack.
At breakfast the following morning, Dicken was surprised to find the whole family lined up to meet him.
“We thought,” Aubrey explained, “that the least we could do was offer a home to one of our soldiers until things are organised.”
“My father was also in the consular service,” Mrs Aubrey explained. “And I have a brother fighting with the brave French Army. He has a very dangerous job. He is a Railway Transport Officer at Dieppe.”
She was a full-busted woman, as French as the Eiffel Tower, and her conversation was larded with references to brave, loyal France and her courageous soldiers. The children were solemnly introduced – George, the elder of the two boys, who was due to go to university; Nicola, the eldest girl, pink-faced and beautiful; Bernadette; Marguerite; Mark; and two small ones, Cecilia and Marie-Gabrielle. The youngest, Marie-Gabrielle, pulled at Dicken’s hand. “Take some notice of me,” she said. “Nobody ever does.”
They shook hands in the French fashion and the children smiled and bobbed their heads, and Dicken wasn’t slow to notice that the eldest girl kept her eyes on him longer than she needed to.
“We have come to Capadolio,” Aubrey said, “because of the arrival of British troops. We’re here to look after the diplomatic side of the business. My French opposite number’s at Villaveria on the
Trentino front.”
As breakfast finished and Aubrey vanished to his office and his wife to the back of the house to attend to her children, Dicken was delighted to find himself alone with the eldest daughter. With her mother she had joined the Red Cross and worked several days a week at the hospital in the town.
“There have been so many wounded since Caporetto,” she said. “And the men have to lie on the stone floor. They sleep like logs, they are so exhausted, and they’re terrified they’re going to be abandoned.”
The Italian soldiers, she said, had a dread of fresh air and when the ward sister’s back was turned, got out of bed and shut the windows she’d opened. Her own patients were mostly not wound cases but men suffering from trench feet, bronchitis, influenza, and typhoid from drinking water out of shellholes.
“They’re such babies,” she said. “A lot of them are country boys in contact with town diseases for the first time in their lives and they persist in dying of ordinary things like measles and mumps, and then we have to hurry to fetch the priest because they want absolution. We’re Catholics, too, of course. We came here from Rome after Caporetto.”
Because the house was in line with the airdrome, their conversation was constantly overlaid with the sound of air-craft taking off and landing.
“Sometimes,” she said, “they look as if they’re going to fly in through the window.”
She described the panic which had swept through the country after Caporetto. “The Italian army was accused of cowardice,” she explained. “It wasn’t true, of course. It was simply that the Germans massed for the attack without being seen, but Father says the Italian command should have known. When the attack came they lost their heads and now General Cadorna’s been replaced by General Diaz and a communiqué he issued blaming the Italian soldiers has been suppressed by the government. It’s said–” she dropped her voice “–that many soldiers were shot for running away. Officers, too. Many of them senior. Would you like some coffee? People here drink coffee all the time.”