Memoir

by Farley Mowat

  Although we were being treated as honoured guests, I was uneasy. How were these people going to react when they realized I was one of the soldati canadesi whose guns had contributed to the wartime devastation of San Carlo?

  I need not have worried. A middle-aged man thrust a glass of wine into my hand.

  “Canadese, no? I am captured by you boys in Sicily in 1943. I work for your engineers. They put me in canadese uniform and I learn to speak English good. Canadese molto bene!”

  Relieved, I explained why we were here. Far from souring the mood, this seemed to warm it even more. However, if the Balardinis harboured no resentment toward Canadians, their feelings toward the tedeschi (barbarians – as most Italians called the Germans) were another matter.

  “When you kick the goddamned tedeschi out of here that time, everything gets smashed. Too bad! But don’t matter so long you got those Nazi bastards out. We can fix everything so long we are free from those sons of bitching fascists!”

  The sentiments of this fervent little speech, repeated in Italian, were vehemently echoed by the family, who now seemed intent on making us one of them.

  Frances, who had edged to the door to get some breathing space, was now frantically waving at me. “They’re taking the luggage out of the car!” she cried.

  They were indeed, having apparently decided we were moving in to Casa Balardini. Only with great difficulty was I able to convince the family we could not stay. There was, however, no gainsaying their demand that we must eat with them before travelling on.

  While the women rushed off to prepare the meal, men and children proudly escorted us around the farm. It embraced just three hectares – about seven acres – and everything that had stood or grown on this small piece of earth had been obliterated during the winter of 1944. Now the land had come alive again. Grapes were forming on neat rows of vines. Young orchards were thriving as peaches and cherries ripened. One supple lad swarmed up a tree and showered us with firm-fleshed fruit.

  Every inch of soil was in use. Corn grew between the vines and in the aisles between fruit trees. Cabbages, tomatoes, eggplants, and other vegetables flourished between the rows of corn. Narrow strips of wheat crowded to the very edge of the road. There were no weeds on the Balardini farm – there was no room for them. Cows, mules, pigs, goats, chickens, and ducks lived in and around the outbuildings. The place was a living supermarket – as it had to be in order to feed so many human mouths.

  Late that afternoon, we sampled its produce. The dishes were too many to remember but I know we ate chicken and kid with a dozen different vegetables, and filled our plates from countless pasta dishes redolent of herbs, spices, and sharp white cheese. Wine flowed freely.

  Not until we had eaten and drunk rather more than our fill did the talk turn to the December day when Operation Chuckle had sent Baker Company to Casa Balardini. What remained of the family, deprived of most of its men by military service and German labour round-ups, had taken refuge in the cellars.

  “There were only about thirty canadesi here,” we were told, “then whole companies of tedeschi with many carri armati [tanks and self-propelled guns] surrounded the casa and blew it to pieces, room by room. The noise was so bad our one remaining pig burst out of its sty and ran right toward a tank, and the tedeschi shot it with machine guns.… Everything that moved got shot. You could smell blood everywhere.… My cousin Maria had turned eight the day before; a big girl but thin because there was so little food. She must have been too hungry to think straight. She had sneaked out to what was left of the vegetable garden. When the shells came she just disappeared. Later we found her feet and one arm.… Some of the shells had phosphorus inside them, and when they exploded everything was sprayed with fire. Water wouldn’t put it out. My aunt was hit by a piece of that stuff and it burned a hole right into her belly. A Canadian soldier bound it up but she died anyway, screaming and screaming.”

  As the German assault grew fiercer, the surviving Balardinis huddled in a stinking vault below the cattle stable. Then a salvo of shells brought the roof down and the walls tumbled in. One old man was killed and a young woman suffered a crushed thigh. The cattle were all killed.

  After overrunning the ruins of the farm, the Germans herded the few surviving Canadians able to walk (the Balardinis thought there were no more than ten) into captivity but did not discover the Italians in their hole. These survivors emerged two days later to find the destruction so complete they abandoned the place to seek refuge with relatives beyond Bagnacavallo.

  “When we did come back,” the oldest woman told us, “we found everything broken or gone. The next winter was hard. We lived through it. We went to work. And now” – she gave me a gap-toothed grin – “well, here we are!”

  It was late when, laden with gifts of wine and fruit, we left San Carlo. I also took with me a souvenir of a different kind – a shell fragment from a heap that had been collected from the fields during recent cultivation, a small part of the harvest of steel we and the Germans had sown.

  Beyond San Carlo, we and the highway hugged the coast until we reached the port of Ortona on a headland which since ancient times had dominated the world around until, between us, we and the Germans succeeded in reducing much of this city of twenty thousand people to rubble.

  Just beyond its ruins we came upon the Moro River Military Cemetery. Here fourteen hundred men of First Canadian Division rot in incomparably beautiful surroundings overlooking the Adriatic. Amongst them is Major Alex Campbell, once my company commander. Alex, an indomitable mountain of a man, was killed on Christmas Day 1943. His father had died in battle with the Kaiser’s Germans on Christmas Day 1916.

  Fran and I wandered about the battlefields. One morning we visited an observation post where I had spent some of the most terror-filled hours of my life being sniped at by a German 88 mm gun. Now the farmer who owned the land came over to pass the time of day. He offered us a drink from a straw-covered bottle, but even as I sipped the wine my ears were tautly attuned for the shriek of an incoming shell.

  We walked along the now-deserted San Leonardo track which had once been the main highway for an army. Beyond it we came to a gully where Doc McConnell, my batman, had dug me a luxurious foxhole – but had forgotten to take into account the cumulative effect of the almost ceaseless rain, which one night brought it all down on my sleeping head.

  I had another memory of this gully.

  Early in March, the sun had returned and the shell-churned ground had begun to thaw. One day I came upon an old woman prodding the ground with a brass rod from a bedstead. She had no business being there, for all civilians had been evacuated, or so we thought. I questioned her and found she had spent that ghastly winter hiding in an abandoned German dugout. For company she had had her daughter and granddaughter – both of whom had died before the new year began. For months this old woman had endured the unendurable, emerging only to grub for roots and anything else edible – while waiting for the war to end and the ground to thaw so she could bury her dead.

  Originally we had intended to continue south to Sicily, on whose beaches the regiment had landed in July of 1943 as part of the first successful Allied invasion of Europe. However, after Ortona I could no longer stomach the bloody memories, so we turned our backs on war for a time in an attempt to escape the grim moods of battle, and became tourists. Crossing back over the Apennines to western Italy, we gaped at Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Positano, and such places as we became part of the frenetic flow of mostly well-to-do foreigners who were again enjoying themselves “doing Europe.”

  Two weeks of flitting amongst historic monuments, famous art treasures, and the fleshpots and watering holes celebrated in glossy tourist guides were enough for me. In the last week of May I decided we should return to Britain, where I could refresh memories of the regiment’s relatively unbloodied sojourn during the early years of the war.

  We turned north and after a long day’s journey came to Florence.

  In 1944, when I had
last been here, the Germans had held the north bank of the river and we the south. Although Florence had been declared an open city the Germans reminded us by firing occasional artillery salvos across the narrow waters that they were not to be trifled with.

  One afternoon I had gone looking for a place to establish an observation post from which our artillery could direct counter-battery fire and had come upon a riverside estate behind whose high walls rose the cupola of a palazzo that looked as if it might serve my purpose. I walked through the open gates. Attached to the shabby and much-neglected palazzo was a large greenhouse, which, instead of flowers, housed a sculptor’s studio.

  At that moment a shell screamed overhead and crashed into a row of houses beyond the walls of the estate. I thought this might be the ranging shot for a possible barrage. If so, a greenhouse would be a poor place near which to linger. I was about to dash for the shelter of the palazzo itself when movement behind the glass caught my eye. A white-haired man, handsome and erect, was working at a plaster bust. Another shell exploded and I dropped on my belly. When I cautiously rose again, the sculptor was still at work, apparently unperturbed.

  Curiosity overcame caution, and I found a door and entered. The sculptor, who appeared to be in his seventies, glanced up, laid down his tools, and came toward me.

  “Welcome, sir.” The vibrant timbre of his voice belied his apparent age. “Will you have some wine?”

  As we sat on ornate iron chairs under that precarious roof drinking his wine, I saw that the greenhouse studio was full of plaster casts and draped figures – none of them finished.

  “You observe my work is only clay and plaster,” he remarked, smiling. “Allow me to explain.

  “In my younger years I cast my figures in bronze, but then I came to understand the futility of that. How long could even bronze outlast me? A millennium or two perhaps. A fleeting moment in the torrent of the years. So now I work only in clay and plaster – honest materials of the moment – and I no longer harbour delusions of immortality.”

  Later, as I walked with him through the greenhouse, an almost-life-size clay bust of a young woman caught my eye. He drew off the wet drapes covering her and she was lovely. Realizing that in a few weeks her clay would dry and crack, and she would disintegrate, I was half-inclined to think the old man mad.

  Two days later the Germans took note of the high cupola of the palazzo and presumably concluded, as I had done, that it could serve as an observation post. Their guns removed it with Teutonic thoroughness – together with the greenhouse and most of the rest of the palazzo. Perhaps the old sculptor escaped. I never knew. That night we moved on to fight another battle.

  Frances and I left Florence intending to follow the coast to Marseilles then drive north up the Rhone Valley. But that night when we stopped not far from Genoa, we heard that Sir Edmund Hillary had just scaled Everest. The news set us thinking about mountains – and changed our plans.

  “What do you say we skip southern France and go over the St. Bernard Pass into Switzerland instead?” I asked my wife. “That way we’d get a look at Mont Blanc, and maybe the Matterhorn.”

  “And meet the St. Bernard dogs? Let’s do it!”

  Next day, however, we learned the St. Bernard Pass was snowbound and closed to all traffic. Moreover, nobody had any idea when it might be open again. We looked at one another and decided to press on anyway.

  As we entered the mouth of the Aosta Valley, the mountains began to appear through rifts in the overcast. The clouds were luminous with unseen sunlight. Slabs of wet, green stone in marble quarries along the road glowed eerily. Grape terraces marched up steep slopes until they were lost in the high mists. We climbed higher and the valley narrowed. After a couple of hours it unexpectedly widened again to reveal the city of Aosta.

  It was now almost dark, and time for us to roost. The Albergo della Corone e Poste in Aosta’s main square looked like our kind of place. Its several ancient buildings surrounded a roughly cobbled inner courtyard where post carriages had once rattled and horses had been stabled. The guest rooms within were panelled in dark woods and dimly lighted by leaded windows.

  All was presided over by three brothers in their sixties. Frédéric, the courtly middle brother, showed us where to sign the book. Balding, vivacious Domenico led us to our wainscotted room overlooking the square. The oldest brother, portly and rubicund François, escorted us in to dinner then became our waiter, wine steward, and general factotum.

  He served us minestrone, steamed trout, tender little steaks with artichokes, strawberries and cream, fresh apricots and cherries, cheeses, and a variety of local wines. Between times he entertained us with tidbits about the history of the Valle d’Aosta. We were the only guests, so the other brothers joined us for coffee and liqueurs.

  Glowing with good food, wine, and company, we went to bed under a feather comforter. The steady rumble of rain on lead-sheathed roofs sounded like a benison.

  The rain pelted down all night, the wind whined in the chimney pots, and the barometer plummeted. After a late, luxurious breakfast, I dashed across the square to the regional tourist office. The woman behind the desk shook her head regretfully.

  “The St. Bernard passes are still closed, I think, signore; but if the telephone is working I will call.”

  For a long time it produced no response. When it did, the news was not good. Two ploughs, one working from each direction, had failed to cut paths through the snow fields of the Great St. Bernard. A hurricane was blowing through the Little St. Bernard. Snow and sleet were beating down on both.…

  She smiled sympathetically and suggested we forget about the mountains for a while.

  The Albergo Corone was warm and snug so we settled down to endure the delay in comfort. During breaks in the weather, we walked about the old town, explored the countryside, or sat in the snug drawing room of the hotel while one or other of the brothers regaled us with stories about the Valle.

  The brothers were a saga unto themselves. Fleeing religious persecution, their paternal ancestor had come over the Little St. Bernard from France late in the sixteenth century.

  “He was a dissenter from the Roman faith who only escaped burning because he had a good horse and good sense,” François told us. “He led that horse, or it led him, across the pass in mid-winter. The Valle applauded independent ways so it took in horse and man. They went to work for a hostelry. Both produced big families. In time our family took over this hotel while the progeny of our ancestor’s horse carried the mail and hauled coaches from one end of the Valle to the other.”

  “Yes,” added Domenico, “and the offspring of both were all dissenters. They still are.” He grinned at his brothers. “We three manage not to agree on anything for very long.”

  There were no post horses at the hotel now but the equine branch of the family still prospered in the nearby Gran Paradiso National Park, where they earned their living carrying visitors into an alpine wilderness.

  The peaks and valleys of the Gran Paradiso were home to some of the last wild wolves in Europe; to the almost equally rare chamois (a sheep-like antelope); and to the ibex, a wild goat that a century ago was abundant all through the Alps but now survives, precariously, only in a few parks.

  “All the wild creatures are going,” said Frédéric gloomily. “That is man’s law. Unless a creature becomes our slave it must go. Even the lammergeyer, that wonder of the skies, must go. That is man’s law.”

  Lammergeyers are enormous birds of prey closely related to eagles. In all of Europe, they still existed only in the Gran Paradiso, where at the time of our visit fewer than ten remained. Yet even in the park they were persecuted – for their eggs, which were sold to rich collectors for as much as five thousand dollars each!

  One night the weather broke, and in the morning we heard that ploughs had reached the col of the Grand St. Bernard. It was time for us to go. The brothers gathered in the courtyard to wave us off and to give us a farewell present. It was a short-handled s
hovel.

  “Leave it in the hospice at the Pass,” Domenico told us. “You may not need it but then again you may.”

  They gave us another parting gift as well. When we stopped that night, we found six straw-wrapped bottles of their own best wines stowed in Liz’s trunk.

  Ten minutes after leaving Aosta we were climbing into heavy clouds that dimmed the car lights to a pallid glimmer. The scenery we should have seen must have been spectacular. To the right the Matterhorn, and to the left Mont Blanc. We saw nothing. In second gear, sometimes in first, we groped through an impenetrable murk. So it went for an hour, by which time we had climbed six thousand feet.

  Then we emerged between two layers of cloud and could see a little way about us. Behind was the steeply inclined trough of the valley, clogged with roiling clouds. Around us was arctic tundra, barren and rocky, leading the eye to the snowy peaks of mountains on a level with us. Ahead was a wall of rock rising, so it seemed, perpendicular to our path but scarred by a road climbing its face in tortuous switchbacks.

  We drove on and in places our wheels spun. Water vapour reached the carburetor and the consequent lurchings did nothing to ease the strain of manoeuvring along the ledge. Snowbanks appeared and grew deeper until they hemmed us in, sometimes ten feet deep. Masses of wet snow slid into the ruts and several times we had to halt and dig our way clear. The murk closed in again and brought with it a driving wind laden with sleet that clogged the windshield wipers.

  The desolation seemed absolute until we swung around the last hairpin bend of hundreds and there before us was the striped barrier of a customs post. Seldom have I seen a sweeter sight.

  Only one man was on duty, a half-frozen youngster who gaped at us from a face blue with chill then quickly raised the barrier to let us by. He was a realist who understood that passports and papers were meaningless up here.