A Winter's Night (12 page)

“Aim!” The rifle barrels converged towards the target.

He had stopped crying.

“Fire!”

He collapsed onto the chair. As the guns thundered, Floti felt his own heart stop for an instant.

He thought of Clerice waiting for him at home, fingering her rosary beads, awake at night in the dark, in her bed. He was sure that somewhere, someplace on the plains or in the mountains, the mother of that boy had heard his last silent plea, the words that never found their way out of teeth clenched in a spasm of terror. She must have collapsed as well wherever she was, out in the fields or in her house, her back sliding slowly down the wall as her eyes stared wide onto nothing.

Floti turned around and saw that Sisto had tears in his eyes. Cavallotti didn't say a word. He glared at the sergeant to ensure he would stay silent as well as they resumed their march. Towards Codroipo. Towards the Tagliamento flowing gray and swollen between its banks. Entire divisions were heading towards the bridges, with their baggage trains and artillery pieces. The pounding of boots trudging wearily forward was the dull backdrop to that unending march. And yet that multitude of men, looking more like a herd than an army, carried their weapons and wore their uniforms and obeyed orders. The unrelenting discipline, paired perhaps with the conviction that there was no alternative to closing ranks, kept together the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in retreat.

The first to pass was the Third Army, under the command of the king's cousin, the Duke of Aosta. They could be distinguished at a distance because they were formed in rank and file and were marching in step, unit after unit, their officers at their head and flanks. They had lost none of their equipment and as soon as they crossed the Tagliamento they took up battle positions in order to cover the others who still had to pass. But that was not to be the main line of resistance. The king had personally decided that the front was to be established on the Piave, and declared that he was prepared to abdicate if that line of defense were to fall.

Floti and his comrades passed Udine as well on the night of October 30th, and it was there that Captain Cavallotti was informed by a message from the High Command that the new line of resistance would be the Piave river, while Mount Grappa would be the stronghold from which the artillery would keep the Austrians at bay if they attempted to break through.

Towards evening, when they had already set up camp, Floti saw a colonel arriving in the sidecar of a Frera. He had the captain summoned immediately and Floti was close enough to hear their conversation.

“How many men do you have, Cavallotti?”

“Six hundred and fifteen, sir.”

“Arms?”

“Light arms and seven machine guns with ammunition.”

“Good. This is the position your men will have to secure between the Priula Bridge and Mount Montello: this is a crucial point because Mount Montello will be one of the main objectives of the Austrian army. You'll have to hold them off, at any cost. The English and French commanders have arrived and are promising reinforcements.”

“About time,” replied Cavallotti.

“Yes, right, but don't be expecting too much: they have their own nuts to crack. Cadorna has ordered the Fourth Army to fall back from the whole region of Cadore beyond the Piave, so they can join up with the rest of our defensive front. Di Robilant won't be very happy but he'll have to comply. There's desperate need of his artillery to hold Mount Grappa.”

Cavallotti nodded. “When?”

“Tomorrow at five you'll have to set off. Don't stop until you've reached your position. As soon as you arrive, dig in. Expect the Austrians to attack immediately. They won't give you a moment's respite.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I also wanted to tell you that we'll be calling two more years to arms: 1898 and 1899.”

“'99? But they're children!”

“You have a son born in '99? Well, so do I, but we have no choice, Cavallotti. Good luck.”

Floti felt his heart sink. 1899! Savino would be getting his summons from one day to the next. His parents would be alone, with just Maria and the farmhand. All seven brothers, whoever was still alive, would be lined up on the Piave.

But where?

He thought of those men with their fancy sounding names—at least they sounded fancy to his ears—deciding the destiny of hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings just by signing a line on a sheet of letter paper, those manicured fingers moving a pen over paper and moving entire divisions. It reminded him of the talks he used to have with Pelloni.

The next morning they started their march and didn't stop until they saw the Piave. It was much bigger than the Samoggia back home; it was in flood and its waters were raging and foaming. It must have rained a lot up in the mountains.

“Men, look!” exclaimed the captain. “The river is on our side! We'll blow up the bridges after we've crossed them and the Austrians will never get across with the water so high.”

Floti couldn't help but think that the Austrians and the Hungarians hadn't done anything wrong. They were shooting at them because they had been ordered to, just like him, and if someone didn't want to shoot they'd execute him, just like that poor boy they'd seen before arriving at Codroipo. He thought of what the captain had always told them, and it did seem right that each population should be independent and not ruled by foreigners who spoke a different language. But in the end, the only thing that really counted was saving your life and he hoped that his brothers would be spared as well. Not just for their sake, but for their parents, who would never be able to bear such a terrible loss.

Before mid-November, the rumor got out that General Cadorna had been dismissed and that the king had put a Neapolitan general named Armando Diaz in his place. Floti waited until he had the opportunity to ask Captain Cavallotti what kind of man this new general was, struck by the fact that his name was Armando like his own brother's.

“He's a good person,” replied Cavallotti. “He has had a lot of experience on the field, and he's a man who thinks that soldiers are not animals, and that it doesn't help to beat them down. That their courage will not falter if they are given good reasons for fighting.”

Floti would have liked to say that he didn't know any good reasons, but he thought it better to keep his mouth shut under the circumstances. Cavallotti, however, seemed to have read his mind. “I know what you're thinking, Bruni,” he said, “and you're right, in part, but you don't know what's really at stake here; you have to take a step back, and understand how the Italians have suffered for centuries over the loss of their liberty and independence. A nation is something like a family, you have to stick together. And when a stranger comes into one of our houses he has to ask permission, doesn't he, and behave like a guest, not like the boss. What's more, the fruit of our labor must remain here at home. And those of us who are better off must help those who are worse off.”

Floti nodded without saying a word and Cavallotti concluded his speech: “I know we've seen too many deaths, far too many. I don't sleep at night over it, don't think otherwise. But I never send my men into danger's way if I can help it.”

“That's a good thing, sir,” said Floti, plucking up his courage, “because it's not like their mothers bought them at the market. Their mothers conceived them and gave birth to them and stayed awake with them at night when they were ill and fed them the best they had, so they could grow up and live as long as possible. Let's hope this new general thinks the way you do.”

Cavallotti dropped his head in silence for a moment, then went outside to check the cannon stations. Before nightfall he promoted Floti to corporal.

 

For at least their first two months there, they had no contact with other contingents and Floti could get no news about his brothers. From one day to the next, new soldiers were constantly being added to the line of troops along the Piave to comply with the king's orders that no enemy be let through. As soon as the new year started, the latest recruits began to report for duty, boys of eighteen and nineteen. Floti continuously scanned the units to see if he could spot Savino, but it would have been easier to win the lottery. That didn't dissuade him and, whenever he could, he'd stop one of the new boys and ask: “Have you ever met a lad called Savino Bruni?” And it didn't discourage him if they looked at him like he was crazy or if they replied with a shrug or with a “what the fuck?”

Once Floti saw that even the impossible can happen. An
Alpino
of about forty-five wearing a sergeant's stripes, at the head of his company, was returning from the trenches, covered with mud from head to foot except for the black raven feather on his cap. Under the rain that had begun to fall from a gray sky, his boots were beating time as all his men marched behind him, formed into rank and file. Dead tired as they were, soaked to the bone, some of them wounded, they kept the pace like a single man. All at once, as they were crossing paths with their replacement unit—all
bocia
, as the Alpine soldiers called the youngest troops—one of the foot soldiers cried out: “
Bepi
!
Bepi
!” Half a dozen of them wheeled around as if they'd been ordered to perform a half turn to the left, but he was interested in just one, the one with the light blue eyes and the freckles. Bepi too abandoned the ranks, heedless of the cursing of his sergeant and the two of them embraced in the middle of the field. Both units stopped and the non-commissioned officers who commanded them did not have the heart to separate father from son.

 

As time passed, the pressure continued to mount: the cannonades were continuous and the Austrians were forever attempting to cross the river; in the end, they succeeded, managing to establish two bridgeheads on the right bank of the Piave.

One day, Captain Cavallotti, who had struggled to set up a tent which provided some semblance of an administrative office, gave his men orders to pack up everything and send all the documents over to the engineers' headquarters.

“We have to take up our rifles, Bruni,” he told Floti, “all of us, down to the last man, because if we don't push them back this time, it's over. Venice will fall, and all the rest with it. Do you know how much sacrifice it took to create Italy? We've been fighting for almost one hundred years. We have to finish the job once and for all, and then we'll be done with it. I know what you're thinking: ‘France or Spain, who gives a damn, as long as there's food on our plates,' but only a nobody reasons that way. Only animals and slaves have masters: are you an animal, Bruni? No, you're not. Are you a slave? No.” He was answering all of his own questions. “Now we can finally afford to be free men, all of us, cost what it may.”

“To tell you the truth, sir, I do have a master back at home. He's a notary named Barzini. We work his land, he does nothing and takes more than half of everything.”

“We'll take care of that, too, Bruni, but now let's worry about this army that's invading our country. I've armed even the members of the band, Bruni: guns instead of trombones and clarinets.”

That was true. Floti had seen the guys from the band in the trenches, and they weren't half bad as shots.

From the two bridgeheads, the Austrians were battering Mount Montello and Mount Grappa incessantly, and from his post Floti could see hell being unleashed over the dominion of those two peaks. Cannons rumbled in the distance and columns of smoke rose with fire inside. The volcanoes in the south of Italy must be something like this, he thought. Everyone was expecting the Italian front to collapse all at once, like at Caporetto, and then that would be the end of everything.

Instead, that's not the way it went.

Assault after assault, the Austrians were pushed back. Could the fear of a firing squad alone be a sufficient explanation for all of this, Floti wondered. Why didn't all those proletarians rebel and start shooting at the
carabinieri
instead of at their comrades of the Austro-Hungarian proletariat, as Pelloni would have suggested. Apparently this whole thing was not very easily explained, but Floti had come up with his own idea while fighting at the front: he'd seen that the Neapolitan general who was commanding now and whose name was the same as his brother's didn't send his men to the slaughter, his soldiers; he asked them to hold fast but not to get themselves massacred by charging the machine guns bare-chested. The food was better, the shoes were sturdier, the grappa and the cigarettes were better quality. It didn't take much, all told, to stop them from feeling like cannon fodder: a little respect and a bit of consideration. And then there was the river, so big and so beautiful, that had to be defended at all costs, and before you knew it you ended up believing in it and doing your part.

One evening Floti crawled over to a derelict building near the riverbank to see if he could see for himself any traces of this offensive everyone was talking about. But it had become too dark and he couldn't make out much at all. Then he heard a light lapping of waves along the shore, and saw dark shapes intent on sliding small boats into the water; one man to a boat, they stretched out inside and used their arms as oars. There were a number of them: two, three, five, all dressed in black. Maybe half a dozen in all. They were crossing the river to the opposite side, where Franz Joseph's empire began. Well, not his any longer, the old man was dead, so his son's empire. They were using the current to their advantage, cutting across on the diagonal until they touched land.

All at once, as he was getting ready to turn back, he felt a boot crushing down on his back and something hard like a gun barrel pressing into the nape of his neck.

“What are you doing out here, handsome? Shouldn't you be asleep?”

“Listen,” replied Floti. “I'm from the thirty-eighth. I just wanted to take a look because I heard there was going to be a big offensive.”