The Light in the Ruins (43 page)

Francesca and Alessia were screaming on the kitchen floor, their wails biblical, but Massimo was merely whimpering against his grandparents’ legs. Muller took Cristina by her arm and dragged her outside. She expected him to stand her up against the wall of the villa and shoot her as well, but she was too numb to care. Really, why go on? What was the point?
Just be quick
, she thought.
Please, dear Lord, let this all be quick and over soon
.

“I beg you,” she heard herself mumbling, “spare the children.” Out here, Francesca’s and Alessia’s howling was muted, but only slightly.

“Do the partisans have more than rifles?” he asked, ignoring her question.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I don’t know for sure.”

“How many are there?”

She tried to think. “Five? Six? No more than six. And two are wounded—and one is dying.”

“All men?”

“No. Four men, two women. And it’s one of the women who’s dying.”

“Fine. You’re going to lead us to the tombs and make sure that my men aren’t ambushed on the way there. You’re going to walk down there right now and take them some food,” he said, and he let go of her arm so he could massage his neck and his shoulder. Then he yelled into the house for Bayer and the other soldiers to join him.

“We don’t have any food,” she said meekly.

He shook his head, annoyed. “I’ll give you some field rations. Say you stole them.”

“I stole them,” she repeated without emotion.

“That’s right. Then just walk to the tombs. I’m going to take seven or eight men with me and follow you. No doubt there will be at least one partisan as a lookout. He will stop you. While you’re talking to him, we’ll kill him. Then you’ll continue into the ruins and we’ll kill the others. Do this and yes, we’ll spare the children.”

Bayer and the two soldiers who had been inside the kitchen came up beside them.

“Give me your field rations, Bayer,” Muller said.

When the lieutenant paused, Muller rolled his eyes and told his men the plan. “Also,” he added and pointed inside the villa, an afterthought, “tell someone to shut those two up.”

Friedrich spotted the limbs—arms and legs and feet, the feet in some cases bare and in others still clad in shoes—and the clothing draped on the olive tree branches. Based on the fabric and the footwear, these weren’t the reeking vestiges of soldiers; these weren’t the sleeves and the shoes of Germans or Brits. They belonged to
peasants, he decided. Peasants. Maybe partisans. And then he saw a woman’s head in the grass beside one of the trees like a big rock, and even though he knew there were women among the partisans, he guessed this was a reprisal.

The command was in chaos as the division tried to assemble and move farther north. The remnants of an armored column—the troop carriers and half-tracks and trucks—were struggling to gather themselves, and amid the stink of diesel fuel, tired, unshaven men were packing their gear as quickly as they could. Others were tying olive branches to the roofs of the vehicles. Friedrich knew well how close the British were. It was possible they were already behind them, cutting them off as he stood and surveyed an army in retreat and this nightmarish fruit among the olives.

He saw a private who managed to look both haggard and plump sitting on the hood of a jeep. The fellow was pressing a last pair of socks and a brick of cheese into his haversack as Friedrich approached him. “Where is Colonel Decher?” he asked.

The private started to answer, but then they heard the sound of incoming shells and almost in unison dove to the ground beside the edge of the grove. The explosions sent them rolling, and Friedrich was reminded of the horrific moment in Voronezh when the building collapsed all around him and he lost his right foot. Pebbles and dirt rained down upon them both, but Friedrich realized he was fine. He had jostled his wooden foot when he had fallen fast and hard to the earth, but nothing more. He sat up and adjusted the straps. The private was looking at him, and Friedrich couldn’t decide whether the fellow was wide-eyed with awe or with disgust.

“I asked you where the colonel was,” he said evenly to the soldier. On the other side of the jeep, perhaps twenty or twenty-five meters distant, a soldier was hurt and screaming for a medic.

“He was just here, sir. I’m sure he’s nearby. He wants us on the road now.”

Friedrich waved his arm at the pieces of the dead in the midst of the olive grove. “What happened there?”

“We had to execute some of the villagers.”

“A reprisal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But why are there body parts in the trees?”

“The colonel had us blow up the bodies in the pit before we covered them up.”

Friedrich shook his head. Decher was an idiot. Did he really think blowing up the bodies would either hide the evidence or make it easier to bury the victims? He couldn’t believe the man had been given a combat command. Besides, at this point in the war, any reasonable person had figured out that reprisals made no sense. There was a logic to revenge; there was a satisfaction to revenge. But killing innocent civilians? It never worked. All it did was make the men against you vow to fight harder.

“Were you part of the execution squad?” Friedrich asked.

The private shook his head. “Thank God, no. But I saw a minute of it from that hill—but only a minute. I couldn’t watch. The villagers were bayoneted.”

“What?”

“The colonel ordered them killed by bayonet. I’m telling you …”

“Go on, Private.”

The private looked around, as if he feared someone were listening. “Never mind, sir.”

“Tell me,” Friedrich said. “I promise, you can.”

“Well, if we have to surrender—and the rumor is we’re already surrounded—everyone who was part of that detail is a dead man. When the British get here, they’ll hang everyone who was a part of the squad. Or maybe they’ll bayonet them.”

Friedrich reached for a door handle and pulled himself to his feet. In the distance he heard airplanes approaching. He leaned against the jeep and thought of how hard he had worked to stay ahead of the British and reach the division. And for what? Clearly this private felt it was over.
When the British get here
. In his opinion, the Germans weren’t likely to make it much farther north. And of course he was right. It was over for these men, it was over for the
army, and it was probably over for Germany. Everyone knew it but Hitler. All a person had to do was look at a map. And the Germans deserved it. Men like Decher. Soldiers like Muller and Bayer. They all deserved it. He thought of Cristina and wondered what would have happened if he had stayed with her at the villa. Waited for the British to arrive and surrendered. Or, better still, hidden somewhere on that estate until the combatants had found other ground on which to duel. He saw himself working with Vittore to rebuild the olive press in the autumn. Making love with Cristina on a blanket in the sloping grass above the Etruscan tombs. Having coffee in a piazza in Florence in the last warm days of fall.

“Get down!”

It was that private. Friedrich turned and saw the soldier leaping once more behind the vehicle, but already the planes were upon them, three American Mustangs, and one was diving at them, its machine guns nearly as loud as its engine, and then the jeep was exploding in a deafening roar of white-hot flame and daggerlike shards of steel and glass. His last thought as he felt himself rising, rising, rising, the air sucked from his lungs in the blast? Cristina had so loved to watch the planes as they’d flown high above the Crete Senesi and the Villa Chimera.

Decher crawled his way through the high grass between the still-burning half-tracks and the blackened shells of the jeeps, his pointed elbows pickets in the soil. He heard the cries and moans of the wounded and wondered briefly if he was the only one still breathing who was uninjured. He was, he realized, terrified. He had never experienced anything like this, the planes swooping down upon them like hawks, the men on the ground with absolutely no way to defend themselves. A part of him couldn’t believe that he had ever craved combat, and his initial thought now was to get the hell out of here. To stay alive. Slowly, however, a woozy bear awakening from hibernation, he was coming to his senses.

There were plenty of others still alive and unhurt. Had to be. But the British would be here soon. He had to rally the survivors and get them all on their way to Arezzo. Gingerly he rose to his feet and gazed around him. He saw two dead soldiers beside the smoldering husk of a jeep, and one—and he had to look twice to be sure he was seeing this correctly—looked a lot like Strekker. He jogged over to the pair and stared down at the face. Sure enough, it was the lieutenant. He stood there, transfixed by the sodden mound of entrails beside the fellow. All that had once been inside Strekker had spilled out onto the grass. It was as if his uniform tunic were a cardboard box that had grown waterlogged and useless in a flood. The fellow’s eyes, mercifully, were shut. Decher leaned over and saw that the soldier’s trousers were ripped and the leg that should have ended in a bone-white shaft of wood ended now above the knee, the pants a sodden red rag. The prosthetic, he guessed, had either been blown into thousands of tiny splinters or been reduced to a negligible pile of ashes somewhere. He spied a blackened metal buckle, but that was the only trace.

In the distance he thought he heard vehicles. He stood up and brought his field glasses to his eyes, but he didn’t really need them. Working their way up the tortuous switchbacks that marked the hill were three British tanks—Churchills—a column of dust from the dirt road obscuring them only slightly in the summer heat. He had to get his men moving, he thought. They had to hurry. He glanced back at the olive grove and the parts of the dead in the trees. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d been thinking when he’d had the peasants bayoneted, and he wasn’t quite sure what he was thinking now. The problem, perhaps, was that he hadn’t been thinking; he had been furious, appalled at the way this country was awash in cowards and partisans and traitors. An Italian was either spineless or treacherous. As a race, they were as bad as the Jews. Nevertheless, the method of execution had been a mistake—and a profound one. Even his own men had been appalled and (if he was brutally honest with himself) ashamed. And while he tried to
convince himself that those soldiers were too weak to understand the dictates of total war, most of them were combat veterans. He knew in his heart that he was the one who was in over his head.

And so, with the sound of the approaching Churchills growing louder, an idea—tentative, inchoate—began to form in his mind. Just in case (though just in case of
what
was also chimeric and vague), he reached under his shirt for the aluminum oval that was his dog tag and ran it between his forefinger and thumb. Moving quickly, his eyes darting around him to be sure that no one was watching, he removed his cap and pulled the ID over his head and dropped it into his pants pocket. Then he squatted and lifted Friedrich Strekker’s skull with his left hand and slipped off the lieutenant’s dog tag with his right. When he had it, he let the corpse fall back onto the ground and slipped his old adjutant’s tag around his own neck. He emptied the young man’s pockets and picked the prosthetic buckle off the grass, hurling it as far away as he could. Then, as if saying good-bye to a close childhood friend, he left his pay book in Strekker’s tunic and his kit beside the body.