Throughout the entire day we heard continued puffings of steam locomotives; we noticed an uninterrupted movement of trains carrying equipment to the station of Costa. There also passed a long train full of cannon, and wagons whose canvasses flapped in the breeze. The engine proceeded slowly and from the smokestack an acrid, nauseating odor escaped. I wondered what the Austrians were burning in their furnaces since I did not believe they could have much coal.
We passed the juncture of the Friga and the Meschio beyond the village of Capella and now only a short stretch of road separated us from the house we wished to reach. We followed the foamy course of the torrent and, arriving at an intersecting 216 point we saw approaching us a truck full of hay, drawn by the arms of a young mountaineer. We saluted him in our dialect and he answered with a pronounced Tuscan accent. That boy certainly was not a native of our regions; he must have escaped from prison and through some good fortune succeeded in establishing himself with a peasant family. It was strange that the Austrian gendarmes, among whom there are many Dalmatians and Istrians, had not noticed his manner of speaking which was not at all like that of our mountaineers.
We resumed our journey, eager to reach the coveted goal. By following a country road we suddenly found ourselves in front of a group of houses. Near the small church a peasant, seated on the ground, was swinging his scythe and at the noise of our footsteps turned his emaciated face towards us, eying us suspiciously. We crossed a courtyard where the chickens, frightened at our footsteps, scurried quickly away and we 217 found ourselves on a little bridge which crossed the Friga. The road continued towards the mill. We knew the village and further recognized it from the photographs made from our aeroplanes. Bottecchia started running and I ran after him. At last we arrived at a wide courtyard where there were gathered many men whom I did not know. They were seated on a narrow bench and from a large ornate bowl of majolica they helped themselves to hot, smoking soup and in their hands they held broad yellow slices of polenta (pudding made of Indian meal). The door of the house was ajar. Within the large kitchen a brilliant, playful fire was flickering. From the massive gridirons hung a large round caldron. A woman bending over it mixed and turned the yellow flour at intervals. The woman had her shoulders turned towards us and Bottecchia sought in vain among those present for someone he knew. We approached her, and lo, from a side door 218 there appeared a little nervous woman with an emaciated face and bony hands seamed with heavy blue veins.
“Cietta, Cietta,” cried my soldier, “stare at my face and do not tremble. It is I, really I, your Giovannino!” The old woman stared at him with her eyes opened wide. Her hands fell heavily upon her apron; she leaned against the table as not to fall. Suddenly, as she wavered, Giovannino took her in his arms, and embraced and caressed her a long time. Finally she regained her self-possession and passed her lean hand over his forehead.
“Let me look at you, let me touch you, let me feel the life of my life. But how you have changed; how big you have become, how handsome!” She smiled through her tears. “Do you remember the happy days when we were all together and I used to take you on my knees and sing sweet lullabies to you, before nightfall? Then no one could harm you, but now, instead!... 219 Tell me, are you in danger? Tell me is anyone following you, for I am afraid, terribly afraid.” She eyed him steadily as though to divine his secret; she threw her arms around him as though to protect him. “Tell me they will not come to take you away. Are you tired? Are you hungry? Ah, we have nothing to give you!”
The poor woman, terribly agitated, ran from one end of the kitchen to the other not knowing where to begin. She wanted to do everything at once, she wanted to feed us, she wanted to call her daughter, to confide in her sister, to tell the old men outside to watch out for us and warn us.
“And who is this man? Is he your comrade? When did you succeed in escaping? Do you come from afar?”
We tried to calm her, to tell her that no danger threatened us, and she poured some milk into two deep cups and cut for us two enormous slices of polenta, not too large however for our appetites.
220 “Cietta, Cietta,” Giovanni began, “rest assured, do not be afraid. Don’t you see how well we look, and how happy? This is an Italian officer,” and Bottecchia made a mysterious sign of silence by placing his finger before his mouth.
“What? An Italian officer?” Everyone gathered round me.
“It is safe to talk here, isn’t it? All those here are good Italians?”
“Yes, you may talk, but be very careful because now one is not safe even in his own house, and at any moment, when one least expects it, he is likely to be dispatched to the other world before he even has time to recommend his soul to the sacred Madonna.”
The sister of Cietta, who expressed in her thin face a suppressed grief, making it all the more pitiful, took me by the hands and said with sobs, “I too, had a son, big and strong like you and they have killed him. One day as he was walking here in front of the house a platoon of Germans arrived 221 for the requisitions, and he, frightened, began to run down the slope. One of the gendarmes called after him to halt, but my poor dear one, believing himself far enough to be out of danger, continued running without obeying. The gendarme at once aimed his rifle and fired. He fell in a pool of blood with a leg and an arm shattered. We lifted him up. He was pale and did not utter a word. For a long time we nursed him here because I preferred to keep him under my care, because he wanted to die near his mother, but at length they took him away from me to the hospital, where his condition grew worse every day, every hour. The wounds would not heal and after two months of indescribable suffering he died on the night when the swallows returned. I always see him before me as he was, strong as you; but taller, yes, taller than you.” As she spoke she clutched my arms as though in pressing my flesh she pressed the flesh of the son she had lost. “Who will 222 bring my boy back to me, who will bring him back? Oh, unjust war, oh, ruthless war, and you German assassins, may you be damned forever! May the stain of the blood of that innocent lad fall upon you and your children so that throughout all eternity you never shall have peace!”
Softly I pressed her hand and whispered, “Courage, courage, life is made up of terrible sorrows and we must face them bravely and with resignation, but God is just and your appeal to Him in malediction is worth maybe more than the fire of a thousand guns. The day shall come when they will have to pay, and pay in blood the measure of your sighs and all these your tears.”
I asked the mistress of the house who the people were about us and she answered that they were refugees from villages along the Piave, especially San Stefano and Valdobiadine, now under the fire of our guns. They had had to abandon everything. The enemy did not even allow them to take with them 223 their mattresses and the most necessary things, so that they were now compelled to sleep on the ground. Among the refugees there was a man, about fifty years old, whose heavy skeleton expressed the strength of his days now past. He approached me, looked at me cautiously and asked, “Is it really true that you are an Italian officer? If you are an officer you ought to try to get to the other side, to cross the lines so as to tell them on the other side what the Austrians are preparing because for the past two months, both night and day, we have seen nothing but thousands of cannon and interminable lines of soldiers and wagons passing along the roads.”
“Yes, it is true, I am an Italian officer and I have been sent here to do exactly what you have said, to try to find out something. I am an aviator and I landed here with an aeroplane to try to learn and communicate to our forces the day of the offensive and everything else I can gather about the 224 enemy’s plans. And you who are good Italians, if you really believe in our cause, if you really hope on some not distant day to see our troops return and if all of you do not wish to die here of hunger, everyone of you must, in all seriousness, help me, for all has been organized, all has been prepared. We Italians have the habit of being enthusiastic at the beginning but do not always have enough seriousness and constancy to carry a project through to the end. Now, I want you to act as soldiers for me, I want each one of you to choose a sector in which to act, but the method of obtaining information must be the one I suggest, must be so organized that the reports are safe, that I may communicate them without doubts to our headquarters.”
Giovanni was talking with his aunt who was telling him of all the many trials and tribulations she had had to endure since our retreat. She anxiously asked him of news of her sons on the other side.
225 “Tell me, then you are not jesting? You have really seen Pietro? And is Antonio still in the artillery? And Uncle Baldassarre who went with his family to............