Checco had dropped out of sight ages ago; no one in the family had received any word of him. No one knew that his regiment had been transferred to France to provide support for the French who were having a hard time of it. His unit had taken up quarters at Bligny, and Checco, an artillery private assigned to ammunition provision and transport, drove a Fiat 18 BL loaded with mortar rounds and 320s, machine gun belts, and tubes of gelatin for blasting holes in the German barbed wire entanglements.
He knew that he could be blown to high heaven at any moment: all it would take was a gunshot, a stray bullet, a deep pothole taken at high speed and goodbye Checco. But he hugely preferred this work to serving guns, loading rounds into barrels, breathing in cordite fumes day and night under an unrelenting downpour of metal and flames as the thunder of artillery fire rent the air. He thought he’d been lucky. If it was his turn to die it would be in a single go; he wouldn’t even have the time to realize what was happening. And at least this work gave him plenty of time to gab with the fellow assigned to drive with him, a bricklayer who had emigrated to France. Sitting next to a friend, listening to the rumble of the engine and enjoying the scenery: not a bad job at all. At just twenty kilometers or so from the front, the countryside was just beautiful. The land dipped up and down in gentle slopes covered with vineyards lined up in perfect order, the grapevines low to the ground and much smaller than any he’d ever seen. How many grapes could they grow with such small vines? They certainly must have been easy to harvest, not like those back at home, more than two meters high, with shoots so long you had to keep moving the ladder to make sure you got everything, down to the last cluster.
What made him most curious was that there were no houses to be seen no matter how far you looked, and there weren’t even any hedges marking boundaries. Where were the farmers? Just how big could those properties be? And how many harvesters would they need to pick all those grapes?
His travelling companion told him that the wine produced from those grapes was called ‘sham-pane’ and that it was so precious that the row on the border between two plots, marked with a red rose bush, was harvested one year by one neighbor and the next year by the other. ‘What you can learn by travelling the world!’ thought Checco.
He realized that sooner or later a replacement would arrive and he’d be sent up to the front line, where every day the war was killing thousands, and wounding or maiming thousands more who’d have to spend the rest of their days hobbling around on a wooden leg or hiding the stub of an arm in their shirtsleeve, unable to work and bring home bread for themselves and their families.
And this is exactly what happened, not two months later. He got an order signed by Captain Morselli, a Tuscan who was full of piss and vinegar but had a heart of gold, transferring him to a field battery twenty kilometers from his supply base.
“Oh, you,” said the captain when he reported to headquarters with the order in hand, “you have to take turns like everyone else, Bruni; everyone wants to drive the truck and no one wants to serve the guns. But cheer up, the Austrians and Germans didn’t succeed in breaking through at the Piave. Our men are holding the line and not letting those bastards make a move. If things continue this way, we may have good news soon . . . who knows, maybe even before Christmas.”
Checco wasn’t sure what the captain meant by that last phrase, but he thought of his brothers there holding down the bank of the Piave. If they were still alive, that was. Who knew how many of them were left. And whether his parents knew anything, or were in the dark like him.
The next day, at five in the morning, he was already at the front with his battery. The cannon rounds were so big it took four of them to pick each one up and load it. Then the gunner pulled the lever on the breech block, everyone covered their ears and off went the shot. The deflagration was so powerful it shook the ground under their feet and knocked the gun carriage backwards. Then Checco counted one, two, three, four and there was a second explosion as the projectile made contact, producing a blast even louder than the first, a blaze of fire then a huge cloud of smoke and dust that rose for dozens of meters. Cannon shot was falling thick and fast all around them, making the earth shudder painfully as if wounded to its deepest core. Maybe, before the war, that desert of holes, that blackened mess of stones that he saw before him, had been a field of wheat dotted with poppies or a pretty vineyard, like the one he used to drive his truck past every morning, down the little dirt roads that crisscrossed the countryside.
This went on for ten or twelve days, with continuous salvos from both sides, a rain of fire that never left him; it kept thundering in his head even after he’d returned to camp for the night.
Then, one day, he saw the advance of the tanks, iron monsters as tall as a house that spit flames and fire and roared and groaned so loud it burst your eardrums and turned your blood to water. A scene that he’d never forget, for as long as he lived. There was a space perhaps three hundred meters wide between the two battle lines, bombarded from one side and the other by an incessant artillery barrage. A heavy cloud of smoke hung there permanently, but that morning, from inside that cloud, Checco—who was on forward guard duty—could have sworn that he was hearing an intermittent sound that was getting closer and clearer with every passing moment. He could barely believe it, but he was listening to the words of a song, warbled out at a full yell:
“My darling Spanish songbird
Lovely as a flower in bloom . . . ”
Then the source of those notes appeared and Checco was sure that he was seeing things. A two-wheeled wooden cart drawn by a pair of mules was lurching forward, sinking left and right into the holes left by the bombs, at risk of being overturned at every bump. The unlikely vehicle was being driven by none other than Pipetta, a carter from his town who worked transporting gravel for making roadbeds and who was now approaching his position, getting nearer and nearer to the tanks and the no-man’s-land being pounded by the artillery.
As soon as he had gotten over his shock, Checco took advantage of the dense curtain of smoke covering everything; he jumped out of the hole he’d been crouching in and ran over to a burnt-up tree stump. As Pipetta continued to wail his song, Checco started calling out: “Pipetta! Pipettaaaa! Stop, for god’s sake, it’s me, Checco!”
Pipetta tugged at the reins on his mules and, just as if they had run into each other one Sunday morning in the town square:
“Well, well, well. It’s good to see you, milord!”
“Pipetta, what are you on about?” replied Checco. “Can’t you see we’re at the front?”
Pipetta had a laugh at this and turned his cart towards the tanks, in the midst of the crashing bombs, singing his song.
Checco started shouting: “Stop! Pipetta, stop, you idiot!”
But Pipetta wasn’t listening anymore. He continued singing about a beautiful Spanish maiden at the top of his lungs and heading, completely unawares, into the mouth of the dragon. Checco left his shelter and dashed off behind him, but a grenade exploded almost immediately between him and the cart, and Checco was buried under a hill of debris. He had just enough time to think that at least he’d be making the journey to the next world with someone from his hometown.
Gaetano took part in the counterattack of Pederobba with his regiment, and since he was hefty and strong as an ox they had paired him up with others like him to lay the planks on the pontoon bridge being installed to allow the Grenadiers of the Sixth Army to cross over to the other side of the Piave. They were mounting a counterattack and the word was that the Austrians were in bad shape. They had also heard that the Duke of Aosta, the king’s cousin, was launching an offensive on the other side of the river with the Third Army, the troops who had taken Gorizia the year before and had kept everyone hoping they would reach Trieste.
The weather was getting worse as the autumn neared, but who cared about the weather? Gaetano had fought four battles on the Isonzo, the battle of Ortigara and then Mount Montello. Two of his comrades had completely lost their hearing thanks to the pounding of eight thousand cannon mouths. Another had lost his sight, and now his eyes were only good for crying.
At first Gaetano had been scared to death and he’d often pissed his pants at the moment in which the lieutenant would shout “Forward, Savoia!” to order an attack. But then he learned how to stick the enemy with his bayonet before they stuck him. He, who had always refused to slaughter a pig because he felt badly for the poor animal that was squealing and struggling to get away, now killed people without batting an eye; he’d killed so many of them it really didn’t matter much one way or the other.
He wanted out. He cared nothing about anything anymore. He wanted out and that was all, and the only way to get out was to win the damned war and to kill as many Germans and Austrians and Croatians and Hungarians as he could, even though they’d never done anything to him. They were trying to do the very same thing anyway, although none of them really knew why.
When the moment finally came, the artillery upstream of his position started laying down enough firepower to frighten God himself, while the bulk of the army crossed on the pontoon bridge further downstream at Pederobba. Gaetano had installed a great number of the heavy ash boards, freshly cut and still smelling of the sawmill where they had been made, that the infantry were now crossing on. They advanced in silence under the pelting rain, not marching in step, treading lightly so they would not give themselves away. All that could be heard was a confused scuttling, not easily noticed against the rush of the current, as the Piave pooled up for a moment amidst the pontoons of the bridge before breaking and running free and fast towards the sea.
Gaetano was one of the last to cross so he and his team could ensure that the bridge was still usable. But not because they would be crossing back, there was no going back anymore. Because the bridge would be needed for guaranteeing supplies and ammunition to the advancing army.
All at once he thought he heard voices, a whispered song. A battalion of Bersaglieri, you could tell from the clusters of feathers perched on their helmets. They were singing in such low voices he had to strain his ears. It wasn’t a war song, or who knows, perhaps it was . . . It sounded like certain songs sung at harvest time in an old dialect that you couldn’t understand entirely. Something about a girl’s heartache because her fiancé had left for the war and she’d heard nothing from him since. Gaetano thought it would be nice to have a fiancée who was waiting at home pining away with love for him, but he didn’t have anyone. Once he got back he’d have to look for a girl and start up a family.
The advance lasted six days in all, without ever stopping. Sometimes entire units of the Austro-Hungarian army, surrounded on every side, surrendered along with the officers who commanded them. They’d had enough of the war as well; they didn’t believe in what they were doing anymore. Every man for himself and God for all. Everything around them was gone; there was nothing but rubble, razed houses, whole towns where the only thing left standing, barely, was the church belltower. A few emaciated chickens still strutted around abandoned farmhouses, and a rare cow witnessed the soldiers’ passage with her big damp eyes, unmoving under the rain.
As they proceeded, a sort of excitement was spreading among the troops and the officers. Victory was suddenly seeming altogether possible, and with it, the end of the war. Even Gaetano felt caught up in the mood. After so many months of bloody battles, of slaughter and destruction, he’d come to the conclusion that wars should never be fought because they only bring havoc and ruin and they don’t solve anything, but that if you had to make war, it was better to win than to lose. Not much is gained, but at least you feel like you’d fought for something. A bit like at home in the winter in the stable when he used to play a hand of briscola without stakes. He would rather win, anyway.
The third of November—he would remember this for the rest of his life—the Austrians surrendered. On the fourth the war was over.