Throughout the last week of October 1944, Rome was drenched by rain and the streets off the Via Appia became muddied between their cobblestones. On November 1, the rain stopped, the sun broke and a warm, clear day began. Up north, Tony Basciano and the rest of the Hasty Ps were heading to the town of Miramare. Eight had been killed and seven wounded the previous day. Forty-one reinforcements arrived while soldiers from “A” Company went to the movies in the town of Riccione.1 In Avellino, the scent of pine needles filled the head of Captain Hugh Ramsay Park as he sipped coffee and smoked a cigarette at a café in the town square. At 28 Via Pistoia, Maria paused as she prepared breakfast for Bill and thought of her family. Today was Tutti Santi, All Saint’s Day, and all the families in Naples would be going to church together. On Via Cesena, Joe Pringle and Bill Holton slept with their women beside them, secure in bedrooms ringed by shuttered windows that cut the Italian sun. Tom Jamieson, now a captain, reported in at Allied 1st Echelon Headquarters in Rome. After spending the fall attached to the 8th Army up near Ravenna, running supplies up to the front, he was in Rome helping to organize the next big push. He was soon to be sent to Greece to meet with partisan guerrillas. Private L. G. Doiron, from Nova Scotia, who had spent time in the Glass House and who owed the government fifteen months’ back pay, was listed as a deserter.2 After being sent to Italy and serving at the Hitler Line and the Gothic Line, he had gone AWOL from the West Nova Scotia Regiment on October 1. A Private Fried, who had escaped from the 2nd Canadian Field Punishment Camp in Avellino, was reported killed in action. The commandant at the Field Punishment Camp learned that, after escaping from military prison, Fried had caught up with his regiment, the Seaforths, and returned to the front. He crossed him off his list.
Charlie Honess woke up in his damp, dirty basement bedroom and stared at the ceiling. His pillow was soaked with sweat, and up his spine he felt an uncomfortable tickling, as if a snake were coiling and uncoiling itself in the small of his back. Honess dressed quickly, at least as quickly as he could, but his head spun and his balance was off and he had trouble putting on his shoes. Once his shoes were on, Honess stuck his gun in his coat pocket and walked up the stairs to the ground floor. He was dressed as an on-duty GI, a typical disguise for him. Charlie saw Maria in the kitchen with the landlady and her daughter. The women were cutting open pomegranates, which had come into season in October and had become a staple of the Sailor Gang’s diet. Lucky in particular craved the orange-shaped fruit with its tough rind and acidic reddish pulp. Honess stepped to the counter, grabbing a few seeds and popping them in his mouth.
“Buon giorno, Carlo,” Maria said. “ti piacciono i melograni?”
“Buon giorno, si, si,” Honess told the women. “Come va?”
“Bene,” the landlady replied. “E te?”
“Non c’e male,” Honess said. “Non c’e. Vado al bar. Okay?”
“Okay, Carlo,” Maria told him.
Honess walked out the front door, glancing up at the pine tree that stretched over the front garden of the house on Via Pistoia. He strolled down the short street, turned up Via Taranto and gazed at the apartment buildings lining it, five and six storeys high. At the corner of Via Orvieto he saw the post office, built by Mussolini before the war but now in the hands of the Allies. From Via Taranto he crossed along Via Pinerolo and stopped, sitting down for a cigarette in the round park at Re di Roma. The pinching in his back began to knot up again. The snake tightened its coils and Honess worked his shoulders, trying to shake it. He was up again quickly, heading for Bar Cecchelia on Via Appia, which he could see a little in the distance. There were soldiers sitting at tables out in the sunshine with coffee and liqueurs. It was only eleven o’clock, but who was counting?
At eleven thirty, Bill Croft and Maria met Charlie, and the three decided to go to a restaurant on the Via Appia for a lunch of pasta and spinach. Afterwards, Bill suggested that they walk to a bar near the Entertainment National Service Association (ENSA) Cinema on Via Rimini. They arrived at the bar at about one in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day drinking rum and coffee. Lucky appeared that afternoon at four o’clock. He had a few drinks and then he and Honess went off to another bar to buy a couple of bottles of liquor. At four thirty, they came back to the bar near the cinema. Honess would later describe the rest of the afternoon:3
Lucky said that he had got a party on that night and would I like to come with him. He also asked Bill. I said, “Yes, all right.” Well, we all came out of the bar, walked across the road to the ENSA cinema and a garry [a military jeep] came along and there was an American and two girls. One of the bottles was open and Lucky asked the American would he like a drink. The garry stopped and we gave the American a drink and then the American asked where we were going, so Lucky said we were going to a party. The American asked us if we would like to go down with him for a drink, so we got into the garry, drove round somewhere and we finished up, I am not certain of the name of the club, but it was either the New Zealand Officers Club or the South African Officers Club, and right opposite the officers club there was a café, but when we got there the café was not open.
By this time Lucky was pretty drunk. Honess, by his own confession, was half drunk.
We had been there some time waiting for this café to open and then Lucky got fed up with waiting and he threw a bottle up against the wall, one of the empty bottles, and said, “Come on lads, let’s go to this party.”
I said, “All right, we will go to the party,” and Lucky tried to get a garry. He could not get a garry, and a jeep came along with an American in, and the American gave us a lift back to where we had started from, just near the ENSA Cinema.
Lucky went to the bar and bought a bottle of anisette, a colourless sweet liquor flavoured with aniseed. It was half past five. Honess and Lucky went along Via Rimini and found a bar. Lucky told Honess to open the bottle and “give the boys a drink”: “There was lots of GIs in there and sailors and Italian women and he told me to give anybody a drink who wanted one.”
Lucky and Honess spent two hours there.
“When we got in there,” Honess said, “there was a table reserved and we sat down and then there was about six or seven GIs came in, an Englishman and an Italian girl. They all came over to the table and they all knew Lucky, and Lucky introduced me to them, and they all sat down and then some food Lucky ordered came over and there was also a lot of drink on the table.” They spent the evening drinking, singing and eating. Lucky ordered twenty bottles of wine, just for himself and Honess.
The bar filled up and the party continued into the night. Lucky and Honess joked and traded songs. Lucky sang Cape Breton ballads and Honess sang east London music hall songs. Somewhere around eight o’clock an accordion player came into the restaurant. Lucky was overjoyed; he gave the man five dollars and told him to play. The crowd at the restaurant clapped and laughed, and soon people on the street were clamouring to get in. Lucky delighted in the scene.
Then the proprietor of the place wanted this music fellow to go away after playing a couple of tunes because the music was attracting a lot of people and the place was very crowded. Lucky did not speak Italian at all. I speak a bit, and if Lucky wanted to say anything he would tell me what he wanted to say. This proprietor was telling me, and I was telling Lucky, about the music fellow. The music fellow was not gone, but Lucky went to pay his bill and he had not got enough to pay it and he asked me to give him some money.
I gave him fifteen dollars and he said that would be enough. Then when I was looking at the bill that the Italian proprietor had given me, Lucky had moved over to the end of the table, and the next thing I knew Lucky had shot the table up in the air, and all the bottles were flying around, and then Lucky started tipping the other tables over. I do not know exactly why he tipped it up. He was in a temper, that was all. I imagine it was to do with the amount of the bill, because he was saying how much he had spent there and how much he had drunk and what he had given the music fellow to play music.
Some more fellows, some GIs over in the corner, picked up some bottles and came at Lucky. I was trying to smooth Lucky down, to pacify him a bit, and they came at me with a bottle. I took a pistol out of my back pocket and I told the fellows who had the bottles to back up in the back of the bar, and I said to the American fellows and Lucky: “Come on, we will get out of here.” But the American fellows moved against the stairs but Lucky said no, he had hurt his wrist or something, and he said, “I am going to find the fellow that cut my wrist.”
Honess backed up the stairs with the Americans he had been drinking with, all the while trying to talk Lucky out of the bar. Lucky was having none of it. He handed Honess his wristwatch and told him to take care of it. Honess told Lucky, “If you don’t come, Lucky, I am going to get away and leave you.”
This did not sit well with McGillivary. “If you take off on me, Charlie,” he swore, “I will kill you next time I see you.”
As he was going up the stairs for the last time, Honess saw a Canadian soldier, pistol in hand, going down into the bar. Earlier in the night, Lucky had given the Canuck a drink from his bottle. The Canadian told Charlie, “All right, I will look after him.”
That was all the encouragement Charlie needed. He backed out of the bar and then ran down the street, sprinting for about twenty minutes. The flickering lights from the cafés and bars blurred as he passed. Charlie made for Joe and Bill’s apartment, on Via Cesena and walked through the large porch archway at the apartment’s front door, climbing the stairs. He banged on the door. In a few moments, Holton opened it. He and Pringle were both sober; they had decided to turn in for the evening with their girlfriends. Holton saw Charlie standing there, his hair rumpled. He had blood on the left side of his shirt and he was out of breath.
“Where’s Joe?” Honess asked, and he pushed past Holton in a stagger.
Charlie walked down the hallway and saw the Canadian, whom he knew as Joe Pringle, half-dressed, standing beside his bed. Harold’s girlfriend was lying under the covers. Pringle came out and asked Honess what the trouble was. Charlie rushed through the events of the evening; he’d been in a fight with Lucky on the other side of town and he’d left Lucky there. The three men talked briefly. Just what sort of trouble had it been? Finally, Joe said that they might as well go round to Via Pistoia and see what had happened to Lucky. They fetched the jeep from the garage on Via Rimini and drove over. It was around nine-thirty.
They parked the jeep in front of the house, and Joe removed the rotor and coil wire to prevent the jeep from being stolen. Inside, the landlady and her daughter were cleaning up the kitchen; they greeted the women in Italian. The three men then went upstairs to Bill Croft’s room and found him and Maria asleep. Joe sat down in a chair by the room’s window, waking Maria. Bill, who had gone to bed drunk at seven o’clock, kept on snoring. Even in his own inebriated state, Honess thought Croft looked “pretty drunk.” Charlie crawled onto the bed and gently picked up Croft’s pistol, which was tucked behind the mattress. He handed it to Harold, who set it on a small table near where he was sitting. Bill was fully dressed, lying on top of the sheets, with his shoes off. Honess told Holton to get a glass of water.
As Honess and Holton tickled his feet and sprinkled water in his face, Croft gradually awoke. He would later recall seeing “Pringle grinning at me.”4 Charlie asked, “Where is your gun, Bill?”
“Down there by the bed,” Croft said.
“Are you sure?” asked Honess, smiling.
Croft looked in its usual hiding place, the dresser drawer beside the bed. “Maria must have shifted it,” Croft said. Then Honess laughed, grabbing the gun from the table and tossing it to him. Harold sat silently and watched as Honess showed Croft Lucky’s wristwatch and recounted the story about the fight in the bar. “Lucky told me, ‘Get to hell out of here, I can take care of myself,’ ” Honess said. A soldier had rushed him with a bottle, but another Canadian had been there and had helped Honess escape. “I pulled out my pistol, but I don’t remember firing a shot,” he said. Honess realized that he had lost his jacket.
Harold Pringle was not impressed by the theatrics. He told Honess, “I think you had better go down to bed.”
“I will see Lucky later,” Charlie said and went down to the basement, where he dug up a bottle of crème de menthe that he had been saving. Honess poured himself a few drinks.
The landlady brought coffee up to the bedroom, then she and her daughter left for home, which was a few doors down at 11 Via Pistoia. The men each smoked a cigarette. Holton brought out a deck of cards and began playing solitaire at the foot of the bed. A half-hour passed, and then they heard Honess holler up.
“Joe, there is someone fucking around the house.”
Croft told Holton to “nip down there and see who it is.”
Holton went downstairs and opened the front door, and Lucky sort of “fell into” the hallway. He had blood on his hands and face and he was not wearing shoes. “Shut the door and lock it,” he said. As Holton locked the door, Charlie came up from the basement. “Get upstairs out of the way,” he said to Holton. “This is nothing to do with you.” Holton went back upstairs to Bill Croft’s bedroom.
“What’s all the noise at this time of night?” Bill wanted to know.
“Oh, Lucky has come in and looks the worse for wear,” Holton answered.
Croft was not worried. He closed his eyes and declared, “Let them fight it out between themselves.”
The men could hear an argument beginning downstairs. Lucky was yelling. Maria started to cry, and though she could speak very little English, she thought Lucky’s voice sounded “annoyed.” He and Honess were quarrelling about the incident at the bar. Lucky told his friend he was a “yellow bastard. I told you what I would do to you.” Then Lucky moved into his room and toward his chest of drawers. Honess remembered that that was where he kept his revolver.
Meanwhile, Croft was fed up. “Go down and tell them Maria is crying,” he said. Holton rushed down but as he reached the foot of the stairs, he saw Honess and Lucky struggling. He saw Honess grab hold of Lucky, pulling him back, at the same time pulling his pistol from his pocket. Honess stuck the pistol in Lucky’s ribs and said, “Shut up and don’t move or I’ll shoot.”
Lucky replied, “You haven’t got the nerve, you chickenshit bastard.”
AT MIDNIGHT ON NOVEMBER 1, 1944, Gabriele Di Biagio was preparing for bed. Di Biagio was a farmer who lived in the village of Torre Gaia, a small hamlet outside Rome. That night he had attended celebrations at a friend’s house. As every Italian knew, today had been Tutti Santi, All Saints’ Day. It was a holiday reserved for worship and for feasting. Every Italian also knew that after Tutti Santi, right at the crack of mezzanotte, at midnight, came Tutti Morti, the Day of the Dead.
That was why Di Biagio had returned home well before midnight.
At midnight on Tutti Morti, Italians believed, all the dead from all the thousands of years past rose up from their graves and walked the roads. They could move freely but could not pass through a crossroads. That was one reason why all Italian graveyards were located outside city walls.
The dead had no specific malice against the living on Tutti Morti. They were not seeking revenge. But they might cause trouble for those among the living who dared to venture out on their night. Bad things happened to those who were on the roads after midnight on Tutti Morti.
At midnight, Di Biagio heard a truck drive down the main street of his village and past his house. His dog barked at the noise. About ten or fifteen minutes later he heard a truck drive back in the opposite direction. Di Biagio assumed it was a truckload of bandits out to steal. He rose from bed and went to his window. From there he saw the shadow of what seemed like a small military vehicle with its lights off. It passed down the main street and out of view. Di Biagio returned to bed.
The next day, one of Di Biagio’s grandsons went out after breakfast to play in the fields near Di Biagio’s house at Torre Gaia. The ground was muddy from the rain and a slight drizzle was coming down. The boy followed the water as it ran through ditches and irrigation wells and then he saw something that stopped him cold. He fetched his grandfather.
Gabriele Di Biagio, his brother and his brother-in-law went back with the boy to the field. There they saw the branch of a pine tree and a little grass resting on a dead body in an old irrigation ditch. It was a man’s body, dressed in an olive green uniform with American sergeant’s stripes. The corpse’s head leaned on its chest. The body was seated with its arms folded and its legs running down the ditch. It wore socks but no shoes. Its toes were sticking up into the air.