The cannon had produced, as its only accomplishment, the wounds of the gunner and the lieutenant. All the sappers had fallen. But the assault had to be launched just the same. The general was still there, like an inquisitor, determined to witness, to the bitter end, the agony of the condemned. It was just a few minutes before nine o’clock.
The battalion was ready, the bayonets inserted. The 9th Company was amassed around the breach opened for the sappers. The 10th was right behind them. The other companies were all in closed ranks inside the trench and the passageways and behind the rocks to the rear of the trenches. You couldn’t hear a whisper. The only things moving were the canteens of brandy. From the belt to the mouth, from the mouth to the belt, from the belt to the mouth without interruption, set in motion like shuttles on a giant loom.
Captain Bravini had his watch in his hand, and he was staring at it, following intensely the inexorable passing of the minutes. Without taking his eyes off the watch, he yelled, “Ready to attack!”
Then he yelled again, “Ready for the assault! Officers, at the head of your units!
The wounded sapper sergeant kept on shouting, “Avan …”
The eyes of the soldiers, wide open, looked for our eyes. The captain was still bent over his watch and the soldiers found only my eyes. I forced myself to smile and mime a few words on the edge of my lips; but those eyes, brimming with questions and anguish, frightened me.
Of all of war’s moments, the one just before an assault was the most gruesome.
“Ready for the assault!” the captain repeated once more.
The assault! Where were we going? We were leaving our shelter and going outside. Where? The machine guns, all of them, lying on their cartridge-crammed bellies, were waiting for us. Anyone who hasn’t experienced those few seconds has not known war.
The captain’s words came crashing down like slamming shutters. The 9th was on its feet, but I couldn’t see all of it, squashed against the walls of the trench. The 10th was on the other side of me, in the middle of the trench, and I could distinguish each of its soldiers. Two of the soldiers moved and I saw them, one beside the other, maneuvering their rifles into place under their chins. One of them bent over, fired his rifle, and slumped down on himself. The second soldier imitated the first and collapsed next to him. Was it cowardice, bravery, or madness? The first was a veteran of the Carso.
“Savoy!” yelled Captain Bravini.
“Savoy!” the troops responded.
And it was a yell that had the sound of a wailful lament and a desperate invocation. The 9th, Lieutenant Avellini in the lead, poured out of the breach and launched into the assault. The general and the colonel were at the loopholes.
When the head of the 10th got to the breach, we threw ourselves forward. The 10th, the 11th, and the 12th followed us in a rush. In a few seconds the whole battalion was in front of the enemy trenches.
Whether we had yelled or not, the enemy machine guns were waiting for us. As soon as we got beyond a strip of rocky terrain and began the descent toward the valley, out in the open, they opened fire. Our shouts were covered by their gun bursts. The terrain was so thickly traversed by hisses and explosions that it seemed to me there must have been ten machine guns firing on us. The soldiers who got hit fell to the ground heavily, as though they had been thrown from trees.
For a minute or so, I was overcome by a sort of mental torpor, and my whole body felt heavy and slow. Maybe I’m wounded, I thought. Yet I could feel that I wasn’t wounded. The machine gun bullets whizzing by and the constant rush of the units on our heels woke me up. Instantly I regained consciousness of my situation. Not anger, not hate, as in a brawl, but utter calm, absolute, a sort of infinite weariness wrapped around my now lucid mind. Then even that weariness subsided and I was running again, fast.
I felt calm again and I could see everything around me. Officers and men were falling with their arms outstretched and, as they fell, their rifles were thrown through the air in front of them.
Captain Bravini never stopped yelling, “Savoy!”
A lieutenant from the 12th passed right by me. He was red in the face and had a musket in his hand. He was a republican and detested the monarchist attack yell. As he saw me he cried out, “Viva l’Italia!”
I had a walking stick in my hand. I raised it up high to respond to him, but wasn’t able to pronounce a word. If we had been on level terrain none of us would have reached the enemy entanglements. The machine guns would have mowed us all down. But the terrain had a slight downward slope and it was covered with bushes and rocks. The machine guns had to adjust their aim constantly for elevation and their fire became less effective. Nevertheless, the assault waves grew thinner, and out of the thousand men in the battalion, there were very few left who were still on their feet and advancing. I looked toward the enemy trenches. Their defenders were not hidden behind the loopholes. They were all standing up and leaning out over the trenches. They felt secure. A lot of them were even standing on the parapets. They were all shooting at us, carefully taking aim, as though it were a drill on the parade ground.
I stumbled over the sergeant of the sappers. He was lying on his side, the cuirass wrapped around him, his helmet shot through from side to side. He had been hit in the head while urging his men forward, and he kept repeating the cry that had been cut off in his throat, in a pitiful singsong. “Avan … avan …”
Around him lay the bodies of three sappers, their armor ripped with gaping holes.
We were coming to the trenches. Captain Bravini fell, too, and I saw him, his arms open wide, plummet into a bush. I thought he was dead. But immediately afterward, I heard the cry “Savoy!” repeated over and over in a faint voice.
The battalion was supposed to attack on a front two hundred fifty to three hundred meters wide. But the downward slope of the terrain had inevitably pushed all of us, as we gradually moved forward, toward the same strip of terrain right in front of the enemy trenches, barely fifty meters wide. The remains of the battalion were all amassed at that point. The machine guns couldn’t hit us anymore, but we provided the standing riflemen with a compact target. We were being shot at point blank.
Suddenly, the Austrians stopped shooting. I saw the ones who were in front of us, their eyes thrust open with a terrified look, almost as though it were they and not us who were under fire. One of them, who didn’t have a rifle, cried out in Italian, “Basta! Basta!”
“Basta!” the others repeated from the parapets.
The one who was unarmed looked like a chaplain.
“Enough, brave soldiers, don’t get yourselves killed like this!”
We came to a halt for an instant. We weren’t shooting, they weren’t shooting. The one who seemed to be a chaplain was leaning out so close to us that if I had reached out my arm I could have touched him. He had his eyes fixed on us, and I looked back at him.
From our trench a harsh voice cried out, “Forward! Men of my glorious division, forward! Forward, against the enemy!”
It was General Leone.
Lieutenant Avellini was a few meters away from me. We looked at each other. He said, “Let’s go forward.”
I repeated, “Let’s go forward.”
I wasn’t holding a pistol but an Alpine walking stick. I didn’t think of taking out my pistol. I threw my stick at the Austrians. One of them caught it in midair. Avellini had his pistol in his hand. He moved forward, trying to climb up onto a tree trunk that was lying on top of the barbed wire. It was the trunk of a fir tree that, eradicated by an artillery shell, had crashed onto the barbed wire. He climbed up on top of it and struggled to walk across it, as though he were on a gangplank. He fired his pistol and shouted to the soldiers, “So shoot! Fire!”
A few soldiers fired their guns.
“Forward! Forward!” the general yelled.
Avellini was walking across the trunk and it was all he could do to keep his balance. Behind him, two soldiers struggled to keep their feet. I had come to an entanglement where it seemed to me it was possible to get through. There was a narrow passage through the wire. I started in. But after a few steps I found my way blocked by a cheval-de-frise. It was impossible to go on. I turned around and saw some soldiers from the 10th, who had followed me. I stood there frozen. There was no shooting coming from the trenches. Through a large loophole directly ahead of me. I got a glimpse of a soldier’s head. He was looking at me. All I could see were his eyes. And it seemed to me that all he had was eyes; they looked so big. Slowly, I took a few steps backward, without turning my back, still under the gaze of those big eyes. Then I thought, “the eyes of an ox.”
I wiggled out of the entanglement and made my way toward Avellini. There was already a group of soldiers standing on the tree trunk, holding each other up. As I was approaching the trunk, a voice of command cried out from the enemy trench, “Feuer!”
Two shots rang out. The trunk turned over and the men fell on their backs. Avellini wasn’t hit and he responded with two pistol shots. We all threw ourselves on the ground in the middle of some bushes, and took cover behind the fir trees. The assault was over. It’s taken me a long time to describe it but the whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a minute.
Avellini was nearby and he whispered to me, “What should we do?”
“Stay put and wait until it gets dark,” I replied.
“And the assault?” he insisted.
“The assault?”
The Austrians kept shooting, but their aim was high. We were safe. We could still hear Captain Bravini’s weary voice, feeble. He kept on repeating “Savoy.” On all fours, I went looking for the captain. I think it took me an hour to get to him. He was lying down, his head behind a rock, one hand on his head. His jacket was off and one arm was bandaged and covered with blood. Around him there were only dead bodies. He must have bandaged himself. The bushes kept him hidden from the trenches. I got very close to him without him noticing. I touched him on the leg and he saw me. He took a long look at me and repeated again, lowering his voice, “Savoy.”
I held my finger up to my lips to tell him to keep quiet. I crawled over to his head and whispered in his ear, “Shut up!”
He seemed to wake up from a long sleep. He put his finger up to his lips, too, and didn’t talk anymore. It was as though I had pushed the button of a mechanical device and turned it off.
Now the whole valley was quiet. Our wounded had stopped their crying. The sapper sergeant had gone quiet, too, dropped off into eternal silence. Even the Austrians weren’t shooting anymore. The sun was shining on the little battlefield. The rest of the day went by like that, an instant and an eternity.
When, after dark, we returned to our lines, the general was there to shake the hands of all the officers—five, counting the wounded. As he took his leave, he said to Captain Bravini, who had a fractured forearm, “You can count on a Silver Medal for Military Valor.”
The captain remained at attention until the general had disappeared. Left alone with us, he sat down and cried all night, without managing to say a word.
When we had finished carrying back the wounded and the dead, which the Austrians allowed us to gather without firing a shot, I lay down and tried to get to sleep. My head was so light it felt like I was breathing with my brain. I was exhausted but I couldn’t get to sleep. The Greek professor came over to talk. He was depressed. His battalion had been part of the assault as well, farther to the left, and had been destroyed, like ours. He talked to me with his eyes closed.
“I’m afraid of going crazy,” he told me. “I’m going to go crazy one of these days, or I’m going to kill myself. I’ve got to kill myself.”
I didn’t know what to say. I, too, could feel the ebb and flow of waves of madness. At times, I could feel my brain sloshing around inside my skull, like water inside a shaken bottle.