When Dicken reached his billet that night he found the whole Aubrey family bustling around laying the dining table.
“What’s this?” he asked. “A celebration?”
Mrs Aubrey’s hands flew. “Have we not a hero in our midst?”
“Who?”
Mrs Aubrey looked at him, startled. “But you, Monsieur! Did you not destroy the enemies of France this morning? My daughter tells me how you leap into a car and drive at full speed to the airfield where you destroy the Austrian formation single-handed.”
As she clapped her hands, the children began to take their places at the table. There was a lot of whispering and scuffling alongside Dicken between the two boys and Nicola before Nicola emerged triumphant to take the next-door chair. Grace was said, then chicken appeared, cooked with tomato and pepperoni, and the wine began to move around the table.
“This is good wine, my boy,” Aubrey said. “Orvieto. Golden-yellow and very dry.”
“Not as good as a French wine, of course,” Mrs Aubrey explained. “But good. Afterward we have Barbaresco, an aristocrat among wines.” She kissed her fingertips. “It will remind you of violets.”
When the meal was finished, the kitchen staff appeared in their best clothes, the cook and maids in green skirts with white blouses. An elderly footman, in green trousers and a red waistcoat, sang folk songs with them and played an accordion for dancing. Aubrey danced with his second eldest daughter, the eldest boy with his mother, and the rest of the children paired off, leaving Nicola very noticeably free to dance with Dicken. It was an Italian dance Dicken didn’t know but, with everybody pushing him, he found himself circling with Nicola, their hands on their hips.
“I am very happy, Mr Quinney,” she said.
“Dick. Please call me Dick. You’re very pretty, Nicola. Do you know?”
She blushed.
“Nicola’s a pretty name, too.”
She looked up at him, her eyes meeting his for the first time. “Do you know many girls?” she asked.
The question startled him. “Everybody knows one or two.”
“Particularly soldiers. I know England very well,” she went on. “One day I hope we shall go back there. I’d like to live in London and be English like my father. Are you married, Dick?”
He hastened to reassure her.
“You are engaged?”
He wondered about that. He’d been to bed with Zoë Toshack and had even suggested marriage, but he had a feeling she’d been much more interested in the car engine she was looking at. He played for safety.
“No,” he said firmly. “I’m not engaged.”
The rest of the squadron arrived four days later, flying in, in ones and twos. Huts had been erected by this time and Dicken was well aware that his stay with the Aubreys was already short. Occillotti, the Italian interpreter, said that, because of the retreat, riots had been taking place in Treviso as they had left, but that there would be no more fighting now that the winter was on them.
Since the enemy line ran roughly along the northern bank of the Piave, their patrols would carry them up and down the river, where the Austrian observation machines would range to spot for the artillery shelling the southern slopes of the Montello, a hogsback that ran along the front near Montebelluno. To the north the mountains rose like the backcloth for a stage setting and at night they could see pinpricks of light which were shells bursting on the slopes where the Italian trenches ran.
Near the airdrome was a river, the water as clear as gin, the pebbles and the boulders that lined the banks white as old bones in the sun. All around the airdrome the plain was full of troops. The backward movement had finally stopped and reserves were moving north again, and all the tree-trunks were plastered on one side by the mud flung up by wheels. The traffic seemed to go on constantly, even through the night, big guns pulled by tractors, their long barrels camouflaged with branches, mules carrying ammunition, grey trucks filled with men.
The country was dark with the winter rains and the valleys held mists, while on several days there was a wreath of cloud around the mountains. The troops, splashing past, their dark Italian eyes haggard in the grey light, seemed to be wet through to a man and mud-splattered by the lorries and the grey staff cars that roared indifferently past.
The countryside they were to fly over was very different from the squalid wasteland of Flanders. It was thickly populated and the steep round-topped hill of the Montello was clearly going to be a problem in low cloud.
The Austrians were known as the Kameraden Schnürschuh – the laced boot comrades – which was what the Germans called them because of their distinctive laced boots that were said to allow them to run away faster. Despite their recent victory at Caporetto, nobody seemed frightened of them. “Everybody beats the Austrians,” Foote said. “Even the Italians.”
C Flight were first to be ready and, flying a practice formation over the Montello, found themselves looking down on the Piave, a river of many streams, some mere rivulets, others broad and thrusting, running through ribbon-like channels of shingle and between stony banks and innumerable pebbled islands. As they turned north-west with the shining river the stones seemed to move in the sunshine, and looking down, Dicken frowned. The damn things were moving! He looked again, and it dawned on him that what he was looking at was an Aviatik painted in a checkerboard of black and white, which was flying along the river bed so that it was almost indistinguishable from its background.
Moving alongside Trenarworth, he waved and pointed downward. Trenarworth stared in the direction of the pointing finger but obviously saw nothing and lifted his head to stare inquisitively at Dicken. Gesturing wildly, Dicken pointed again, but Trenarworth still didn’t seem to see and, when, a minute or two later he gave the washout signal for the return, Dicken turned away and dived toward the river bed.
He had lost the black and white machine by now, however, and for a moment he wondered if he’d been mistaken. Then he saw it again, flying up and down, keeping carefully to the pebbled banks of the river. Artillery fire was bursting along the Italian lines.
Howling down out of the sky, he came up behind the Aviatik but the Austrian pilot was experienced and swung back underneath him and flew at speed in a south-westerly direction, so that by the time Dicken had turned to follow him, he had begun to head north and was bolting at full speed for the shelter of the Austrian anti-aircraft guns.
With his petrol low, Dicken turned for home, to find a mist settling over the airfield. He put the machine down quickly but by the time it had been wheeled to the hangar, the mist had become a fog that blanketed the field and made further flying impossible. Trenarworth demanded to know why he had left the flight and as Dicken explained what had happened the telephone went.
Trenarworth answered it. When he put it down, he looked curiously at Dicken.
“Artillery, me dear,” he explained. “Said it’s about time somebody chased that black and white bugger away. He’s been troubling them for weeks.”
It didn’t take them long to discover that flying on the Italian Front wasn’t as easy as they’d expected and that the Austrian Air Force wasn’t as inadequate as their showing at Christmas had indicated. Instead of “jagdstaffeln”, they called their squadrons “fliegerkompanien”, shortened to “Flik”, and until recently had all been flying Hansa-Brandenburgs, designed by a man called Heinkel, strange high-nosed machines with tall fuselages, which were called Spiders because of their strange strut formation. Now, however, they had gone over to Bergs, Albatroses and Phönixes, small machines with round-ended wings, large scalloped tails and inward-sloping struts, that could out-climb a Camel, and they had been taking a steady toll of the Italian airmen.
There were other difficulties which highlighted the difference from France. Because of the rapid retreat, there were few military telephone lines and the normal telephone system had to be used. But this was very indifferent and, as there was no priority for military signals, when they wished to contact the artillery or the forward positions, they had to take their turn with commercial and private callers.
The mists and fogs that appeared on the Venetian Plain were a further hazard. Occillotti said they were caused by the warm air from the Adriatic striking the bitter winds off the mountains, and the weather changes were sudden. At bewildering speed, sunshine gave way to fog which could rise to five hundred feet. To overcome the difficulty, they set up a forward signal station to indicate by ground markers to returning aircraft which airfields were fogbound and which were clear, but they soon found it didn’t work because the signal station was invariably fogbound, too.
With the weather clamped down and the local people insisting it would stay clamped down for several days, the Italians were quick to arrange a public ceremony to announce the arrival of their allies. They didn’t think much of the British Government because they felt they should have sent troops to the Italian front months before, but now that they’d arrived they were determined not to miss the opportunity for an occasion. The whole Aubrey family was excited at the prospect of a march past and Nicola was allowed a new coat and hat, which she shyly brought to show Dicken.
“They’ll ruin the march past,” he said gallantly. “Everybody will be too busy looking at you.”
“Our father said she wanted a new coat and hat especially for you,” Marie-Gabrielle pointed out.
Nicola tried to shoo her away but she refused to go, a miniature version of Nicola herself and, like all the Aubrey children, attractive to look at.
“Blue suits her,” she pointed out in matter-of-fact tones. “Last year she went in for red. Our father said it was because she was a bit gone on a French officer who wore red trousers.”
Despite the close proximity of Venice, they were not allowed to fly within five miles of it because the Italians there didn’t want to fire their anti-aircraft guns in case the vibrations damaged the fragile buildings. They had already discovered at Issora that the Italian gunners weren’t very particular and shot at anything that appeared. The Italians were nervous in every way about Venice, in fact, and cameras were not allowed, even in Issora, and the sending home of picture postcards which might fall into Austrian hands was forbidden, as was the purchase of spirits, wine or bread from local shops because of the shortages.
Despite the blue skies and the beauty of the countryside, Italy seemed in the end to have less to recommend it than they’d expected. It was riddled with rickets, tuberculosis, illiteracy, inertia, corruption, unemployment, charms, churches, absentee landlords, bailiffs, floods, debts, bad sanitation, malnutrition and infant mortality. But the Italians themselves were warm-hearted, gregarious and quick to rejoice. But they liked to be dramatic about things and their sudden glows of warmth had their reciprocals in sudden bursts of histrionic rage, though they soon caught on to the fact that British troops delighted in egg and chips, and small cafés opened all along the road to Capadolio, each with its little group of tables and its wired-in chicken run with laying hens.
Even Italian humour was different, uproarious and bawdy, and they seemed to spend a large part of every day singing. Foote’s gramophone was of a type they had never seen before and the air was full of “Oohs” and “Ahs” and “Mamma mias”, and from then on they were constantly on the doorstep with records they wanted playing – all of them, to Foote’s disgust, opera. Even the Italian infantrymen camped across the road edged nearer, joining in to outsing the record and indignantly stopping the carts which rattled past so they could hear better.
Without doubt, the war in Italy was a happier, more naïve affair than the war in France where everything was deadly, adult and in earnest. In Italy there wasn’t the same intensity. The Italians had been known from time to time to hang their washing on their barbed wire, and when the Austrians had advanced to the Piave they hadn’t even cut off the telephone across the river.
“Ma naturalmente,” Occillotti explained. “The people there are Italians and they have paid their subscriptions.”
They were not fools, however, and their uniforms, surely the ugliest in Europe, were also the least visible. “Their wearers don’t even make a shadow,” Occillotti said proudly.
Because of the tree-clad slopes where they fought, they wore what they called grigio-verde – grey-green – known to the British as rat-grey, and it was quite uncanny how difficult it was to see them against the background.
“Take mud from the Nile,” Foote said, “rub in a couple of pounds of ship-rat’s hair, then paint a roan horse with it and you’ll understand why the Austrians can’t see an Italian at fifty yards.”
The bersaglieri were always popular and were always being asked to swap headgear, but the carabinieri, their famous cocked hats covered with grey linen for the war, were totally uncompromising. You didn’t argue with them and you didn’t ask them to change hats.
Seeing what was provided for off-duty British troops in the way of YMCA canteens and bars, Occillotti was indignant that the Italian politicians had done nothing for their men.
“Because we can sing,” he said, “they expect us to sing all the time.”
For the celebration of the arrival of the allies, British infantry appeared from the north, to be followed shortly afterwards by a battery of artillery and a French alpine battalion. Drawn up on a patch of empty ground outside the town, they shivered with the rest of the squadron as they waited for the word to march in. Having arrived first, 28 and 45 Squadrons had opted out with a claim that they were too busy defending the sacred soil of Italy.
An Italian band marched up, resplendent with brilliant uniforms and cocks’ feathers in their hats, and while the musicians licked the mouthpieces of their instruments, a civilian photographer with a camera on a three-legged stand manoeuvred blindly under his black cloth.
As they approached the Town Hall the streets were crowded. Bunting had been hung up and there were banners at every window – Italian, British and French – but, with the band playing an impossible marching tune, it was difficult to keep the step.
“I think it’s a valeta,” Foote murmured out of the corner of his mouth.
The crowd seemed to love it nevertheless. Schoolchildren waved miniature flags and the streets were full of cheering. Every window was crammed with people and photographers were stationed at every corner. Among the crowd around the mayor were delegations from all three countries, and among the British contingent Dicken could see the Aubreys, Nicola in her bright blue coat and hat.
They remained at attention while the band played “God Save the King”, the “Marseillaise”, the “Marcia Reale”, the “Brabançonne”, “Tipperary” and the “Marcia del Alpini”. By the end of it their knees were trembling with the effort of standing still.
As the band finished, there was a yell of “Evvivano i Liberatori! Evvivano gli Inglesi! Evvivano i Francesi!” and everybody began to sing “La Campana di San Guista”, the song of the Italians who had fought for generations to free Northern Italy from Austrian domination.
“O Italia, O Italia del mio core,
Tu ci vien’ a liberar’.”
The mayor made a speech, to which a British staff officer replied in halting Italian. The crowd was entranced.
“They speak the language of Dante,” the mayor crowed.
For some reason, an elderly man with long white hair delivered an oration on behalf of the Italian Teachers’ Association. Speaking a little English, he bored them silly with references to Gladstone, Palmerston, Garibaldi and Cavour, and announced that he was proud to see them there because his wife was also “an Englishman”. Italian banners were presented to the commanding officers, to be flown alongside their national flags, and women moved along the lines of men, giving short lengths of red, white and green ribbon for good luck. Among them was Mrs Aubrey, who handed Dicken not only a red, white and green ribbon, but also a red, white and blue one.
“My brave brother in France,” she announced, “has always worn one as a good luck charm and he is still safe after three years of fighting.”
Since he was Railway Transport Officer at Dieppe, his safety, Dicken decided, probably owed less to his scrap of ribbon than to the fact that he was eighty miles from the front line.
He had been informed by this time that in future he was to live with the rest of the squadron on the airdrome and the Aubreys decided that the parting merited another dinner. It was the usual mixture of solemnity and gaiety, with prayers for Dicken’s safety alongside Mrs Aubrey’s boasts that 1918 would see the end of German domination in Europe.
“By then,” she said, “gallant France will have asserted her mastery over the treacherous Boche.”
While the younger children were whipped off to bed and Aubrey disappeared to his study to work on papers for the next day, Nicola played the piano softly for Dicken. He sat alongside her, trying to turn the sheet music when she nodded. As their fingers touched, her playing faltered and, as she stopped, he leaned over and kissed her cheek.
For a second she stared back at him, her eyes huge and starry with long dark lashes.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because kisses have meaning.”
“They’re supposed to have.”
“But it’s dangerous. We’re Catholics. You’re a Protestant.”
He smiled. “Nothing like variety.”
She frowned. “You’re making a joke of it.”
The smile faded. “Aren’t you?”
She was silent for a long time, then she shook her head slowly. “George has decided that instead of university, he’s going to enter a seminary and become a priest. His religion’s very important to him. So it is to me.”
Dicken wasn’t quite sure what to say. He couldn’t imagine Zoë getting steamed up about anything as illogical as religion, and as far as he could remember, he’d never seen her going to church.
From a girl who appeared to have no religion at all, he seemed to have progressed to one with too much.