IT WAS AN ARMY STOREHOUSE THE ENEMY HAD REACHED before our rearguard had had time to set fire to it. Its southern side was scarcely more than a dozen steps from the wood, and was unguarded.
In a whisper Renato asked the woman where the horses and mules were.
‘Behind the store.’ That woman knew her onions. ‘The men here are always drunk. They go inside and drink themselves silly.’
I followed Renato to the building. There were four sentries. Only one was awake, smoking.
‘Wait for me among those carts. I’ll lay my hands on a horse.’
I slithered into the ditch. Several minutes passed. No sign of him. The carts were really a heap of wrecks, but two were serviceable. I inspected the wheels, the axles. I crawled in under the one with a bench nailed to the floorboards. I was thinking of Brian’s ankle.
Renato joined me half an hour later. He had a horse, and the others were with him. The Englishman let go of the woman, who was hard pushed to support him, and grabbed on to me. He was sopping wet and dead on his feet. Maybe he had a fever. He smelt of hay and decay.
The girls climbed onto the cart while Renato backed the horse between the shafts.
He then had to help me with Brian, who lay back on the boards with his throbbing ankle up on the seat between the two girls.
The woman got up on the box with Renato and me, and took the reins from him.
‘I know how. Falzè?’
‘Falzè it is.’
The horse was a bay, iron-shod carthorse. It moved off at the merest murmur from the woman, her head now covered with a piece of sacking.
‘She knows horses,’ whispered Renato in my ear. He was tense, but relieved.
We slid off into the darkness. After nearly an hour the woman drew up beside a haystack. ‘We need to get some hay. Over that hump there’s a bridge, and it’s guarded.’
Renato looked at her for a long moment. He turned towards Brian. He was asleep, or maybe he had fainted. ‘All right, let’s get a move on.’
I dismounted with him and the elder of the girls. In a few minutes the cart was piled with hay. We all scrambled under it except for Renato, who rubbed a bit of soil over his face and into his hair, and then climbed back on the box beside the woman. ‘I’d better take the reins now. I’m your husband, a woman carter would look odd.’ She handed him the reins without a murmur.
The first, slow moments of daylight. The horse’s hoofs clattered on the cobbles and the hay bulged out over the sides of the cart. In less than ten minutes we reached the bridge. I poked my head out. No one there. A hundred metres away on the left was a sleeping encampment. I saw a fire burning and three men warming their hands at it. One of them, the only one wearing a helmet, raised his head to look in our direction, but he lowered it again almost at once and lit his pipe. I could make out from even that far away that it was a large, curved pipe. Work was beginning again, but the intense cold made the men too lazy to be interested in what was on a cart.
As daylight grew the roadside pickets thinned out. Every so often there would be some mechanical carcass blocking a ditch, and a patrol surrounding it wielding spanners and hammers, and the occasional soldier looking up at the cart. As for Renato, he observed everything. Those infantrymen had a well-fed look to them; the sacking of the Italian army stores and the houses was still boosting their rations. ‘But not for long,’ he said, pushing my head back under the hay. ‘They’re getting indigestion now, but food shortage is going to come, and it will be long and hard, for everyone.’
In the warmth of the pungent hay I nodded off. I dreamt of Villa Spada, I dreamt of Giulia who was giving herself to me, until I was woken by a jolt. I heard Renato’s voice: ‘Only Schützen.’ I peeped out again. He was lighting his pipe and speaking to the woman: ‘No Germans here.’ He turned round. ‘And you, Paolo, pull your head back under!’
The pilot’s chubby face emerged beside mine.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Better.’
The woman nestled up close to Renato. And seeing the pair of us with our hair full of hay, she laughed. For the first time. I noticed she had good teeth. Comfortable life and healthy food, I thought.
‘How are my girls doing?’
‘They’re asleep.’ The pilot’s accent made us laugh, all three.
‘This is what I like about war,’ Brian laughed along with us, ‘when you get a laugh. That’s the best thing.’
A ‘Sshh!’ from Renato sent us all ducking back under. I held a hand over the mouth of one of the girls in case she woke up, and Brian did the same with the other. A rumble of engines. Less than a minute later, after a bend, the cart drew into the roadside. Lorries, lots of them. A motorized convoy climbing up the valley. Our own silence became oppressive. The girl whose mouth I was stopping woke up. But she remained motionless, or almost. I pressed my fingers to her lips, trying not to hurt her. Behind the lorries followed the mules, an entire battalion, I later learnt, of infantry with pack-animals.
The minutes seemed never-ending. But at last the cart moved on. I waited a while and then poked my head out. A church steeple pointed upwards from a knoll. ‘Barbisano?’
‘Yes,’ answered Renato. ‘It’s Barbisano.’ Then, in a lower voice: ‘Honvéd, Hungarians, coming from Falzè, Moriago or Mercatelli. Sickeningly filthy uniforms.’
I dived back under the hay and released the mouth of the girl, who first stroked my hand and then squeezed it without letting go.
The horse was moving at a trot, and I nodded off again with the girl’s breath on my face.
Half an hour later I poked out my head again. ‘How much further?’
‘Not much,’ said the woman.
There were no longer any wrecks by the roadside. We saw no one and made good progress. It was as if the war had simply gone away. No more tents, no more sentries, the sky was clear and the air less chill. We heard no gunfire, not even in the distance, and there was no stink of diesel oil, of wet leather, of urine. Peace had returned.
Suddenly came the loud roar of the Piave. The pilot and the two girls thrust their heads up out of the hay, looking around them and spitting out bits of stalk like threshing machines. ‘Have we got to the river’? asked the younger one.
‘Very nearly,’ replied the woman, gently solicitous.
‘Not long now,’ said Renato, and cracked the whip over the horse’s ears.
Evening had come to our aid. Here and there, the first stars. And at last Renato, who had halted the cart a hundred metres from the river and had gone with the woman in search of food, came back with a sack containing blessings galore: sopressa and cheese, and dry black bread which hunger melted in our mouths. There was even a bottle of wine, slightly sour but good. We waited for darkness. The Piave was in full flood, and the noise of it drowned out every other sound. Renato was nervous, Brian was acting impatiently, while the elder girl struggled to hold back her tears and the other slept curled up on the knees of the woman, now crouching in the hay. The cart was drawn up behind a boulder only a few dozen metres from the river bank. The Hungarian trenches stopped three or four hundred metres further south. To the north, less than half a kilometre away, was an Austrian outpost where the soldiers were making merry round two fires burning almost on the river banks.
‘The flood waters are a help to us. There’s not even a patrol boat,’ said Renato, though I could sense the tension in his voice.
‘With such a strong current…will the boat make it?’
‘It’ll make it,’ he assured me, giving me a pat on the shoulder.
The two Austrian fires were in plain view. Quite enough to scare one.
Brian staggered to his feet and joined us, giving Renato a light punch on the chest. ‘Somebody’s coming.’
Indeed, someone was crawling along the bank. Renato crouched low and went to meet him.
‘Are you the Englishman?’ asked a boy’s unbroken voice.
‘Yes, that’s us,’ replied Renato. ‘It’s four people who have to cross,’ he added at once. I stretched out flat on my belly and wormed my way forward to join them. The boy might have been eleven or twelve.
‘They’re sending us children to do war jobs now,’ I murmured, and for the first time I felt myself to be a soldier.
‘There’s room for two,’ said the boy, putting on a man’s voice.
‘You have to fit in four. Two are little girls.’ The major’s tone of voice allowed of no dispute.
While I was helping to lower Brian into the boat – it was long and narrow, a kind of flat-bottomed pirogue – Renato went back to lend a hand to the woman.
In the stern was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, holding the tiller, while the younger one helped the woman to scramble down and told her to crouch down on the floorboards. The sides were scarcely more than half a metre high, and the bow was filled by half a dozen sacks. Brian put his arms round the two girls, so relieved that his ankle wasn’t hurting so badly. The boards were sopping wet, and I felt a shiver of cold run down my back.
Brian and the major brought up their right hands in salute at the very same moment. The boat left the bank. ‘So long.’ And the current swept it away.
‘Good luck,’ I murmured.
Renato turned to me: ‘We’ve got a long trek ahead of us. We must get back before dawn.’
‘What about the cart?’
I tore off a piece of sopressa with my teeth and put the rest in my pocket. ‘Do you know the way?’
‘Lieutenant Muller, the man who brought you to me, is expecting us four kilometres away, but we’re late.’
The light caught us just as we reached the garden. The Villa was still sleeping. We made our way round it and approached from the direction of the little temple. We parted without a word. I was so weary that my legs were numb, and all I wanted was to sleep. Grandpa heard me come in. He stroked the back of my neck as I sat on the palliasse taking off my boots. ‘Welcome back, laddie.’
I flopped face down on the pillow. I hadn’t the strength to undress. The crackly mattress stuffing seemed to me like goose-feathers.