THE BATTLE COMMENCED AT THREE IN THE MORNING ON 15 June, beneath a moonless, starless sky. Fog erased houses and hillsides from view. For twenty days in unbroken succession, the coming and going of soldiers had sorely tested the Villa’s resources. Hot sunshine and still air only reinforced the stench wafting up out of the latrines. Unfailingly, Grandpa proffered one of his maxims: ‘Soldiers may come and soldiers may go, but the shit stays here with us.’
And as the sloshing filth spilled over, the church was being transformed into a field hospital. Don Lorenzo had taken to saying mass outdoors, in the meadow between the portico of the barchessa and the Villa, something that turned into more and more of an irritant because his sermons were preached in an increasingly loud voice that verged on a shout, while the summer heat made us reluctant to close the windows. Still, even amidst the vast upheaval, some good had come of the situation: the Kraut field kitchen finally had something to cook, including a bit of meat now and then, and a fraction of that something would end up in Teresa’s cookpot, in small part due to the baron’s benevolence, and in large part because of the glittering gold in the occasional pound sovereign that Grandma, through Renato’s hands, managed to drop tinkling into the pockets of the quartermaster sergeant, who had little to envy, sitting comfortably in God’s lap as he was in those days.
The cannon on both banks of the river fired incessantly. Luckily the Italians, on that first day of fighting, unleashed only their small- and medium-calibre artillery, and Refrontolo remained out of range. The baron had been too busy to pay any mind to the minor matter of the escadrille that flew overhead every sixth or seventh day. My aunt said that he’d changed profession: ‘Now he’s a town constable, always out there in the square directing traffic.’
By late afternoon the church was already packed to the rafters with wounded men; they put the less serious cases out in the stables, with the mules. Austrians, Hungarians, Bosnians, Czechs, Poles, Montenegrins; there were even a first few Italian prisoners. Looking out the window I saw the endless line of wagons waiting to unload bloody infantrymen, who were then stretchered away in all directions. More than once, that day, I saw men without legs, without hands, their head reduced to little more than a clotted bundle of bandages. And more than once I was forced to summon all my strength to keep from throwing up. The dogfights overhead no longer made us look up. Fighter planes with Savoy insignia were constantly strafing the roads, and two of those planes were shot down. From the cockpit of one they extracted a blackened trunk that reeked of charred steak from fifteen metres away. ‘Dear God, let it end,’ I said over and over under my breath.
The news was bad: the enemy forces had broken through on the Montello, overrunning the front and second lines, and were about to flood the plain. But Renato was still optimistic. ‘The Piave river is rising; it’ll be no easy thing to fight with a river in spate at their back, and after all, the attack on the Montello can’t be the principal thrust…Judging from what the wounded men have to say today, south of Nervesa it must have been hell.’
That night, even though it was summer, we lit a fire in the little drawing room near my aunt’s bedroom to dry our bones: the rain was pouring down and the night was damp and chilly. No one spoke. We knew that if the Austrians pushed all the way to the banks of the Adige river, Italy would be tempted to surrender: perhaps sue for a separate peace. But we also knew that this offensive might well prove to be the Hapsburgs’ swan song. Grandpa and I agreed to slip in among the prisoners and ask how the battle was faring, because the wait had become intolerable.
‘Tomorrow I’ll go down and introduce myself to the official in charge at the church; I want to do something to help,’ my aunt announced, breaking the silence. There were no comments: for once, not even my grandpa knew what to say.
We practically hadn’t eaten a thing, and Teresa angrily scolded us: ‘Time to eat, masters and mistresses,’ she said. ‘Empty bags can’t stand upright.’
You could cut the tension with a knife and my aunt, to break the evil spell, started telling us about the baron, to the astonishment of one and all. She said that his father had been a presence at court, that he was a renowned art historian, and that his mother was a saintly woman who’d lost her mind when the baron’s little sister died. ‘The baron was eleven years old when they committed his mother to a clinic in Zurich from which she never returned…He carries her portrait in a locket that only a mortar shell could separate from his neck.’ My aunt spoke softly, looking into the fire, and there was deep feeling in her clear voice. The army, she told us, had been the refuge of a boy who yearned to do good but had little enough talent to offer. ‘He’s a lonely, good-natured boy, he searches for happiness but when he finds a little, he doesn’t know how to live with it. He dislikes the army, even though it’s given him a life and a future, and he dislikes warfare too, but he won’t pull back, because… he’s a child filled with uncertainty, and niggling fears…but right now the biggest fear of all, deep inside, is that he might not live up to the uniform that he wears. What Rudolf is most afraid of is dishonour.’
This was the first time we’d ever heard her call him by his given name.
My aunt wrenched her gaze away from the fire that seemed to be hypnotizing her, and looked at us one by one: ‘He learnt our language so well as a way to please his father, whom he’d accompany on his trips to Italy; his father came here to study sixteenth-century painting, especially Venetian artists, and I believe he even wrote a book about Titian.’ She sighed, and the flames made the green wood snap. ‘He’s not much of a soldier… Poor Rudolf, he’s too fond of horses…and, just like me, he can’t stand to see them suffer…A few days ago he admitted to me – and he blushed as he said it – that he was made aide-de-camp to General Bolzano in consideration of his illustrious birth, not his gifts as an officer.’
‘These aren’t the sort of things a man says lightly…I mean to say…unless he doesn’t care about the woman sitting across from him.’ There was a tenderness in Grandma’s voice that I’d never heard before. I too was shocked, it wasn’t like her to confide her inner thoughts.
‘Listen, Maria…take some advice from an old man: don’t let that baron slip through your fingers. One way or another, the war is going to end…’
My aunt looked at my grandfather and shook her head as if she were trying to ring a cowbell. ‘The war will end and that officer has a wife back home waiting for him…Remember, challenging times bring people together as long as they last, but then they separate them.’ My aunt was practically whispering now. ‘The vanquished cannot forgive the victors…even if no one ever knows who really wins and who loses, because what’s at stake, what’s really at stake, the things that no one ever talks about, are unknown. Life goes on,’ and she looked at my grandfather with her flinty green eyes, ‘but you lose pieces of yourself along the way, every day.’
The windowpanes shivered. Suddenly the explosions had come closer. ‘That’s large-calibre artillery,’ my grandfather said. ‘Let’s keep our fingers crossed.’
‘Don’t be silly, scaredy-cat,’ said my grandmother, with a half-hearted laugh. ‘We’ll survive.’