Chapter 19

 

August 1914

 

My life was played out against a sombre backdrop. During the spring and summer of 1914, Europe slid towards war and everyone seemed powerless to prevent it. Vincentello had once described Zaronza as a rural backwater, and yet even we were not immune to the changes that were sweeping through the world. The stifling and sultry summer weather matched the prevailing mood. Everyone held their breath, waiting for the inevitable.

An Archduke was assassinated in an obscure place called Sarajevo, the spark that set off the powder keg. The newspapers were full of talk of mobilisation and curbing Germany’s territorial aggression, but the nationalists and the peacemakers couldn’t agree. At the end of July, the French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, who strove to prevent war and to make the great powers negotiate, was assassinated in Paris, weakening the cause of peace. The political climate was now dominated by those who wanted to hit back at Germany for taking Alsace-Lorraine in 1870.

Sophia and I sat in her kitchen and read her father’s newspaper, spread out on the table. The news made for solemn reading.

“I’m so worried for Orso,” said Sophia. “If war is declared he’ll be called up to fight. And I know he would volunteer, anyway. Only the other day he said, ‘It’s time we taught those iron-heads a lesson. I hope I get the chance to do it.’ Papa will be distraught if anything happens to him. We both will be.”

“But everyone says that if there is a war it will be short. Our army is much better-equipped and drilled than it was in 1870, or so they say. And no one wants to see all-out war, surely?”

“You can see for yourself,” Sophia replied, gesturing towards the newspaper. “The peacemakers have lost. All people can think of now is getting revenge on Germany for our humiliation in 1870. It’s no longer a question of if we go to war, but of when.”

I thought of all the able-bodied young men in the village: fathers, sons, husbands. I was glad that I had no one close to me who would be caught up in this overwhelming machine called war. I didn’t much care what happened to Vincentello. I didn’t even know if he would be called up to fight for his country from Puerto Rico.

Raphaël’s face flitted across my thoughts. Where was he? Was he still in his village in the Bozio? I had heard nothing of him since he left Zaronza, and I hadn’t tried to find out. Neither did I think of him if I could help it, but sometimes I couldn’t stop the memories filtering into my brain, like sand in an hourglass. How old would he have been then? Thirty-nine, I calculated. Did they call up men of that age? And did they call up schoolteachers? Raphaël would have hated the idea of war, but would he have volunteered out of a sense of duty? I didn’t have the answers, and I saw no point in troubling Sophia with these questions. She, too, was deep in thought, no doubt worrying about what might happen to Orso if war broke out.

The church bell started ringing; not the solemn call to prayer or the hourly chimes but with a wild, hysterical note. Sophia and I looked at each other. The alarm call.

“Is there a brush fire?” I asked. We had so many of them on the hillsides that year. The parched maquis was dry as tinder. A single spark was enough to set off a blaze that was soon travelling as fast as a horse can gallop, fanned by the breeze off the sea. The whole village was mobilised then to beat out the flames with brooms and lug cans of water in an attempt to stem the licking flames.

We hastened down the steep alley towards the square. I held Sophia’s arm as she stumbled along. We couldn’t see any sign of smoke on the hillsides, but people from all over the village were converging on the square. Sophia’s father hurried up to us from the direction of the town hall. He was red in the face and puffing.

“War,” he said. “It’s war.” He leant over and placed his hands on his thighs, catching his breath.

“I had a telegram not ten minutes ago. The order has gone out for general mobilisation. The reservists will be called up in the next few days.”

Sophia put her hands to her mouth. “Orso!” she gasped.

Monsieur Franceschi just nodded and took her hand. He had wanted to buy Orso out by paying another man to take his place, but Orso wouldn’t agree.

The news spread like a plague around the village and reactions varied. The women looked worried, but some of them also looked proud beneath it. The men ranged from silent to swaggering, but nearly all of them believed that the war would be all over by Christmas. That’s what the newspapers were saying, after all. Despite the sweltering August heat, I felt cold all over. I prayed that they were right.

***

The units of the 173^rd Infantry Regiment were ordered to Ajaccio and they sailed from there for Marseille. They camped there for a few days before embarking on the long train journey up to north-east France. Orso had gone, too, and Sophia and her father looked like ghosts. Monsieur Franceschi was torn between pride in his son and fear that he would fall in battle. Nothing I could say would console them but I tried to do so with my presence, keeping them company and taking their minds off the war by talking of other things. But the war was never far beneath the surface, and whatever we said, its undertones darkened our conversation.

The village was silent and empty without the ringing voices of men. The women stayed in their houses or worked their small plots on the hillside in place of their husbands. Few vehicles passed on the road. Dogs lay and scratched themselves in the dust, while bare-legged children ran about unsupervised on the beach far below the village. Similar scenes must have been taking place in villages all over Corsica. Thousands of men had answered the call to arms. Annunciata’s son, the mason, had gone too, although he had a wife and two children.

It wasn’t long before we heard news of the first battle in which Corsican soldiers fought, at Dieuze. Reports were confused, and we weren’t sure which side had won or lost, or if our troops had retreated or advanced. The newspapers were full of the strange names of the villages in that part of France – Dombasle-sur-Meurthe, Lunéville, Flainval, Mortagne. I tried to imagine the landscape and the villages there, but I had never left Corsica and knew only the rocky scenery of our own island. Surely they weren’t fighting in that sort of terrain?

August gave way to September, and the heat and dust continued unabated. News arrived of a new battle, the Battle of the Marne, which was apparently a victory for the Allies and stopped the German advance in its tracks. As before, reports were confusing and garbled, but they were enough to tell us that this was a bloody and ferocious battle in which unimaginable numbers of men fought. It also brought the first casualty for Zaronza.

I was crossing the square one fine day in mid-September when I saw Monsieur Franceschi walking from the town hall. He was wearing his official sash and bearing a piece of paper, his face closed and sombre. He walked towards Janetta Aligheri’s house. Her husband had enlisted right from the start, even though they had several children. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my arms were covered in gooseflesh.

Even before her piercing screams ripped the air, I knew what news the mayor had brought. She chased him from the house, flinging anything she could find at him. A saucepan sailed past his head.

“It’s not true! It’s not true!” she screamed, before collapsing onto her knees, wailing hysterically and covering her head with her apron.

Her two neighbours rushed to her aid and she fell into their arms. They lifted her up and walked her between them back into her house. Monsieur Franceschi walked past me back towards the town hall and shrugged. His eyes were filled with tears. A knot in the base of my stomach told me that this would not be the only time he would have to perform this sad duty.

***

And so it continued into 1915, this war that everyone said would be over by Christmas. My business visits to Santa-Lucia and Bastia were now infrequent, since the war had restricted everything; though at least the rents for the lands were still coming in. But the sight of young women everywhere clad in black was becoming all too common. I, too, was still in black for Maman. She had told me that there would be plenty of time in my life to wear it, and she was right. I wore my black not only for her but also for Corsica.

Zaronza was only a small village, but it took its share of casualties as this war to end wars continued, eating up men like some gigantic, greedy monster. No one was spared its voracious appetite. Time and again wives, mothers, sisters, children, parents were left bereft, and I wondered more and more if life would ever be the same again here. Madame Gaffori had long since died, and no one had taken her place as a voceratrice⁴. Nobody in the village had her gift, but even if they had, there was never a body to mourn.

Sophia and her father were no strangers to the effects of the carnage. Orso was not killed, but he lost his right arm in an artillery barrage on the Marne. He was lucky not to have died from gangrene. He spent weeks in a hospital behind the lines and then arrived back in the village one damp March day, brought by the carter from Bastia. No one knew he was coming: he didn’t want anyone to meet him off the boat at the port.

I was returning from the village shop, my purchases in a wicker basket, when Orso got down from the cart and reached up with his one good arm for his baggage. The other sleeve of his jacket was tucked into his right pocket – flat and empty, a mockery of his once-robust form. I stopped in the middle of the street, my heart somewhere around my knees, praying that he wouldn’t see me. But, as if aware of my presence, he turned his head and looked me full in the face. Etched on his features were hatred, shame, pride, resentment – a thousand emotions. Then the moment passed and he jerked his bag down onto the road, staggering a little, off-balance with his single arm.

I took a step forward and held out my hand, but realised too late what I was doing. The greeting died on my lips and my arm dropped back to my side. I knew he wouldn’t want my friendship and least of all my pity. He squared his shoulders and, rigid with pride, set off in the direction of his father’s house.

***

As the war went on, Orso was not the only one to return maimed to Zaronza. They arrived singly, no bands or bunting heralding their return; creeping back to their homes like dogs to their kennels. They had left their youth on the battlefields, and what good had it done anyone? Sometimes I encountered a former soldier as I went about my shopping in Zaronza, sitting on a bench, resting his false arm or leg, looking into the distance, and fixing on sights, hearing sounds that we, thank God, would never see or hear. Their empty sleeves or trouser legs were pinned up. Their faces were blank with suffering but they looked with contempt upon those of us who had no knowledge of what they had experienced. To what Hell had these poor souls descended? Would they ever return from it? Their wives and families did their best to help them, but they had passed far beyond our understanding and they never talked of it.

Monsieur Franceschi had to perform his painful duty several more times as the flower of Corsican youth was mown down on the barren fields of northern France. And each time, he met with the same response from a mother or a widow mad with grief. I felt sorry for Sophia’s father, but who else did these women have to blame for their troubles? He was, after all, the local symbol of the French Republic, which had condemned their men to their deaths.

Where would all this end? What good would anyone derive from it? The newspapers became less forthcoming about the news, and we could only guess at what was really happening up there on the Front, so far away. Thousands upon thousands of Corsican men were in the thick of the fighting, but, even to my inexperienced eyes, all this achieved was to bicker over a few hundred metres of land, which passed from side to side as fortunes waxed and waned. Did it really take millions of men to resolve a territorial dispute?

***

Annunciata continued to help me in the house, although I didn’t really need her. After all, only I occupied this stern, granite building with its echoing corridors and clock ticking in the hall. Papa and Maman were both long gone.

I neither knew nor cared what Vincentello was doing. How different it might have been. I had never loved Vincentello, but maybe we could have achieved a semblance of a life together if only I could have had children. The house was crying out for life and laughter to lighten the gloom. How they would have enjoyed playing at kings and queens up at the old château! How they would have loved to be the brave Corsican captain fending off the French by subterfuge in the watchtower! But it was no use dwelling on the past. So many women were far worse off than me.