1919 (26 page)

The car rounded a block of houses and came out on the waterfront. “Judas Priest, Dick,” said Steve, “the goddam town's on fire.” Beyond the black hulks of boats drawn up on the shore a rosy flame like a gigantic lampflame sent a broad shimmer towards them across the water. “Gracious, Steve, do you suppose the Austrians are in there?”

The car went whanging along; the conductor who came and got their fare looked calm enough. “Inglese?” he asked. “Americani,” said Steve. He smiled and clapped them on the back and said something about the Presidente Veelson that they couldn't understand.

They got off the car in a big square surrounded by huge arcades that a raw bittersweet wind blew hugely through. Dressedup people in overcoats were walking up and down on the clean mosaic pavement. The town was all marble. Every façade that faced the sea was pink with the glow of the fire. “Here the tenors and the baritones and the sopranos all ready for the show to begin,” said Dick. Steve grunted, “Chorus'll probably be the goddam Austrians.”

They were cold and went into one of the shiny nickel and plateglass cafés to have a grog. The waiter told them in broken English that the fire was on an American tanker that had hit a mine and that she'd been burning for three days. A longfaced English officer came over from the bar and started to tell them how he was on a secret mission; it was all bloody awful about the retreat; it hadn't stopped yet; in Milan they were talking about falling back on the Po; the only reason the bloody Austrians hadn't overrun all bloody Lombardy was they'd been so disorganized by their rapid advance they were in almost as bad shape as the bloody Italians were. Damned Italian officers kept talking about their quadrilateral, and if it wasn't for the French and British troops behind the Italian lines they'd have sold out long ago. French morale was pretty shaky, at that. Dick told him about how the tools got swiped every time they took their eyes off their cars. The Englishman said the thievery in these parts was extraordinary; that was what his secret mission was about; he was trying to trace an entire carload of boots that had vanished between Vintimiglia and San Raphael, “Whole bloody luggage van turns into thin air overnight . . . extraordinary. . . . See those blighters over there at that table, they're bloody Austrian spies every mother's son of them . . . but try as I can I can't get them arrested . . . extraordinary. It's a bloody melodrama that's what it is, just like Drury Lane. A jolly good thing you Americans have come in. If you hadn't you'd see the bloody German flag flying over Genoa at this minute.” He suddenly looked at his wristwatch, advised them to buy a bottle of whiskey at the bar if they wanted another bit of drink, because it was closing time, said cheeryoh, and hustled out.

They plunged out again into the empty marble town, down dark lanes and streets of stone steps with always the glare on some jutting wall overhead brighter and redder as they neared the waterfront. Time and again they got lost; at last they came out on wharves and bristle of masts of crowded feluccas and beyond the little crimsontipped waves of the harbor, the breakwater, and outside the breakwater the mass of flame of the burning tanker. Excited and drunk they walked on and on through the town: “By God, these towns are older than the world,” Dick kept saying.

While they were looking at a marble lion, shaped like a dog, that stood polished to glassy smoothness by centuries of hands at the bottom of a flight of steps, an American voice hailed them, wanting to know if they knew their way around this goddam town. It was a young fellow who was a sailor on an American boat that had come over with a carload of mules. They said sure they knew their way and gave him a drink out of the bottle of cognac they'd bought. They sat there on the stone balustrade beside the lion that looked like a dog and swigged cognac out of the bottle and talked. The sailor showed them some silk stockings he'd salvaged off the burning oilship and told them about how he'd been jazzing an Eyetalian girl only she'd gone to sleep and he'd gotten disgusted and walked out on her. “This war's hell ain't it de truth?” he said; they all got to laughing.

“You guys seem to be a couple of pretty good guys,” the sailor said. They handed him the bottle and he took a gulp. “You fellers are princes,” he added spluttering, “and I'm goin' to tell you what I think, see. . . . This whole goddam war's a gold brick, it ain't on the level, its crooked from A to Z. No matter how it comes out fellers like us gets the's—y end of the stick, see? Well, what I say is all bets is off . . . every man go to hell in his own way . . . and three strikes is out, see?” They finished up the cognac.

Singing out savagely, “To hell wid 'em I say,” the sailor threw the bottle with all his might against the head of the stone lion. The Genoese lion went on staring ahead with glassy doglike eyes.

Sourlooking loafers started gathering around to see what the trouble was so they moved on, the sailor waving his silk stockings as he walked. They found him his steamer tied up to the dock and shook hands again and again at the gangplank.

Then it was up to Dick and Steve to get themselves back across the ten miles to Ponte Decimo. Chilly and sleepy they walked until their feet were sore, then hopped a wop truck the rest of the way. The cobbles of the square and the roofs of the cars were covered with hoarfrost when they got there. Dick made a noise getting into the stretcher beside Sheldrake's and Sheldrake woke up, “What the hell?” he said. “Shut up,” said Dick, “don't you see you're waking people up?”

Next day they got to Milan, huge wintry city with its overgrown pincushion cathedral and its Galleria jammed with people and restaurants and newspapers and whores and Cinzano and Campari Bitters. There followed another period of waiting during which most of the section settled down to an endless crapgame in the back room at Cova's; then they moved out to a place called Dolo on a frozen canal somewhere in the Venetian plain. To get to the elegant carved and painted villa where they were quartered they had to cross the Brenta. A company of British sappers had the bridge all mined and ready to blow up when the retreat began again. They promised to wait till Section 1 had crossed before blowing the bridge up. In Dolo there was very little to do; it was raw wintry weather; while most of the section sat around the stove and swapped their jack at poker, the grenadine guards made themselves hot rum punches over a gasoline burner, read Boccaccio in Italian and argued with Steve about anarchism.

Dick spent a great deal of his time wondering how he was going to get to Venice. It turned out that the fat lieutenant was worried by the fact that the section had no cocoa and that the Red Cross commissary in Milan hadn't sent the section any breakfast foods. Dick suggested that Venice was one of the world's great cocoamarkets, and that somebody who knew Italian ought to be sent over there to buy cocoa; so one frosty morning Dick found himself properly equipped with papers and seals boarding the little steamboat at Mestre.

There was a thin skim of ice on the lagoon that tore with a sound of silk on either side of the narrow bow where Dick stood leaning forward over the rail, tears in his eyes from the raw wind, staring at the long rows of stakes and the light red buildings rising palely out of the green water to bubblelike domes and square pointedtipped towers that etched themselves sharper and sharper against the zinc sky. The hunchback bridges, the greenslimy steps, the palaces. the marble quays were all empty. The only life was in a group of torpedoboats anchored in the Grand Canal. Dick forgot all about the cocoa walking through sculptured squares and the narrow streets and quays along the icefilled canals of the great dead city that lay there on the lagoon frail and empty as a cast snakeskin. To the north he could hear the tomtomming of the guns fifteen miles away on the Piave. One the way back it began to snow.

A few days later they moved up to Bassano behind Monte Grappa into a late renaissance villa all painted up with cupids and angels and elaborate draperies. Back of the villa the Brenta roared day and night under a covered bridge. There they spent their time evacuating cases of frozen feet, drinking hot rum punches at Citadella where the base hospital and the whorehouses were, and singing
The Foggy Foggy Dew
and
The Little Black Bull Came Down From the Mountain
over the rubber spaghetti at chow. Ripley and Steve decided they wanted to learn to draw and spent their days off drawing architectural details or the covered bridge. Schuyler practiced his Italian talking about Nietzsche with the Italian Lieut. Fred Summers had gotten a dose off a Milanese lady who he said must have belonged to one of the best families because she was riding in a carriage and picked him up, not he her, and spent most of his spare time brewing himself home remedies like cherry stems in hot water. Dick got to feeling lonely and blue, and in need of privacy, and wrote a great many letters home. The letters he got back made him feel worse than not getting any.

“You must understand how it is,” he wrote the Thurlows, answering an enthusiastic screed of Hilda's about the “war to end war,” “I don't believe in Christianity any more and can't argue from that standpoint, but you do, or at least Edwin does, and he ought to realize that in urging young men to go into his cockeyed lunatic asylum of war he's doing everything he can to undermine all the principles and ideals he most believes in. As the young fellow we had that talk with in Genoa that night said, it's not on the level, it's a dirty goldbrick game put over by governments and politicians for their own selfish interests, it's crooked from A to Z. If it wasn't for the censorship I could tell you things that would make you vomit.”

Then he'd suddenly snap out of his argumentative mood and all the phrases about liberty and civilization steaming up out of his head would seem damn silly too, and he'd light the gasoline burner and make a rum punch and cheer up chewing the rag with Steve about books or painting or architecture. Moonlight nights the Austrians made things lively by sending bombing planes over. Some nights Dick found that staying out of the dugout and giving them a chance at him gave him a sort of bitter pleasure, and the dugout wasn't any protection against a direct hit anyway.

Sometime in February Steve read in the paper that the Empress Taitu of Abyssinia had died. They held a wake. They drank all the rum they had and keened until the rest of the section thought they'd gone crazy. They sat in the dark round the open moonlit window wrapped in blankets and drinking warm zabaglione. Some Austrian planes that had been droning overhead suddenly cut off their motors and dumped a load of bombs right in front of them. The antiaircraft guns had been barking for some time and shrapnel sparkling in the moonhazy sky overhead but they'd been too drunk to notice. One bomb fell geflump into the Brenta and the others filled the space in front of the window with red leaping glare and shook the villa with three roaring snorts. Plaster fell from the ceiling. They could hear the tiles skuttering down off the roof overhead.

“Jesus, that was almost good night,” said Summers. Steve started singing,
Come away from that window, my light and my life
, but the rest of them drowned it out with an out of tune
Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles.
They suddenly all felt crazy drunk.

Ed Schuyler was standing on a chair giving a recitation of the
Erlkönig
when Feldmann, the Swiss hotelkeeper's son who was now head of the section, stuck his head in the door and asked what in the devil they thought they were doing. “You'd better go down in the abris, one of the Italian mechanics was killed and a soldier walking up the road had his legs blown off . . . no time for monkeyshines.” They offered him a drink and he went off in a rage. After that they drank marsala. Sometime in the early dawn greyness Dick got up and staggered to the window to vomit; it was raining pitchforks, the foaming rapids of the Brenta looked very white through the shimmering rain.

Next day it was Dick's and Steve's turn to go on post to Rova. They drove out of the yard at six with their heads like fireballoons, damn glad to be away from the big scandal there'd be at the section. At Rova the lines were quiet, only a few pneumonia or venereal cases to evacuate, and a couple of poor devils who'd shot themselves in the foot and were to be sent to the hospital under guard; but at the officers' mess where they ate things were very agitated indeed. Tenente Sardinaglia was under arrest in his quarters for saucing the Coronele and had been up there for two days making up a little march on his mandolin that he called the march of the medical colonels. Serrati told them about it giggling behind his hand while they were waiting for the other officers to come to mess. It was all on account of the macchina for coffee. There were only three macchine for the whole mess, one for the colonel, one for the major, and the other went around to the junior officers in rotation; well, one day last week they'd been kidding that bella ragazza, the niece of the farmer on whom they were quartered; she hadn't let any of the officers kiss her and had carried on like a crazy woman when they pinched her behind, and the colonel had been angry about it, and angrier yet when Sardinaglia had bet him five lira that he could kiss her and he'd whispered something in her ear and she'd let him and that had made the colonel get purple in the face and he'd told the ordinanza not to give the macchina to the tenente when his turn came round; and Sardinaglia had slapped the ordinanza's face and there'd been a row and as a result Sardinaglia was confined to his quarters and the Americans would see what a circus it was. They all had to straighten their faces in a hurry because the colonel and the major and the two captains came jingling in at that moment.

The ordinanza came and saluted, and said pronto spaghetti in a cheerful tone, and everybody sat down. For a while the officers were quiet sucking in the long oily tomatocoated strings of spaghetti, the wine was passed around and the colonel had just cleared his throat to begin one of his funny stories that everybody had to laugh at, when from up above there came the tinkle of a mandolin. The colonel's face got red and he put a forkful of spaghetti in his mouth instead of saying anything. As it was Sunday the meal was unusually long: at dessert the coffee macchina was awarded to Dick as a courtesy to gli americani and somebody produced a bottle of strega. The colonel told the ordinanza to tell the bella ragazza to come and have a glass of strega with him; he looked pretty sour at the idea, Dick thought; but he went and got her. She turned out to be a handsome stout oliveskinned countrygirl. Her cheeks burning she went timidly up to the colonel and said, thank you very much but please she never drank strong drinks. The colonel grabbed her and made her sit on his knee and tried to make her drink his glass of strega, but she kept her handsome set of ivory teeth clenched and wouldn't drink it. It ended by several of the officers holding her and tickling her and the colonel pouring the strega over her chin. Everybody roared with laughter except the ordinanza, who turned white as chalk, and Steve and Dick who didn't know where to look. While the senior officers were teasing and tickling her and running their hands into her blouse, the junior officers were holding her feet and running their hands up her legs. Finally the colonel got control of his laughter enough to say, “Basta, now she must give me a kiss.” But the girl broke loose and ran out of the room.