The Beauty and the Sorrow (31 page)

His illness has worsened. His high temperature has overheated his brain and in his delirium he has been shouting for Kaiser Wilhelm in order to hold him personally responsible for the war. When the nurses placed something on his head he thought it was a golden crown: it was an ice-bag. He has heard voices, supernaturally beautiful voices, and he has heard music.

These bells, however, are very real. The priest and the two nuns walk through the ward. D’Aquila follows them with his eyes, feeling sorry for the poor soul for whom the bell is about to toll. Imagine dying on Christmas Eve, at “the moment which all the world is supposed to commemorate with the greatest of good cheer and happiness.”

The small group passes bed after bed, their bells tinkling. It is as if time becomes extended, stretched, slowed down in D’Aquila’s fevered mind. Time does not count. It’s as though the whole of eternity can be contained in a single moment. The three figures come closer and he does not take his eyes off them.

They come to a halt at his bed. The nuns go down on their knees.

He is the one who is to die.

D’Aquila does not want to, does not intend to and will not. The priest mumbles his prayers and anoints D’Aquila’s brow with oil, but
to D’Aquila’s mind he has become an executioner whose actions are intended to take his life. D’Aquila, however, is so weak that he cannot utter a word. His eyes meet the priest’s. One of the nuns blows out the candles and he is left alone.

D’Aquila tells us what happens next:

Everything about me was in pitch darkness which helped, I suppose, to produce an extraordinary feeling of suspension. It was for all the world like standing still in the air, neither moving to the right nor to the left, forward nor backward, neither rising up nor sinking down. The ether itself stood still. It was a state of immobility carried to absolute zero […] Abruptly, after an oppressive dose of suspended animation in this impenetrable medium […] a wall of light like a silvery screen appeared against the jet black background. A kaleidoscopic as well as multi-coloured projection of my entire life cycle, from my very birth and babyhood up to that moment when I received the Sacraments of the dying, was then slowly unrolled to my gaze, evidently for my absorption and edification.

Everything changes and he goes from fighting against death to welcoming it with joy.

The visions continue. He becomes a woman giving birth. He flies through the universe, past planets, stars and galaxies, but then his whirling path through the cosmos bends and he returns to earth, to northern Italy, to Udine, to the hospital on Via Dante, where he passes through a narrow little window into the hospital ward and to that thing at the outermost limit of existence—his own waiting body.

CHRISTMASTIDE
, 1915
Paolo Monelli receives his baptism of fire on Monte Panarotta

The time has come. The time for his baptism of fire. They start marching at midnight. A long chain of soldiers and loaded mules stretches out across the snow. Paolo Monelli is thinking of two things as they march forward: one of them is home, the other is how happy he feels that he
will be able to tell them all in the future about what he is about to experience. It is cold; the sky is cloudless; the stars are pale; moonlight is playing over the glistening white snow. The only sounds to be heard are the squeak of their nailed boots in the ice, the rattle of empty cooking pots, the occasional oath and short, muttered conversations. After six hours they reach a deserted, looted Austrian village. They rest there during the day, waiting for darkness when they are to make a surprise attack on an Austrian position on Monte Panarotta.

Paolo Monelli was born in Fiorano Modenese in northern Italy. His original intention was to be a soldier but he started studying law at university in Bologna instead, which is where two of his passions coincided: his interest in mountaineering and winter sports and his writing. During his time at university he wrote a string of texts on these topics, which were published in the local daily,
Il Resto del Carlino
. It goes without saying that he and his student friends enlisted as volunteers when Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in May of this year. This is more than just a gesture on Monelli’s part since, as the only son of the family, he has the legal right to be excused from military service. He has consciously avoided taking advantage of this and instead, thanks to his mountaineering experience, succeeded in being selected for the Alpini, the elite mountain infantry. He joined up in June, in Belluno.

At the very last moment, however, Monelli was smitten with regret. On the morning he was to leave he was woken early by a knock on his window and he suddenly felt a vague and fleeting pang of fear. He remembers the feeling as having a touch of the hangover about it in that he had gone to sleep in a state of intoxicated and carefree euphoria and woken up with a feeling of dark and thoughtful regret. (The girl he spent the evening with wept, but he did not take that too seriously.) Dark images of the sufferings, both great and small, that lay ahead ran through his mind. Joining up had seemed the obvious thing for him to do, but he was not really sure
why
.

Is it that I’m bored with my empty peacetime life, am I attracted to the risky game up there among the peaks, is it that I can’t bear the idea of not being involved in what others will be talking about later—or is it simply an honest and humble love of my country that is persuading me to give my eager assent to a life of war?

And he remembers that it was cold on the morning he set off.

His regrets, however, are soon replaced by excitement. He describes a “voluptuous feeling of emptiness—the pride of healthy youth—the excitement of expectation.” Up to this point he has hardly seen the war, let alone experienced it. (The first time he heard rifle fire in the distance he associated the reports with the clicking sound of billiard balls hitting one another.) Photographs of him reveal a rather slender man with sloping shoulders, thick dark hair, deep-set inquisitive eyes, sensual lips and a dimple in his chin. He looks younger than his twenty-four years, and in the pocket of his uniform jacket he carries a copy of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
.

Monelli spends the day in a white cottage, where he lies down to rest on a low divan in a rococo-style bedroom. He has difficulty in getting any peace, perhaps because he is disturbed by the tramping feet of all the soldiers running up and down the wooden staircase, perhaps because his mind is too full of what is to come. Later they start to go through the plan for that night’s attack. It is not going to be easy. They do not really know how to reach their target and, as they sit poring over the map, they cannot even locate their own position.

At nine in the evening they form up and march off. The night is bright, starry and cold. They enter dense woodland. Their nervousness increases. To their own ears, the sound of their boots crunching through the snow-crust is so thunderously loud that it will give them away. Monelli notices that he is hungry. Then comes the echo of a single shot:
Ta-pum. Alarm
.

A chill blast, my heart becomes agitated. The first shot of the war: a warning that means that the machinery has been set in motion and is inexorably dragging you with it. Now you’re in, and you’ll never get out. Perhaps you didn’t believe that before—right up to yesterday you were playing with life but simultaneously felt sure you could pull back out of your involvement at any point. You talked casually of heroic deeds and sacrifices—things you knew nothing about. Now it’s your turn.

Monelli watches one of his comrades, whose face no longer wears its usual closed, inscrutable expression but is instead glowing with
inner excitement. His comrade sees a couple of Austrians running away between the trunks of the trees below them and looses off two shots. “At that point,” Monelli tells us, “something fell away and I no longer felt any anxiety. I am as controlled and clear-thinking as if I was exercising on the drill-ground.”

Then—nothing.

Patrols are sent out to scout around.

Monelli and the rest of them keep watch, half-asleep. Dawn breaks. A cheerful lieutenant appears, his face red with exertion, and gives an order before disappearing off to the right. Rifle fire crackles in the distance. Monelli hears the groaning of a wounded man.

Then—nothing.

The sun rises. They start to eat breakfast.

Then the sound of machine guns. The noise of battle grows, spreads, comes closer. A few men with light wounds pass them. Somewhere up in front there is a battle going on.

They stop eating. Some of the men swear. The platoon forms a line and sets off across the snow. Monelli wonders, “Is this death, this chaos of screams and whistles, these branches being clipped off the trees, this drawn-out wheezing of shells up above?”

Then—nothing.

Stillness. Silence.

The mood is high during their return march. Admittedly they did not even locate the position they had orders to take, but the soldiers are happy to have come through unscathed and Monelli himself is pleased, indeed almost jubilant, to have undergone his baptism of fire. They pass back behind their own lines through a gap opened up in the barbed wire. There, however, the divisional commander is standing waiting, cold, stiff and glowering. When Monelli’s battalion commander, a major, appears among the ranks of his marching men, the divisional commander stops him and gives him a dressing-down. They should have located the position. They should have taken the position. Their losses have been suspiciously small. And so on. After which the divisional commander remains standing at the side of the path and glares acidly at the soldiers as they file past. When it is all over the general takes his place in the back seat of a waiting motor car and disappears.

Towards evening they are back at the deserted village. Monelli goes into the cold white cottage and once again spreads out his sleeping bag
on the low divan in the room with rococo decorations. Through a hole in the roof he can see the stars twinkling.

SUNDAY
, 26
DECEMBER
1915
Angus Buchanan goes out on night patrol near the Taita Hills

They are surrounded by deep darkness. Above them are the stars but no moon as yet. Buchanan and his companions are wearing moccasins since it is virtually impossible to move silently through the bush while wearing heavy army boots. Their mission is the usual one: to prevent German patrols carrying out more acts of sabotage on the Uganda railway. It is about half past nine in the evening and the small group of men is moving quickly along a road which will lead them to a point about five miles away, where they intend to lie in ambush. They are moving in single file with long gaps between the men. Now and then they stop to listen.

Angus Buchanan has just been promoted to lieutenant. His career in the 25th Royal Fusiliers has been a quick one—last April he was a private. It is not without some sorrow that he has left life in the ranks, which he describes as “a gay, care-free, rough-and-tumble experience.”

After marching in silence for a while they hear a sudden, loud crash. They come to a halt.

The noise is coming from the left-hand side of the road.

They can hear the crashing of branches being snapped and the rustling of the undergrowth. Enemy patrols do not move round in such a careless fashion. And right enough, they catch sight of a rhinoceros. They all stop immediately. In the darkness it is impossible to see whether the magnificent animal is showing any signs of aggression towards them. There are a few tense moments. Rhinoceroses are common in this region and are particularly dangerous—much more dangerous than lions. Buchanan has learned that the latter will attack only if they have been wounded. During the current year thirty British soldiers have been killed by wild animals in East Africa.

The rhinoceros lumbers off through the undergrowth. The danger is over.

The four men creep on in the dark.

They find the still-glowing embers of a campfire under a large mango tree. The enemy is somewhere out there in the darkness.

The moon rises and they can see the elongated, weightless shapes of their own shadows gliding along the dusty white road. Just a little way off there is the shimmer of a river.

At midnight they reach a place where they have a good view of the railway. They hide in the bush and wait. And wait. And wait.

Night passed quietly, stirred only by African sounds. Among the high trees on the river-bank, beyond the railway, monkeys yelled occasionally and snapped off dry branches as they swung from limb to limb. A solitary owl hoo-hooed away out in the distant darkness … Sometimes, too, an animal of prey would betray its presence and its prowling: the deep blood-curdling howl of the hyena and the dog-like bark of the jackal at times awoke the silence, for one or two brief moments, ere, phantom-like, they were swallowed in the dark, fathomless pit of night, and lost on their onward trail.

When the sun rises yet another uneventful night has passed. They light a small fire and make tea before walking back in the morning sun.

The soldiers are in the process of clearing large areas around the camp and huge stacks of provisions of all kinds are visible. Rumour has it that they are expecting significant reinforcements: “Daily our spirits rose at the prospect of the coming advance into the enemy’s country.”

*
There had been a promising start in September when the German U-boat
U9
had sunk three British cruisers in the space of just over an hour—old cruisers, admittedly, but still …

†
As has already been mentioned (footnote ‡ on
this page
–
this page
), the German Pacific Squadron had an unexpected victory at Coronel on 1 November 1914, though it was annihilated later at the Battle of the Falkland Islands on 8 December.