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.
“Go and bring her back,” the colonel said to the ordinanza. After a moment the ordinanza came back and stood at attention and said he couldn’t find her. “Good for him,” whispered Steve to Dick. Dick noticed that the ordinanza’s legs were trembling. “You can’t can’t you?” roared the colonel, and gave the ordinanza a push; one of the lieutenants stuck his foot out and the ordinanza tripped over it and fell. Everybody laughed and the colonel gave him a kick; he had gotten to his hands and knees when the colonel gave him a kick in the seat of his pants that sent him flat to the floor again. The officers all roared, the ordinanza crawled to the door with the colonel running after him giving him little kicks first on one side and then on the other, like a soccerplayer with a football. That put everybody in a good humor and they had another drink of strega all around. When they got outside Serrati, who’d been laughing with the rest, grabbed Dick’s arm and hissed in his ear, “Bestie…. sono tutti bestie.”
When the other officers had gone, Serrati took them up to see Sardinaglia who was a tall longfaced young man who liked to call himself a futurista. Serrati told him what had happened and said he was afraid the Americans had been disgusted. “A futurist must be disgusted at nothing except weakness and stupidity,” said Sardinaglia sententiously. Then he told them he’d found out who the bella ragazza was really sleeping with… with the ordinanza. That he said disgusted him; it showed that women were all pigs. Then he said to sit down on his cot while he played them the march of the medical colonels. They declared it was fine. “A futurist must be strong and disgusted with nothing,” he said, still trilling on the mandolin, “that’s why I admire the Germans and American millionaires.” They all laughed.