“From what you tell me Oberleutnant Friml sounds a difficult guest.”
“Difficult? I tell you, the man’s completely mad, more of a danger to us than to the Italians. Everywhere he goes he stirs up trouble, then leaves us to dodge the mortar bombs they send over. Every time he goes out we hope he’ll get it, but always he comes back. He’s not right in the head and half his men would have ended up on the gallows as common murderers but for this rotten war. Do you know what he makes them do to qualify for his storm-company? They have to pull the toggle on a stick bomb, then balance it on top of their helmet and stand to attention until it goes off. He must have killed dozens with that trick. And now I hear they’re putting him up for the Maria Theresa. I tell you, if I were a Maria-Theresien Ritter and they made that criminal one as well, I’d send them their medal back by the next post.”
Toth and I made our way back along the communication trench that evening. We were shaken, and torn by barbed wire, and my chest ached from the effects of the gas, but otherwise we were none the worse for our crash landing in no man’s land—and I still had the valves from the wireless sets tucked inside my flying jacket. There were about thirty of us in the party: a guide, Toth and me, the Italian prisoners, plus three badly wounded men on stretchers and two corpses, whom we made the Italians carry. The dead were both victims of the trench-mortar mine about midday: two blanket- covered forms and two pairs of dust-clogged boots joggling lifelessly as we manhandled the stretchers across heaps of broken rock and squeezed against the trench-walls to let ration parties go by. Alongside one of the bundles on the stretcher were the smashed remains of a crude violin made from a petrol can. I saw it, and suddenly felt very ashamed of myself for my flippant thoughts that morning about amateur musicians.
Once we were over the brow of the Svinjak and in the dead ground on the other side, out of view of the enemy, I was able stand up straight and look back at the fantastic jumble of dug-outs and shelters on the reverse slope. Made promiscuously from the local stone and from sandbags and cement and timber and corrugated iron, the whole crazy troglodyte town sprawled along the safe side of the bleak limestone ridge, like a lost city of the Incas high in the Andes, or the rock tombs of some long-forgotten civilisation in the Arabian desert. What an odd world we live in, I thought; once we buried old men because they were dead, and now young men have to bury themselves in order to stay alive.
The need for this impressed itself upon me very forcibly as we came out of the protective lee of the Svinjak. The Italians might not be able to see us, but their artillery could still throw shells over the ridge. Almost before we could think they were howling down to burst on the rock all about us, sending more splinters and fragments of hot metal rattling viciously along the trench walls. Our guide motioned us all into a bomb shelter cut into the side of the rock trench and roofed with railway sleepers. We scrambled in, leaving only the dead outside. The guide was a battalion message-runner, a Viennese lad of about nineteen selected not for his physique—he was an under-nourished product of the slum tenements—but for his agility and cunning in dodging shells. We crouched there for the next half-hour until the shelling stopped. Our guide seemed not to be unduly concerned. Cigarettes were passed around by one of the Italians, and he lit his up as calmly as if he had been waiting for a tram on the Mariahilferstrasse.
“Hot this evening,” I ventured as a shell crashed near by, showering us with dust and debris.
He considered for a moment, exhaling the smoke with an expression of intense pleasure: it was months since we had been able to get cigarettes free of dried horse manure.
“Obediently report that it’s not too bad today, Herr Leutnant. They dropped a heavy right in among a relief party here last week: scraping them up with spoons we were.” I saw that he was not exaggerating: I had suddenly noticed a blackening human finger lying below the duckboards of the shelter. “No,” he went on, drawing on his cigarette, “most days it’s worse than this.”
“How do you stand it out here, week after week?”
He laughed at this. “Oh, we get by, Herr Leutnant, we get by somehow. All depends what you’re used to I suppose. I grew up in Ottakring, eight of us in one room and my dad out of work for three years, so I suppose this isn’t too bad really. The smell’s about the same, the food’s better and the meals are more regular if the ration parties don’t get blown up on the way; and there’s about the same amount of space to lie down in our dug-out. So overall it’s not too bad a life if you don’t think more than twenty seconds ahead. I’ve got a brother with the 11th Army in the Alps and he says it’s like a holiday camp up there—except that the Wellischers send a shell over every now and then and someone gets killed. He hopes the war’ll go on until he retires, he says.”
I found that our Italians were also realists about the war. Peasants from Basilicata with sad, honest brown faces and lugubrious black moustaches, they had the look of men who never expected life to be much fun—and who have not been disappointed in this expectation. I could barely understand what they were saying with my Venetian Austro-Italian. But from what I could grasp I gathered that they were less than totally filled with eroismo ardente. I asked one of them, a man rather older than the rest, where they were supposed to be going with this offensive of theirs. He replied that he had no idea and cared less; knew only that the signori ufficiali and the military police would take a poor view of them if they didn’t go forward when the whistles blew.
“Pah! La guerra—cosa di padroni!” he spat. His companions all spat as well and cursed the whims of the bosses, which had torn them from their families and smallholdings and sent them to fight for the Carso Plateau—“il Carso squallido,” as they called it, with a great deal of spitting and obscene gestures. Then they fell to reviling the politicians and journalists who had got them into this mess.
“Politics,” they said, “dirty business. Where we live Italy is an express train: it only stops around election time. All we see of it in between is the tax collector and the recruiting sergeant.”
“And what about your oppressed brothers in Trieste, groaning under the Austrian yoke? At least, that’s what the newspapers tell you.”
“We don’t read the newspapers,” replied the older man with great dignity, “because we are illiterate. But as for the Triestini, we couldn’t care a farthing. Would the Triestini come and rescue us when the landlords and the money lenders tip us off our land to beg? I tell you, Tenente, I care as much about fighting for Trieste as I do for New York.”
A younger soldier interrupted him. “No, Beppo, fair’s fair. Myself, I’d much rather fight for New York than for Trieste: I’ve got a brother living in Brooklyn and he sends us money orders.” Everyone laughed, and thought this a very apt remark.
“Well,” I asked, “if you are so fed up with the war why do you go on fighting? ”
They found this hugely amusing. One of them levelled a finger and traversed it around slowly, squinting along it as he did so:
“. . . Sette, otto, nove—PAFF! . . . diciasette, diciaotto, diciannove— PAFF!”
From this I gathered that, if nothing else, the Kingdom of Italy, self-proclaimed heir to ancient Rome, had borrowed from its ancestor a number of practices in the area of military discipline.