No Man's Land (25 page)

When his comrades from the machine-gun unit reached him, I witnessed a savage assault. They mauled him furiously, pummeling him with punches. The soldier fell to the ground on his back. His comrades jumped on top of him.

‘Son of a bitch! You miserable bastard!'

‘Leave me alone! Help!'

Punches and kicks slammed into the poor wretch, who was powerless to defend himself.

‘Here! Take that! Who paid you to be the imbecile?'

‘Help!'

‘Save the general! Admit that you were paid by the Austrians!'

‘Leave me alone! I didn't do it on purpose. I swear I didn't do it on purpose.'

The commander of the machine-gun unit was nowhere to be seen. The beating had gone on too long. Since nobody, neither officers nor NCOs, intervened to stop it, I ran over to them.

‘What's going on?' I shouted in a loud voice.

My presence surprised everyone. The aggressors dispersed. Only a couple of them remained where they were and stood at attention. I went over to the victim, held out my hand, and helped him up. By the time he was back on his feet, those few who had stayed had disappeared. I was standing there alone with the soldier. He had a black eye and a cheek covered with blood. He'd lost his helmet.

‘What happened?' I asked him. ‘Why did they come after you like that?'

‘It's nothing, lieutenant,' he muttered under his breath.

And he turned his frightened gaze right and left, looking for his helmet, but also out of fear of being heard by his comrades.

‘What do you mean, it's nothing? What about the black eye? And the blood on your face? You're half dead and it's nothing?'

Standing at attention, embarrassed, the soldier didn't respond. I insisted, but he didn't say another word.

We were both relieved of our embarrassment by the arrival of the commander of the machine gunners, Lieutenant Ottolenghi, the one who in the battle on Mount Fior, with just one gun still working, had saved the day. We were the same rank, but I was more senior. Without saying even a word to me, he went up to the soldier and yelled at him, ‘You imbecile! Today you dishonored our unit.'

‘But what was I supposed to do, lieutenant?'

‘What were you supposed to do? You should have done what everybody else did. Nothing. You should have done nothing. And even that was too much. A dumbass like you I don't even want him in my unit. I'm going to have you thrown out.'

The soldier had found his helmet and was putting it back on his head.

‘What were you supposed to do?' the lieutenant said again, with disdain. ‘You wanted to do something? Well then, you should have taken your bayonet and cut the reins and made the general fall off the cliff.'

‘What?' the soldier muttered. ‘I should have let the general die?'

‘Yes, you cretin, you should have let him die. And if he wasn't going to die, then – since you wanted to do something no matter what the cost – you should have helped him die. Go back to the unit, and if the rest of them kill you, you'll have got what you deserve.'

‘Look,' I said to him after the soldier had gone, ‘you'd better take things a little more seriously. In a few hours the whole brigade will know what happened.'

‘Whether they know or don't know makes no difference to me. On the contrary, it's better if they do know. That way, somebody might just get the idea to take a shot at that vampire.'

He went on talking, still indignant. He stuck his hand in his pocket, pulled out a coin, tossed it into the air, and said to me, ‘Heads or tails?'

I didn't answer.

‘Heads!' he shouted.

It was tails.

‘You're lucky,' he went on. ‘Tails. If it had been heads… if it had been heads…'

‘What?' I asked.

‘If it had been heads… Well! Let's leave it for the next time.'

As the machine-gun unit was joining the battalion, the squad from 9th Company was coming back to the trench, dragging the bodies of the fallen patrol. Six were dead, one was still alive. Their corporal was one of the dead. From their papers we determined they were Bosnians. The two captains were satisfied. Especially Canevacci, who was hoping they could obtain some useful information by interrogating the survivor. He had him taken to the first-aid station and immediately informed the division command, where an interpreter was on staff.

The six dead men were lying on the ground, one next to the other. We contemplated them, deep in thought. Sooner or later, for us, too, the time would come. But Captain Canevacci was too pleased. He stopped next to the body of the corporal and said to him, ‘Hey! My friend, if you had learned how to command a patrol you wouldn't be here right now. When you're out on patrol, the commander, first of all, has to see…'

He was interrupted by the captain of the 9th. With a finger on his mouth and a thin thread of a voice, he invited him to keep quiet. In front of us, from the same direction in which the patrol had fallen, but closer, there was a sound, like the buzzing of people having an argument. The captain looked to the front. The sharpshooters aimed their rifles. The battalion commander and I also kept quiet and made our way silently up to the line to have a look.

The sound was coming from the trunk of a big fir tree, illuminated in patches by the sunlight shining through the treetops. Two squirrels were jumping along the trunk, a few meters off the ground. Quick and nimble, they chased each other, hid, chased each other again, and hid again. Short little shrieks, like uncontainable laughter, marked their encounters each time they launched themselves with little hops from opposite sides of the trunk, the one against the other. And every time they stopped themselves in a circle of sunlight on the trunk, they stood straight up on their hind legs and, using their paws like hands, appeared to be offering each other compliments, caresses, and congratulations. The sunlight shone brightly on their white bellies and the tufts of their tails, which stood straight up like two brushes.

One of the sharpshooters looked over at the captain of the 9th and muttered,

‘Shall we shoot?'

‘Are you crazy?' the captain answered in surprise. ‘They're so cute.'

Captain Canevacci went back over to the line of dead bodies.

‘The patrol commander must see and not be seen…,' he said, continuing his sermon to the Bosnian corporal.

EMILIO LUSSU

THE AUSTRIAN OFFICER LIT A CIGARETTE

from
A Soldier on the Southern Front

translated by Gregory Conti

T
HERE WAS NO MORE TALK
of new assaults. Calm seemed to have settled in over the valley for a good long time. On one side and the other, positions were reinforced. The pioneers worked through the night. The little 37mm cannon continued to pester us, still invisible. Whole days went by without it firing a shot, then, out of the blue, it would open fire on a loophole and wound one of our lookouts.

My battalion was still on the line and we were waiting for the relief battalion to replace us. I wanted to be able to give precise instructions to the commander of the unit that would be taking our place. Day and night, I had a special observation detail on duty, in the hope that the flash of the cannon shot or the movements of its crew might give away its position.

The night before the change of battalions, since the observation details hadn't produced any results, I decided to go on observation myself, accompanied by a corporal. The corporal had gone out frequently on patrol and had a good feel for the terrain. The moonlight was shining through the trees and, whenever the occasional rocket whizzed by, the sudden flash of light made it look like the forest was moving. You couldn't always tell if it was an illusion. It might well have been men moving around out there and not just trees that, because of the speed of the light from the rockets passing through their limbs, looked like they were moving. The two of us had gone out from the far left end of our company, at the point where our trenches were closest to the enemy trenches. Moving on all fours, we took cover behind a bush, about ten meters beyond our line and thirty or so meters from the Austrian line. There was a slight depression between our trenches and the bush, and it crowned a rise in the terrain dominating the trench in front of it.

We were stuck there, immobile, unable to decide whether to advance farther or stay put, when there seemed to be some movement in the enemy trenches, off to our left. There were no trees in front of that part of the trench so what we were seeing couldn't have been an optical illusion. Anyway, we realized that we were in a spot from where we could see into the enemy trench, right down the line. We couldn't do that from any other point. I decided to stay there all night so we would be able to observe the enemy trench coming to life at the first light of dawn. Whether the little cannon fired or not didn't matter anymore. What was essential was maintaining that unhoped-for observation point.

The bush and the rising terrain masked our presence and protected us so well that I decided to connect them directly to our line and make them into a permanent, hidden observation point. I sent the corporal back and had him bring back a sergeant in the pioneers, whom I instructed on how to do the work. In just a few hours, a communications passage had been dug between our trench and the bush. The noise of the work was covered by the noise of the shots going off up and down our line. The passageway wasn't deep, but it was possible for a man to crawl through it, and stay covered, even during the day. The dirt from the digging was carried back into the trench, and there were no visible signs of the excavation. Small, freshly cut tree branches and bushes completed the disguise.

Hunched behind the bush, the corporal and I lay in wait all through the night without managing to make out any signs of life in the enemy trench. But dawn made our wait worthwhile. First came the vague movement of some shadows in the passageways, then, inside the trench, some soldiers appeared carrying pots. This had to be the coffee detail. The soldiers passed by, one or two at a time, without bending their heads, sure as they were that they couldn't be seen, that the trenches and the lateral crossways protected them from observation and from possible raking gunfire from our line. I'd never seen anything like it before. The Austrians were right there, up close, almost at arm's length, calm and unawares, like so many passersby on a city sidewalk. A strange feeling came over me. Not wanting to talk, I squeezed the arm of the corporal, who was on my right, to communicate my amazement to him. He, too, was intent and surprised, and I could feel the trembling that came over him from holding his breath for so long. An unknown life was suddenly showing itself to our eyes. Those indomitable trenches, against which we had launched so many futile attacks, had nevertheless ended up seeming inanimate, like dismal empty structures, uninhabited by living beings, a refuge for mysterious and terrible ghosts. Now they were showing themselves to us, in their actual lived life. The enemy, the enemy, the Austrians, the Austrians!… There is the enemy and there are the Austrians. Men and soldiers like us, made like us, in uniform like us, who were now moving, talking, making themselves coffee, exactly as, at the same time, our comrades were doing behind us. Strange. Nothing like that had ever crossed my mind. Now they were making themselves coffee. Bizarre! So why shouldn't they be making themselves coffee? Why in the world did it seem so extraordinary to me that they should make themselves coffee? And, around ten or eleven, they would have their rations, exactly like us. Did I think perhaps that the enemy could live without drinking and eating? Of course not. So what was the reason for my surprise?

They were so close to us that we could count them, one by one. In the trench, between two crossways, there was a little round space where somebody, every now and again, stopped for a minute. You could tell they were talking, but the sound of their voices didn't reach us. That space must have been in front of a shelter that was bigger than the others, because there was more movement around it. The movement stopped when an officer arrived. You could tell he was an officer from the way he was dressed. He had shoes and gaiters made of yellow leather and his uniform looked brand new. Probably he had just arrived a few days ago, maybe fresh out of a military academy. He was very young and his blond hair made him look even younger. He couldn't have been any more than seventeen. Upon his arrival, the soldiers all scattered and there was nobody left in the round space but him. The coffee distribution was about to begin. All I could see was the officer.

I had been in the war since it began. Fighting in a war for years means acquiring the habits and the mind-set of war. This big-game hunting of men by men was not much different from the other big-game hunting. I did not see a man there. All I saw was the enemy. After so much waiting, so many patrols, so much lost sleep, he was coming out into the open. The hunt had gone well. Mechanically, without a thought, without any conscious intent to do so, but just like that, just from instinct, I grabbed the corporal's rifle. He gave it up to me and I took it. If we had been on the ground, as on the other nights, flat on our bellies behind the bush, I probably would have fired immediately, without wasting a second. But I was on my knees in the newly dug ditch, and the bush was in front of me like a shield in a shooting gallery. It was as though I were on a shooting range and I had all the time I wanted to take aim. I planted my elbows firmly on the ground and started to aim.