Unto the Sons (56 page)

None of the soldiers in Antonio’s car said anything to those held behind the ropes. The people were detained at a distance too remote for conversing, and most of the soldiers were now asleep or were too incapacitated and weary to speak after a harrowing and painful night. With a sound of the whistle and a pump of steam, the train began to move away from the station. Antonio could see the people’s shoulders slacken, and he sensed their deepening disappointment. Many of them had undoubtedly been waiting all night and had seen too many trains come and go without bringing home any men from this town. But Antonio was also aware that the train had not brought home any caskets.

It did deliver caskets to eight of the next twenty towns it stopped at that day, and the farther south the train went, the more caskets it released. Soldiers, too, left the train at most stops, but whatever joy Antonio saw in the reunions along the platform was overshadowed by the forlorn figures who stood near the undertakers’ wagons waiting to claim the bodies. As the names were read aloud by the two quartermaster sergeants who accompanied the caskets in the freight car, Antonio saw wailing women collapsing to the ground, and men cursing while looking scornfully at the sky. He saw priests trying to console the mourners, and flicking holy water upon the caskets, and waving in the air brass containers smoldering with incense. He saw mule carts filled with flowers in the background, and young women draped in black silk veils carrying children not yet old
enough to walk. But Antonio could watch very little of this. It made him too self-conscious about being alive.

Having survived battles that killed his friends, and having now spent hours riding with soldiers disabled for life, he was haunted constantly by the question: Why them, and not me? To what do I owe my life, my limbs? He had begun to put these thoughts in his diary, but he had resisted. Such thoughts were better not written, he decided. Even
thinking
them might bring him bad luck. And yet it had been impossible to avoid them ever since he had seen Muffo, Branca, and the others cut down in front of him during the ambush. Unconsciously he now often behaved in ways that reflected what he wished to repress. He had slowed the pace of his walk, had even affected a slight limp, after he had entered the Milan terminal and crossed the corridor surrounded by soldiers who relied on canes and crutches, wheelchairs and stretchers. He had looked straight ahead in the railcar as he moved up the aisle past the seated victims, searching for a place to stand in the rear, behind the backs of his unfortunate comrades. When there finally were empty seats on the train after many hours of riding, Antonio had been the last of the standees to claim one. What was he resisting? What was he ashamed of? Never during his time in the army, including this trip on the train, had anyone encouraged these feelings. Never once had he detected in the facial expressions of injured soldiers, or overheard in their comments, anything that should give him reason to suspect that he was envied or resented.

On the contrary, and especially since Caporetto, the mere act of wearing his uniform in public had brought him signs of respect and cordiality from every soldier and civilian he met along the streets or elsewhere in Italian-occupied towns behind the frontlines. The truck driver who had gone miles out of his way to take Antonio into Milan; the waiter at the café near the terminal who would not let Antonio pay for breakfast; the middle-aged men and women waiting to board the train who insisted that Antonio move to the head of the line—all these people, and others, were showing respect for the Italian uniform, and deference to the men wearing it, making no distinction between soldiers who had been badly wounded and those who appeared to be perfectly healthy. Respect is what a soldier deserved and appreciated—not sympathy. Antonio knew this. He knew it rationally. But within him stirred ancient warnings against ever
appearing
to be better off than his neighbor, ever taking comfort in his sense of well-being, ever assuming that what was good about his life would last for very long. He had been reared among pessimists, mystics, people shaped by earthquakes, plagues, and other calamities beyond their
control. Nothing was a sure thing in his village, nothing could be counted on. Maida was a warm, bright place in the mountains where nobody truly saw the sun. People wore black there when they had nothing to mourn. They mourned in advance. In that place the most casual of compliments could be construed as a curse.

Antonio remembered as a boy of five or six playing along the road near his house one afternoon when a stranger who was strolling through the village paused nearby to rest. He was a white-bearded, emaciated man in his seventies, wearing a sackcloth tunic and sandals, and he carried a walking stick and had a leather bag slung over his left shoulder. He had a kindly face, and, after settling himself under a tree, he called Antonio over and asked him to find water for the empty bottle he held. After Antonio returned with it filled from a nearby fountain, and the stranger had drunk from it sparingly, he looked around and asked Antonio the name of the town, and the distance between it and the next village to the north, and a few other questions about the area. Antonio spoke freely and politely, prompting the man to compliment him on his manners and to ask what he hoped to do with his life when he became older. Antonio had given it no thought; but imagining what would please his religious mother and her father, Domenico, he replied that he wished to become a priest.

“You seem to be a very nice boy,” the man said. “You would make a fine priest. And even if you do not, I see many wonderful things happening to you in the years ahead.”

Soon the man was on his way, and later at home Antonio told his mother about the man’s favorable prediction. Immediately alarmed, Maria speculated that this stranger may have been trying to place a hex on his future. She hastened to consult with
her
father across the courtyard; then she returned and told Antonio that he
must
pursue the man at once, look directly into his eyes, and declare that he had given him false information. If the man asked further questions, she warned, Antonio should say nothing more and come directly home.

Confused but obedient, Antonio ran out the door and up the road the old man had been following. But there was no sign of him anywhere. Antonio passed the outer boundaries of Maida, and continued northward a few miles more in the direction of the next town, Nicastro. Losing hope of ever finding him, since none of the people he questioned along the route reported having seen him, Antonio turned and headed back to Maida. He wanted to get home before dark. Along the way he met his concerned parents and grandfather, who feared he had gotten lost. Reassured that he was all right, they then revealed their disappointment on
learning that Antonio had not made contact with the old man. His mother and grandfather seemed to be particularly upset, although they did not scold him or verbalize their disappointment. They merely talked quietly between themselves on the way home, staying a few paces behind Antonio and his father, who had his arm around Antonio’s shoulder and said comforting things while keeping him distant from what was being discussed behind them—Maria’s voice rising now and then to reveal her concern over the consequences, the possible consequences, of what had happened. And what
had
happened? Antonio did not know. And he never would know, exactly, since nobody in his family could or would adequately explain it. All that he understood was that something had been visited upon him, something that was pleasing in sound but possibly evil in intent. Because he had been unable to confront the man and take back what he had said, an ill omen was now adrift, a prognosis that (though positive) could bring negative results even if it fulfilled itself. It could bring, at best, pride and conceit; at worst, the envy of others, their contempt, perhaps their vengeance. It could have disadvantageous results, in any case. And yet it was part of Antonio’s psychic burden, part of his boyhood inheritance from Maida that he had carried with him to France, and that he had lived with for almost three years in the most enlightened and sophisticated city in Europe. Now, back from the battlefield, he was returning home with this burden, limping with it along a platform at the Naples train station, several feet from where a group of people fell screaming to the ground as caskets were unloaded from the train.

Antonio sat at a back table in a café within the noisy rotunda of the Naples terminal, with a view of the station’s clock hanging high on the stone wall. His own train was currently sidetracked, not only to allow time for the removal of the many caskets but also to permit mechanics to service the malfunctioning locomotive. Moments before the train had pulled into Naples, the chief engineer had entered the car to announce apologetically that there would be a two-hour delay due to slight compression problems with the engine. Antonio had been delighted with the announcement. He could finally get off the train for a while. There was a telegraph office in the Naples terminal, from which he could send another message to Maida. There was also the café, where in the past he had eaten well and where the bar held a vast assortment of wines and whiskeys, the latter traditionally stocked for British travelers. Since leaving Milan, he had eaten only what the vendors sold through the train windows, and very little of that.

Having already sent his telegram, Antonio sipped a glass of wine while waiting for his pasta and watched the crowds passing before him. He paid particular attention to the groups of young soldiers heading toward the tracks and presumably to the front. Though lively, they lacked some of the spirit and spunkiness of the troops he had accompanied before along this path. He remembered his first ride on the troop train—the cardplaying and gambling on the floor, the singing and joking in the aisles, the tossing of white ration cans out the windows along the rolling green countryside of Lombardy in late spring. Almost all his companions then had believed they were off to a war that would be short and victorious. The young men he saw today had no such illusions, and he doubted there would be any signs of gaiety as they traveled north.

From the newspapers he had bought near the telegraph office he learned that the Italians continued to hold the line along the western banks of the Piave River, and that the Italian Ninth Corps had been particularly effective in driving back one ill-conceived assault by the enemy. General von Below’s forces had pushed ahead so rapidly since breaking through at Caporetto that they had gotten too far ahead of their supply system. Now as von Below’s attacking units assembled along the east side of the river, they lacked the bridging material and other equipment necessary to fight their way across the water and overwhelm the well-positioned and reinforced Italians. Snow was also falling heavily throughout the mountains and valleys, making supply movement doubly difficult, and it was generally assumed by the Allied commanders that there would be no further blitz attacks until early spring.

By that time, Antonio would surely be back in action, but most likely in a different theater of operations. On being released from the hospital he had received a new set of orders: After his Christmas leave in Maida he would report to Turin and join Italian units preparing to be transferred to France. In an exchange program being tested by the Allied commanders, some Italian divisions would join the Anglo-French divisions on the western front and some Anglo-French divisions would be intermingled with General Diaz’s army in northern Lombardy and along the Piave River. This program was largely the result of the Allied commanders’ conclusion that they had up to now been functioning too independently, that there was a need for a more assimilated effort under a single mind who would establish a unity of command and reduce much of the inefficiency that had characterized their methods in battle. It had been emphasized, for example, that after eleven British and French divisions had arrived to assist the Italians in the post-Caporetto campaign, none of the
Allied generals could agree on how or where they should be deployed. Now, under the new plan, such a decision would be entrusted to the new commander in chief of the combined Allied armies, France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch.

While the Americans, under General John J. Pershing, would not subordinate themselves to Foch, they would of course cooperate with the French marshal; and what Foch’s elevation meant at the very least was that all the Allies would now be communicating more in the French language. Within General Diaz’s staff it was soon discovered that many Italian officers who claimed to be fluent in French could not be understood by Frenchmen; and as a result there were solicitations for more civilian interpreters and translators, and for Italian military personnel with a true mastery of the French tongue.

One day during Antonio’s last week in the hospital, he overheard an inspecting colonel asking one of the doctors if he knew of anyone who spoke perfect French. Without waiting for the doctor’s reply, Antonio piped up from his sickbed:
“Oui, mon colonel!”
Thus Antonio was appointed as an interpreter and courier between Italian and French officers on the western front. He had still to be assigned to an Italian infantry unit, but it was expected he would be detached often to accompany some of Diaz’s field officers to staff meetings with their French colleagues. It was hinted that Antonio, already a corporal, would soon become a sergeant, although his Christmas furlough to Maida had been reduced from three weeks to two.

When he heard an announcement through a megaphone that his train was ready to continue its journey, Antonio finished his coffee and left the café for the exit on the opposite side of the hall. As he made his way through the crowd, he saw more fresh-faced recruits, walking hunched forward as they carried their knapsacks, rifles, and gas masks, which, Antonio hoped, were improved over those issued at Caporetto. In addition to the elderly civilians and the many injured servicemen traveling through the station, Antonio noticed that large numbers of Naples’s street beggars and derelicts, more popularly known as
lazzaroni
, had been pressed into employment as station porters, sweepers, pushers of postal wagons, and even maintenance crewmen along the tracks.