I was at Versa, as I have already said, from the 2nd to the 10th of August, to supervise a party working on the hospital. I walked one evening down the village street, where in the light of the sunset an Italian military band was playing to a mixed crowd of soldiers and civilians. Just outside the village I came to the gates of a cemetery, where six tall cypresses stand like sentinels on guard over the graves of many hundreds of Italian dead. This was at first a civilian graveyard, but all the dead have Italian names, except one Kirschner, and even he was called Giuseppe and has an Italian inscription on his tombstone. For this is Italia Redenta, in this one little corner of which a great company of Italian youth have already laid down their lives. And now the graves, in long straight rows, have filled one newly added field, and begun to flow across a second, and soon from the Field Hospitals in the village more dead will come.
Here, as in our war graveyards in France, no religious dogma or supernatural hope intrudes upon the little wooden crosses. On these, for the most part, you can read only the bare conventional attributes of each little handful of dust, which has passed through its quivering agony into the still sleep of decay,—its name and regiment, its civilian home, the place and date of its death. A few have more than this. Here lie the two brothers Bellina in one grave, with a cross at their head and another, rougher and larger, at their feet, announcing simply, "I due fratelli," "the two brothers." And here is a tombstone engraved with an anchor, for one who, very early in the war, was hit while fording the Isonzo in face of the enemy's fire. "Al Pontiere Guazzaro Giuseppe che valorosamente sfidando le infide acque dell' Isonzo cadeva colpito dal piombo nemico. 25 Giugno 1915."[1] And here is another inscription, typical of that Latin sense of comradeship, which is more articulate, though not necessarily more profound, than ours. "Sottotenente Arcangeli Antonio, con commossa memoria," the officers of his Battery, "il loro orgoglio infinite quì eternano." "In deeply moved remembrance they here place upon eternal record their infinite pride in him." It is poor stuff in English, but a vivid and quite natural tribute in Italian.
[Footnote 1: "To the Sapper Giuseppe Guazzaro, who fell, while bravely defying the treacherous waters of the Isonzo, struck down by an enemy bullet, 25th June, 1915.">[
Where the sun went down, the sky was a sea of rose red and golden green, studded with little long islands of dark cloud, and on the edge of this sea the evening star twinkled like a tiny illumined boat, dancing, a blaze of light, upon the waves. To left and right the cloudbanks were a deep purple blue, fast fading into the dim warm grey of an Italian night. East and north the mountains that bound the plain, silent witnesses of Italy's great struggle, were hidden in the dusk, and the cypress sentinels stood up sharp and black against the darkening sky. The band had ceased to play and one heard only the chirp of grasshoppers, and across an orchard the soft sound of Italian speech, and the distant song of two soldiers in the village street. But the warm air, which just now was throbbing with a military march, seemed to be throbbing still with an aching longing that happier days may come swiftly to this land of beauty and pain, so that the sacrifice of all these dead shall not be wholly waste.
* * * * *
Not many miles away, as the sun was setting, an Austrian shell burst in a British Battery, and three hours later through the dark under faint stars an ambulance lorry brought to us the bodies of four British gunners, whose dust will mingle with Italian dust, under Italian skies, for ever.
CHAPTER XI
UDINE
I first saw Udine on the 5th of August. I was still on duty at Versa, but the conversation in the R.A.M.C. Mess bored me, particularly at meals; it was all sputum and latrines, gas gangrene and the relative seniority of the doctors one to another. There was nothing to keep me at Versa, for my gunner fatigue party did not in truth need any supervision. So I determined to go to Udine. I started, walking, about 10 a.m. It was not too hot. I walked about three miles and then picked up a lorry. One can generally get a ride on an Italian lorry if there is any room, by waving one's stick at the driver, shouting out one's destination, and looking agreeable. This one took me to Mogaredo and then stopped. I then walked another three miles to a point near Trevignano. Here I was within ten miles of Udine and picked up another lorry which took me the rest of the way. It was driven by a Triestino who, seeing what was coming, had left the Unredeemed City just before Italy declared war. His face was very sad, and he made a gesture of weeping, drawing his fingers downwards from his eyes across his cheeks, though his eyes were dry. "How long?" he asked. "How long before Trieste will be free?"
We approached Udine through a long avenue of plane trees, planted under Napoleon. It is a gay little town, with arcaded streets, clustering round a hill on the top of which stands a Castello, with a memorial tower to the martyrs of 1848, and on the hill slopes public gardens full of cypresses. Udine was at this time a nest of British newspaper correspondents. I began to make their acquaintance in the afternoon. First an Anglo-Italian lady from Rome, whom I met sitting out behind the Hotel Grande d'Italia under the shade of trees. She was evidently something of a figure here and received several callers, all ladies of Udine, as we sat drinking coffee. One of these, on learning that I was a gunner, took out a locket and handed it to me. It contained a picture of a marvellously handsome boy. It was her eldest son, killed three months before in Cadore, a Lieutenant in a Mountain Battery. He was only nineteen. His mother began to weep as she handed me the locket, and it was the lady from Rome who told me these things. Then the mother cried, between her sobs, "E troppo crudele, la guerra!" And as I handed the locket back, I thought of the unmarried childless parson in khaki who considered that "three or four years of war may be tremendously worth while."