The Flying Spy

by Camillo De Carlo

I

January 15, 1918.—The command of the Third Army has stationed its headquarters in the village of Mogliano, near Venice. The troops of the Third Army, which for the past two months have been successfully resisting the continual thunderous attempts of the Austrian troops to cross the Piave, have established a front extending from the bridge of the Priula to the sea. Fortunately the region along the coast is flooded. Our other troops hold the old Piave line. Even in the mountain regions, events seem to favor us. After the first moments of confusion had passed, the new recruits, especially the youths of nineteen, exhibited once more all the boldness, all the pugnacity which had brought them distinction on the Carso. In vain did the Germans hurl their divisions, from the Lake of Garda to the Montello, against the light line recently reinforced by the foot soldiers of our company. The very troops which were unable to resist the forces of the enemy in the trenches of the Carso, although supported by thousands of mouths of every caliber belching forth fire, here on the rocky precipices of the Grappa, with a few wire entanglements and a single line of uninterrupted trenches, formed a barrier insurmountable by the violent enemy.

The German troops, drunk with the wine from our cellars, and fattened with the rich products from our fertile fields, were in a few instances, held back without aid of munitions, as without support of artillery, by mere stones and rocks hurled upon them by our men inexorably determined not to let the enemy pass. Again I took courage. I had never doubted the fate of our army, but in the rarer and more hazardous moments, had none the less been compelled to question my own convictions, since events scarcely justified my boundless optimism. This optimism depended in some measure upon the fact that I was an officer of the Third Army, the army which, under the command of the Duke of Aosta, had numerous times endeavored to open up a way toward Trieste, and which had occupied, little by little, the land of the Dolina and the rocky regions of the Carso. We of the Third Army had never considered ourselves beaten; we had been compelled to submit to inevitable events; we had been compelled to withdraw, against our wishes, lest we had been surrounded, and to the end that the stream of Germans which had penetrated from Caporetto, might not cut off our road to the Piave. But the heroes of Faiti, the heroes of Hermanda, even on the day when the retreat was determined upon, repulsed more than thirty attacks of the enemy, and in a final magnificent play, in defiance of the enemy pressing them on all sides, made a desperate assault in which they conquered new trenches and made several prisoners.

Those soldiers wept as they abandoned their huts. On our front the enemy had always been held back, and when it did advance, its journey was slow and costly. We aviators, who had been absolute masters of the air over the Isonzo, who had traversed with unswerving flight the enemy sky where hostile machines had in vain attempted our territory, who a thousand times had brought a greeting to the City of Grief, Trieste, seeming ever to be waiting for us there at the end of the Gulf at the foot of the hills—we aviators of the Third Army had even in our retreat inflicted such great damage on the enemy, that our troops, our ordnance, our supplies were enabled to move slowly on the muddy, congested roads, without fear of any harm from the wings of the enemy. Although the enemy planes were supported on land by the slow, persistent advance of their troops, they never dared nor risked firing on our slowly retreating column. A feat which but for us would have been easy, and would have shaken seriously the morale of our soldiers.

I shall ever be able to visualize the spectacle of that retreat; I shall ever remember that throng of men with heads bent low, with an air at once so grim, and so surly, that the collective countenance seemed scarcely human. Yet there were not a few encouraging ones among them. I shall always remember a corporal of the Alpini whom I met in the village of Pordenone. He was lying exhausted beside his machine gun which he had carried on his shoulder from summit to summit, from hill to hill, for seven consecutive days, until he had reached the plain. For food he had eaten bits of musty bread chanced upon along the road. When I stopped he first begged me for a bit of bread, then anxiously inquired on what line our command had decided to halt. He desired to shoulder his gun thither, again to set it up against the enemy where the need of halting their advance was greatest. The soldiers of the new Italy were being re-born!

Without a tear I had left the countryside endeared to me by memories of my childhood, the place where I was born, the place where for several centuries my ancestors had lived. On the last night, when I had a clear vision of the inevitable, after I had learnt from a superior officer that our next stand would be on the Piave, and that all the region in which lay my properties, my houses, my villas, all I possessed, was to be ceded to the enemy, I rushed in an automobile borrowed from headquarters to my father’s dwelling that I might persuade him to depart. I was certain that he would not believe me, and it was not without a prolonged struggle that I succeeded in convincing him. Indeed he would have preferred on that day to hear that we, his two boys, had fallen in battle, rather than learn from one of us that we had been unable to stop the enemy. At last becoming resigned to the cruel reality, giving no thought to the salvation of any of our belongings, since even the dearest personal thing lost all significance when the entire country was in danger he decided to leave.

Even now I can see his tall, straight figure on the threshold of the house, as he turned to cast a final look upon the scene of all our memories; a scene which he would never again observe as he left it that night. The women servants in the house, convulsively weeping, threw themselves at his feet that they might express in a last desperate farewell all the strength of their love. I could not shed a tear. I had given all my tears when I had seen our soldiers retreating from the Carso. I had never feared death, yet then I prayed God with all my strength and faith, that I might live; that I might not die with that vision of defeat in my mind. A thousand times I had hurled myself where danger seemed the greatest, where death was reaping a rich harvest, not asking God to spare me. But at the Carso I prayed for life. I could not die defeated.

Every foot of land we ceded to the enemy was a new grief to my Italian heart. For every villa, for every square, for every expression of art we had to cede, for every remembrance profaned by the greedy barbarian, the wound became greater and hurt with a vehemence never heretofore experienced. At the death of my mother alone had I felt anything similar. I felt as though the world were crumbling about me. At dawn and at evening, on the rising of the sun and its setting, I would ask myself, how, with such immense grief in the world, nature could act according to her custom of mathematical regularity, regardless of so much suffering.

With our successful resistance on the Piave the most painful days had passed. A wave of new bold blood, of passion, had permeated our fighters. They had found themselves again, and if anyone among them previously for a moment had felt a streak of cowardice, he now asked to be allowed to sacrifice his life, to place his multiplied energy at the disposal of his country. Often I had asked myself anxiously what would become of our villages; often flying low over the territories which were now held by the enemy but which I knew inch by inch, I had tried to discover what the enemy plans might be. I had tried to steal from the enemy the secret he guarded so jealously.

Once indeed while flying over San Vendemmiano, over the road which passes near my villa, I discovered a long line of cars slowly traveling eastward. Without a moment’s hesitation I ordered the pilot to lower the plane as much as he could. We were a few hundred feet above the enemy when I let loose on them the fury of our machine gun. Gradually I saw a few men turn for cover towards my villa. This assured me that it, too, was occupied by the enemy, and I fired repeatedly at my own house. Small satisfaction though the deed brought me, it yet sufficed to drive away somewhat of the deep dejection which recent events had instilled.