"And you ... want to go and be blown up?"
"No. I hope to come back safe and sound, and I have still to send your letter to Franz Joey."
Pinocchio was silent and hid himself in a corner without another word. I can't tell you exactly if he had some sad presentiment or if his disillusion resulting from Mollica's technical explanation of "jelly" had put him in a bad humor. There was no doubt about it—war had changed the dictionary. He was still more certain of this when, an hour later, he saw the "Frisian horses" arrive. He was expecting beasts with at least four legs, and instead he saw them drag in front of the trenches a huge roll of iron wound up in an enormous skein of barbed wire. But there was still a greater surprise in store for him. That very night he was to find out that in war-time not only the value of words changes, but that there are some which are canceled from certain persons' vocabulary.
It was night ... and there was nothing to be seen and you couldn't even hear the traditional fly. From the Austrian trench there came a dull regular noise. It seemed as if a lot of pigs were squealing. Instead, it was the Croats who were snoring. No one slept in the Italian trenches. There was a strange coming and going, a fantastic flittering of shadows. There was low talking, commands were passed from mouth to mouth and whispered in the ear—every one was making preparations. Mollica and the Bersaglierino had put steel helmets on their heads and had shields of the same metal on their arms.
"But what are you going to do? You look like the statue of Perseus in the costume of a soldier."
"I would almost rather be in his place and with no more clothes than he has on instead of in this get-up ... but what's there to be done about it? I promised you to take the letter to Franz Joey."
A little later Mollica and Bersaglierino left the trench and wriggled along the ground like serpents, carrying with them big metal boxes. The bersaglieri took their places behind the loopholes, their muskets in position, and stood there motionless, anxious, and restless. Pinocchio, too, wanted to see what was happening, and, taking advantage of his guardians' carelessness, slipped out of the trench and squatted down in a big hole which an enemy projectile had hollowed out twenty yards away.
The poor youngster was very sad. The black night, the silence everywhere, the preparations he had watched and could not understand, were the causes of his melancholy.
"But how under the sun did it ever enter Bersaglierino's head to offer himself for this expedition?" he thought. "He might have let some one else go. Not so bad for Mollica. He'll eat up the Austrians like waffles. If any one dares to play a trick on him he'll land him a few good blows and put him where he belongs, but Bersaglierino ... so little and so frail.... If any misfortune happens to him ..."
Some time went by, I can't say how long, but it was quite a little while, because Pinocchio had almost fallen asleep, when the air was shaken by two tremendous explosions. He woke with a start, saw two red flashes shining for an instant on a shower of fragments thrown up to a great height ... then blackness and the fiendish rattling of the machine-guns and crackle of musket fire. Suddenly a long white shaft of light broke the darkness, coming from no one knew where, waving to the right and to the left, and fixing itself on the ground between the two trenches, which were immediately showered by shells.