Forte Tiburtino is three miles beyond Rome on the road to Tivoli. The train is switched at the Portonaccio station to the rails of the tramway and goes directly to the gates of the hospital. It was the first day of autumn, the wind was blowing a gale, whereby the unfortunates arrived in a cloud of dust which must have added to their suffering. But that was as nothing, I fancy, compared with the pain and ignominy put upon them by the antics of one of my countrywomen clad in the uniform of an American relief organization, an affable Amazon who, approaching her physiological Rubicon, had begun to display somatically and emotionally the results of disturbance and inadequacy of those wondrous internal secretions that give elasticity to the skin, lustre to the hair, sparkle to the eye, and appearance of health to the tout ensemble. She but heightened her painful plainness by a stereotyped smile which, while displaying a row of long teeth, set at an obtuse angle, accentuated the aquilinity of her nose and the prognathousness of her jaw. Everywhere I looked she was there. Every place I went I heard her: "Bentornato," "Benvenuto," "Aspetti un memento, farò la sua fotografia." The ways of the Lord are obscure. Otherwise one could explain why he did not let these poor devils die without having thrust upon them this presence, voice, and affected cheer. I saw them, weak and prostrated as they were, shrink from her as one might shrink from a famished alligator.
They opened the side doors of the cars and put steps against them; the white-clad orderlies came down first, and then began the procession of the weak, the emaciated, the forlorn, the desolate. Some were able to descend unaided, others had to be helped, one on either side, and still others dropped inert and corpse-like, across the strong back of an orderly who carried them the few feet to a stretcher. Now and then one would step out with an air of attempted jauntiness and a feeble smile, but for the most part it was a procession of those who had lost hope, who had abandoned faith in every one and everything, and who read over the portal, "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate." It is some such procession that Dante must have encountered frequently in his passage through the infernal regions. "Nulla speranza gli comforta mai nonchè di posa, ma di minor pena." Not only did their faces reveal absolute despair but their bodies were reduced to such a state of emaciation that they were scarcely recognizable as human beings. Major Pohlmanti afterward told me that the majority of them had lost upward of forty per cent in weight, some of them, indeed, as much as sixty per cent. Many of them were so scantily clad that their chests and legs and arms were bare. Some were without socks, and their bony feet, thrust into cloth shoes with wooden soles, gave the finishing touch to what seemed to be animated skeletons covered with dirty brown paper which had been soaked in putrid oil. After those who were able to get on their feet had passed out came those who were practically in the throes of death, and those whose minds had been dethroned by suffering and privation. One was able to keep the sob in his throat until they appeared, and then the effort to suppress it was impotent. Indeed,
They had a rendezvous with death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair,
and they are reconciled that he shall take their hands and lead them into his dark land, as Alan Seeger said in those precious lines which will ornament his memory for many a day.
The procession slowly wound its way within the gates, and I supposed that they would be conducted and helped lovingly and tenderly to the pavilions ready to receive them; that they would be undressed and given hot, stimulating nourishment by nurses and orderlies recruited, perhaps, from those who had come before and whom nature had been kind enough partially to restore. But immediately they were confronted with a species of Italian bureaucracy which hindered their progress toward this haven of rest and of solace toward which they had been looking forward for many days, perhaps months. They were segregated in a large, barnlike structure a few yards within the gate, permitted to sit on rude, unbacked, uncomfortable benches, and compelled to await their turn until their names and their histories and an enumeration of their possessions could be recorded. I felt that God would have been kind if he had stamped across their brows the letter V to stand for virtue and valor, as he stamped the letter A upon the breast of Arthur Dimmesdale to testify to the people of New England the frailty of that Puritan parson, which was revealed to his parishioners when they gathered together to listen to the confession of his sins and to decide his punishment. There they sat, inanimate, inert, resigned, awaiting what the Italian Government might have in store for them with the same indifference as they awaited that which nature had in store for them.
Never again shall I believe that the victim of tuberculosis is optimistic and hopeful. It may be that their obvious and striking forlornness was the expression of starvation and not of disease. Only about thirty per cent of them, I am told, showed signs of active tuberculosis after the ravages of inadequate and unsuitable food have been overcome. I saw and talked with many of their predecessors, and especially those who had been there a number of weeks, sufficiently long for them to have gained in weight and in strength, but even they were still branded with that expression which hopelessness comes nearest to describing.
It occurred to me that perhaps these were the men who sat down on the sides of the road and in the fields before that great disaster in the Friuli and were resigned to being taken captive, and that the resignation which they then displayed had been stamped on them gradually day after day since then, until now it had become indelible. Life had had no joy or poetry for them. Neither the present nor the future had been tinctured with pleasure nor flavored with hope, and since that day they had been silently awaiting that which now seemed imminent—translation.
I could not but contrast the event of the morning with that of the evening. Probably every one of these boys and men had been brought up in the faith which the Holy Father claims is the only true one. They had been taught that God is Justice. They had been imbued since earliest infancy with the belief that, next to loyalty to God, their most sacred duty was to their country. In their own way they had done their best for both, and this was their reward. Their expressions of despair, their manifestations of hopelessness, their silent portrayal of their abandonment needed no explanation. The saint in the Vatican was having his reward on earth, and the sinners in Forte Tiburtino looked for theirs only in heaven.
"Ahi giustizia di Dio! tante chi stipa
Nuove travaglie e pene, quanto io viddi?
E perchè nostra colpa si ne scipa?"
"Ah, Justice Divine! who shall tell in few the
Many fresh pains and travails that I saw?
And why does guilt of ours thus waste us?"