With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement Part 13

We experienced great variations of weather on the Plateau. When we first arrived in March the snow was in full thaw, and every road a sunlit, rushing torrent. We climbed about at that time in gum boots. Later it snowed again heavily and often. Sometimes for several days running we were enveloped in a thick mist, and then suddenly it would clear away.

Once, I remember, it cleared at night, and one saw the full moon rising through the pine trees into an utterly clear, ice-cold sky, and under one's feet the hard snow scrunched and glittered in the moonlight.

British, French and Italian Batteries were all mixed together in this sector. On our left came first another British Battery, then two French, one in front of the road and one behind it, then another British, then an Italian. On our right, slightly more forward, the Headquarters of an Italian Heavy Artillery Group, in front of them a British and an Italian Battery, one on each side of the road leading past Kaberlaba to the front line. To the right of the Italian Headquarters, across the San Sisto road, was a French Battery, with two Italian Batteries in front of it. To our own right rear was one Italian Battery and two French, and in rear of them, back along the road to Granezza, our own Brigade Headquarters.

This mixture was a good arrangement, stimulating friendly rivalry and facilitating _liaison_ and exchange of ideas. Our relations were specially cordial with the Italian-Group Headquarters and with one of the French Batteries on our left. The Italian Major commanding this Group was a Mantuan and he and I became firm friends. It was in his Mess one night, in reply to the toast of the Allies, that I made my first after-dinner speech in Italian. I do not claim that it was grammatically perfect, but all that I said was, I think, well understood, and I was in no hesitation for words.

Not till the end of May did Spring really climb the mountains, and the snow finally vanish, and then the days, apart from the facts of war, were perfect, blue sky and sunshine all day long among the warm aromatic pines and the freshness of the mountain air. Here and there, in clearings in the forest, were patches of thick, rich gra.s.s, making a bright contrast to the dull, dark green of the pines, and in the gra.s.s arose many-coloured wild flowers.

The Italians have buried their dead up here in little groups among the trees, and not in great graveyards. There was one such little group on the hillside in the middle of our Battery position, between two of our gunpits. There was another in the middle of our forward position at San Sisto, and another, where some thirty Bersaglieri and Artillerymen were buried, in the Baerenthal Valley. It was here one day that an Irish Major, newly come to Italy, said to me, "I don't want any better grave than that." Nor did I. It was a place of marvellous and eternal beauty, ever changing with the seasons. It made one's heart ache to be in the midst of it. It was. .h.i.ther that they brought in the months that followed many of the British dead, who fell in this sector, and laid them beside the Italians, at whose graves we had looked that day.

CHAPTER x.x.x

SOME NOTES ON NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

For a week or two in May an Italian Engineer officer messed with us. He had a sleeping hut on the hill just behind us, and was in charge of a party of men who were working on British Field Artillery positions. His men were on British rations and did not altogether like them. They would have preferred more bread and less meat and jam, and they missed their coffee. Our tea they did not fancy. The first time it was issued to them, they thought it was medicine. "Why do the English give us _'camomila'_?" they asked their officer, "we are not ill!"

I have had, at one time and another, much gay and delightful intercourse both with Frenchmen and Italians, which has led me to certain speculative comparisons and to many dangerous generalisations, some of which I will venture tentatively to set down here. But it is difficult to find forms of words which are not mere journalism.

Italian humour is more primitive and uproarious than French, and the Italians seem to present fewer barriers to intimacy, but the proportion of rational discussion is larger in the conversation of the French. Both the French and the Italians combine natural and easy good manners with great punctiliousness in small matters of etiquette. Only very arrogant or very boorish people find it difficult to get on well with either.

It is idle for any wideawake observer to deny that a certain antipathy exists between the French and the Italians. Both, I think, generally prefer the British to their Latin brothers, and I have heard both say unjust and absurdly untrue things about the other. Their antipathy is rooted partly in temperament, partly in history, and partly in that ignorance and lack of understanding which accounts for nine-tenths of all international antipathies. As Charles Lamb said, in an anecdote which President Wilson is fond of quoting, "I cannot hate a man I know."

It is sometimes said that the French and the Italians are too much alike to be in perfect sympathy. The Frenchman has at times an instinct to be what an Englishman would call "theatrical," which instinct the Englishman himself hardly possesses at all. But in the Italian this instinct is even stronger than in the Frenchman, and he gives it freer play. Thus the Frenchman often notices the Italian doing and saying things which he himself dislikes, but which it needs a deliberate effort of self-repression on his part not to imitate. The Englishman has no inclination to do and say such things, and is, therefore, more tolerant of them than the Frenchman, thinking them either charming or merely "queer," according to his temperament.

If the French are the more admirable, the Italians are the more lovable; if the French are the more creative, the Italians are the more receptive. In the French, though not so much in the Italians, one does find that "sheer brutality of the Latin intellect," which, since the French Revolution, has dethroned many previously dominant ideas and inst.i.tutions. One finds in the French a tradition of limpid precision, of concise and ordered logic, while the Italians are still groping rather turgidly among those great abstract ideas which the French handle so easily. The spirit of France shines with the hard splendour of the noonday sun, of Italy with the soft radiance of the light of early mornings and late afternoons.

The French are proud and sometimes intolerant, the Italians tolerant and often diffident. It has been truly said that in every modern Frenchman there is still something Napoleonic, however subconscious it may have become. One could never be surprised if, in the midst of conversation, a Frenchman should suddenly draw himself up and cry "Vive la France, monsieur!" But one does not expect an Italian in like circ.u.mstances to cry "Viva l'Italia!" In general, the French are the more tenacious and clear-visioned in adversity, but none are more irresistible in success, nor more conscious of its drama, than the Italians.

The low birth-rate of France, as compared with Italy, is a fact of deep and permanent importance. In years to come the French will grow more and more negligible, numerically, in world politics, but the French spirit is immortal and unconquerable. It will penetrate the hearts of the best men for ever, and ideas characteristically and originally French will continue to mould the world's thought and action till the end of time.

The Italians on the other hand will play in future history a greater part numerically, and moreover, by a greater intermarriage with other races, will continue to produce fine and generous human types, not wholly Italian. Italians will continue to show a shining example to the world by reason of their gaiety and charm of character, their mental subtlety, which with time will grow less involved and more lucid in expression, by their art of life, even now not much inferior to the French, by their sensitiveness to beauty, by their capacity for enthusiastic appreciation, and by their technical genius in applied science.

Italy is a naturally democratic and peaceable polity, and her present imperfections will diminish rapidly with the increase of her national maturity and stability. She will be a sane and healthy element in the future international order.

In some respects, as in their indifference, sometimes excessive, to foreign opinion, the French resemble the British, just as, in their excessive sensitiveness on this point, the Italians resemble the Americans. This is the contrast between age and youth, between nations with a continuous tradition of centuries behind them and nations born or reborn only yesterday.

There remains the larger contrast between the Latins on the one hand and the Anglo-Saxons on the other. At first sight it is the latter who are the more realistic and the more practical, the former who are the more effusive, idealistic and poetical. But, as Mr Norman Douglas admirably puts it in _South Wind_, "Enclosed within the soft imagination of the _h.o.m.o Mediterraneus_ lies a kernel of hard reason. The Northerner's hardness is on the surface; his core, his inner being, is apt to quaver in a state of fluid irresponsibility." The comparative method of approach to the inst.i.tution of marriage among Latins and among Anglo-Saxons ill.u.s.trates this truth. And it serves also, perhaps, for an example that, in the midst of the terrors of war, the dim project of a League of Nations, the only hope of the world, first took shape in the minds of Anglo-Saxon dreamers and not of Latin realists. The Latin often thinks more clearly, but not always more profoundly, than the Anglo-Saxon. The currents on the surface are not always the same as the currents in the deep.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

ROME IN THE SPRING

I was at Rome in May. Of the many things and persons I saw there, not much is relevant here. But there is an intoxication and a beauty and a sense of wonder in Rome in the Spring, as great as I have found at any time elsewhere. Rome grew upon me, rapidly and ceaselessly, during the few days that I spent there, and sent me back to the mountains, clothed with their pinewoods and their graves of much brave youth, uplifted in heart and purified in spirit.

Early one afternoon in the Piazza Venezia I fell in with two Italian officers, an Alpino and an Engineer, both wounded and not yet fit to go back to the Front. We rapidly made friends, and, having drunk beer together, we took a carrozza and drove to the Villa Borghese Gardens, where we walked and sat for several hours. Then we went back to the Piazza Venezia, and walked in the neighbourhood and contemplated the monuments. My friends said that Rome was the capital city of the world, and praised also the giant memorial to Italian Unity and Victor Emmanuel II., which, still unfinished, dominates the Piazza, and indeed a large part of the city. This memorial is, I believe, condemned by the greater part of foreign aesthetic opinion, the Germans alone conspicuously dissenting. Personally I like it in the fading light from close at hand, and in a bright light from a distance, as one sees it, for instance, from the Pincio.

We spoke a little, but not much, of the war. They were both for fighting on till final victory, whatever the cost, and both spoke with admiration of the inflexible and stubborn spirit of the British nation. Very wonderful too is the spirit which animates the Alpini. My Alpino friend had been wounded in the leg last August at Rombon, and still walked lame. He told me of incidents which he had witnessed, of Alpini charging across and through uncut enemy wire, with the wounded and the dying crying to their comrades, "Ciao![1] Ciao! Avanti!" He sang me also certain songs of the Alpini, in one of which they sing that in the Italian tricolour the green stands for the Alpini,[2] the white for the snow on their mountains and the red for their blood. O these "fiamme verdi," who can talk and sing themselves into such transfigured ecstasies, as to turn, death and pain almost into easy glories!

[Footnote 1: "Ciao" is a colloquialism, much the same as our own "so long," or "good-bye and good luck!" It is an intimate word, used only between friends at parting.]

[Footnote 2: The regimental colours of the Alpini are plain green, worn on the collar.]

The three of us dined at a little restaurant near the Pantheon, and my friends wrote their names and a greeting to my wife on a post card, and an old man at the next table ordered a bottle of wine, in which we all drank the health of the Allies, and a party at another table began to sing, and went on singing for nearly an hour. We stayed in that restaurant talking till eleven p.m., when the lights were turned out, and then my friends demanded that we should make another "giro artistico," which terminated beneath Trajan's Column, where in the warm air we sat and talked for half an hour more, and separated about midnight, I having had eight hours of continuous practice in the use of the second person singular of Italian verbs.

Next day I lunched with my friends the Marinis, at their charming Villa on Monte Parioli, and in the afternoon Signor Marini offered to act as my guide to places of interest. We took the tram to the Piazza del Popolo, which was laid out in 1810 under the French Empire, perfectly circular and symmetrical, thus differing from the more Italian of Roman Piazzas, such as the elongated and quite unsymmetrical Piazza di Spagna.

We pa.s.sed along the broad embankment beside the Tiber and through the Square of St Peter's. Just outside the gates of the Vatican, my guide pointed out to me the little shabby building occupied by the Giordano Bruno Society, symbolic of the brave defiance thrown out, all down the ages, by poverty and the spirit of freedom and intellectual honesty, in the face of wealth and power and oppression, intellectual bondage and the dead weight of tradition.

My guide thought that, out of the wreck of her material defeat and disaster, Russia would perhaps give a new spiritual religion to the western world, to take the place of old forms now dead, and historic organisations which, having lacked the audacity and the wisdom to remain poor when riches were within easy reach, had now become visibly and irremediably detached from the life of the people. He did not fear, as some did for France, a clerical revival in Italy after the war. For the Italian branch of clerical power had shown itself in the hour of Italy's deadly peril to be largely lacking in Italian patriotism, and to have been scheming for the maintenance, if not the expansion, of Austrian dominion, and, perhaps, for the re-establishment by the aid of Austrian and German bayonets, or Turkish, if it had been necessary to solicit them, of the Temporal Power of the Papacy over Italian citizens and Italian soil. I saw one of the Swiss mercenaries of the Papacy gazing forth a little contemptuously through a door of the Vatican upon the secular outer world.

From St Peter's we drove up the Janiculum, stopping on the way at the convent of S. Onofrio, where Ta.s.so pa.s.sed the last three weeks of his life and where a Ta.s.so Museum has been acc.u.mulated. Very admirable is the equestrian statue of Garibaldi on the Janiculum, both as sculpture and for its details of intention, such as that sideways turning of his head, looking down hill at the Vatican, as though saying, "Non ti dimentico,"--"I do not forget you, my old enemy." The view of Rome from this point is magnificent, the best that I have seen, though the view from the Pincio only just falls short of it.

Thence, pa.s.sing outside the old city walls through the Porta San Pancrazio, we stood on ground made memorable by Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic in 1849, and went down, past the. Pope's monument to the French who died fighting to defend his Temporal Power against the Garibaldini, into the beautiful garden of the Villa Pamfili. "Attendono il finale risorgimento,"[1] says the Pope's Italian version on the monument. It is an ironical phrase in view of the history of the next twenty years. "They did not have long to wait," I said, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." And my guide said, I thought well, of the French that they are a people of great gifts and of most generous mind, but that their rulers have often showed "un po' di volubilita, un po' di fantasia."

[Footnote 1: "They await the final resurrection." But "risorgimento" to most Italians suggests modern history more than theology.]

We visited last of all the Depot of the Bersaglieri in Trastevere, where is also the famous Bersagliere Museum. Here we were received and shown round with great courtesy by the Colonel commanding the Depot, a handsome man with most sad eyes, but full of great regimental pride in this creation, intimately and characteristically Italian, of General La Marmora.

In the Museum, among much that was trivial, I found much that was interesting and even deeply moving: the relics of Enrico Toti, an artist who, having only one leg, joined the Bersaglieri Ciclisti as a volunteer at the beginning of the war, and rode up mountain tracks on a bicycle with a single pedal, and died, after acts of the greatest heroism and after sustaining for many hours grave wounds, crying with his last breath "Avanti Savoia!", upon whose dead body and brave departed spirit was conferred the most rare Gold Medal for Valour; photographs of all the Bersaglieri, who since the foundation of the Regiment have won the Gold Medal, some twenty of them, hanging together on one wall, all dead now; the steel helmet of a Bersagliere Major, killed on the Carso, while leading his men; this is all that they found of him, but it has three holes through the front, sufficient proof, said the Colonel, that he was not going backward when he died; a menu card, signed by all the officers of a Bersagliere Battalion, who dined together on the eve of the victorious action of Col Valbella last January, in which they played a worthy part.

The Colonel told me that his own son was killed and is buried beyond the Isonzo, near Cervignano. It had been suggested to him that he should have the body brought home, but he preferred to leave it where it fell.

"C'e un' idea che e morta l," he said, "It is an idea which has died there. Some day, if I live, I shall make a pilgrimage thither, but the Austrians may, by now, have destroyed the grave."

Outside in the courtyard, where the Colonel took leave of us, I saw many young Bersaglieri, the latest batches of recruits, mere boys. "They are splendid material," he said, with a military pride, not without a half-regretful tenderness, "one can make anything out of them." They were, indeed, incomparable human stuff, whether for the purposes of peace or war. They seemed to have the joy of the spring in their eyes, just as that middle-aged Regular soldier had in his the sadness of autumn. And amid all the beauty of Rome in the spring, I was haunted by the grim refrain, "Nella primavera si combatte e si muore, o soldato,"--"In the springtide men fight and die, young soldier."

I went away from Rome strengthened in my previous judgment that the Italians are not a militarist nation. There was no sign of the militarist, as distinct from the military, spirit at the Bersagliere Depot. The relations of the Colonel and Signer Marini ill.u.s.trated this.

They had never met, nor, I think, heard of one another before. Yet this little civilian seemed to find it quite natural to march into a military barracks without any preliminary inquiries, to walk upstairs and straight into the Commanding Officer's office and, not finding the Commanding Officer there, to send a message into the Officer's Mess, and, the Commanding Officer having come out, to present his card, without any appearance of servility or undue deference, and to ask to be taken round. And the Colonel seemed to see nothing odd in these proceedings, but placed himself at once at our disposal and showed us everything and talked without aloofness and without reserve to both of us. I could not help thinking that things would not have happened quite like this at the Depot of a crack regiment in most other European capitals.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE FIFTEENTH OF JUNE, 1918

I happened to be the officer on duty in the Battery Command Post on the night of June 14th-15th. There had been a thick fog for several days and not much firing. No one expected anything unusual. The Battery was much below strength owing to the ravages of what the doctors in the mountains called "mountain fever" and the doctors on the plain called influenza.

We had, if I remember rightly, about forty men in Hospital owing to this cause alone. I myself had a touch of it, but, thinking I could probably count on a quiet night, I refused the offer of a brother officer to take my place, coldly calculating that a few nights later, when it would be my turn to take his duty, I might have more to do. But my hopes of much sleep were soon dispersed.

Orders came in from Brigade for an elaborate counter-battery shoot with gas sh.e.l.l, in two parts, one between 11 p.m. and midnight, the other between 2 and 3 a.m. We had never fired gas sh.e.l.l from six-inch howitzers before, though we had been warned that we should soon be required to do so. We had no gas sh.e.l.l in the Battery, but we were informed by Brigade that a sufficient quant.i.ty would arrive by the time the shoot was to begin. In fact, however, the first consignment of gas sh.e.l.l was not delivered in time to enable us to take part in the first part of the bombardment, and I was told not to fire high explosive instead, as that would tend to disperse the gas which other Batteries would be simultaneously firing on the same targets. The method adopted on this and later occasions, when gas was used, was that a number of our own Batteries should concentrate for, say, five minutes at the fastest rate of fire possible on a particular enemy Battery, then all switch together to another enemy Battery, and so on, all coming back together on to the first enemy Battery after an interval sufficient to lull the human elements forming part of the target into a delusive sense of security and a return to slumber without their masks, or, alternatively, to make them wear their masks continously for prolonged hours of expectation, thus subjecting them to much discomfort, depriving them of sleep, lowering their morale, and making them likelier victims for fresh forms of devilment in the morning. War is a filthy thing, and must be stamped out ruthlessly. The facts of gas will have helped to drive this simple conviction into many a thick, egotistical, unsensitive head. But, as has been wisely said, you cannot half make a war of the modern sort, you cannot let a faint savour of regret hang about all your actions, and enervate your will. And, in plain, brutal truth, our employment of gas was a big factor in determining and hastening the end. Of the military efficiency of our gas tactics we had much evidence later on.