With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement Part 18

a cheerful song of his own composing, set to a music-hall tune which was famous three years ago, and "_We'll all go a-hunting to-day_," an old song with a superb chorus. And so the days pa.s.s, one very like another.

I dreamed last night that a regular soldier of high degree and uncertain nationality appeared to me and said, "Do you not see now, young man, that peace is degeneracy, and that war is an enn.o.bling discipline?" And I, chancing my luck, replied, "Yes, the great von Moltke himself said that peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream." Whereupon my visitor changed into a white owl and vanished with a hoot. And I awoke, and found that I had overslept myself and that the nine o'clock parade, which I was due to attend, was already falling in outside.

Then said I to myself bitterly, "At any rate we here have all survived, and, therefore, since war is the greatest of all biological tests, we must all be very fit to have survived, especially that most fit young man, who came out to the Battery from England a day or two before the armistice was signed, after three years at s...o...b..ryness, and the fittest of all must be those whose survival, apart from such dangers as influenza and air raids, has never been in doubt, the valuable people who have been kept in England, because they were members of concert parties or football teams at the depots, or officers' servants to influential _imboscati_, or influential _imboscati_ themselves."

And then, with a great and well-disciplined effort, I pulled my thoughts together, and said to myself, "Enough of these musings of the peace-time soldier!"

CHAPTER XLII

LAST THOUGHTS ON LEAVING ITALY

On the 3rd of December I pa.s.sed out of Italy, after eighteen months spent as a soldier within her borders. These eighteen months will always be lit up for me by the memory of a great comradeship between men of Allied nations. We have lived together through the dark days and the sunshine, through sorrow and joy, through uncertainty and defeat to final victory.

I have been very fortunate in my personal relations in Italy. I have found always among Italians, both civilian and military, and from simple soldier to General, the most open friendliness, the most unsparing kindliness, the most happy spirit of good fellowship. And on my journey home I closed my eyes and imagined myself back once more at Venice in full Summer, and at Milan, and at hospitable Ferrara, and at Rome in the Spring, and on the sh.o.r.es of the Bay of Naples, and out on Capri, and in the wonder world of Sicily,--and always among friends. And then my steps went back in fancy to the battlefields, where our guns had been in action. I saw again the great peaks and the precipitous valleys of the Trentino. I saw the wreck of liberated Asiago, ringed round with mountains whose sides were clothed with shattered pine trees, heavy with snow, and I went down once more by that astounding mountain road from Granezza to Marostica, with the Venetian Plain and all its cities spread out beneath my feet, and Venice herself on the far horizon, amid the shimmer of sunshine on the distant sea. I stood again on the bridge at Ba.s.sano, looking up the Val Brenta, with Monte Grappa towering above me on my right hand, and then turning south-eastward across the level plain I heard again the rushing waters of the Piave and, crossing to the farther side, pa.s.sed through Conegliano, burnt out and ravaged, and Vittorio Veneto, a name that will resound for ever, to the broken bridge over the Meduna, east of Pordenone, and the village of Nogaredo, whither I came as one of its first liberators. And, as in a dream, I saw Udine, unspoilt and radiant as she was fifteen months ago, before Caporetto, and poor little Palmanova, as I last saw her, wreathed in the black smoke of her own burning, and the cypresses and the great church of Aquileia and the lagoons of Grado.

Then the flying feet of memory carried me beyond the Isonzo, up the wooded slopes of San Michele, where the dead lie thicker, and along the Vippacco, running swiftly between banks thick with acacias, and among the ruined suburbs of Gorizia, up towards those desolate lands, which for future generations of Italians will be, I think, the holiest ground of all,--the bare summit of Monte Santo, and the mountain-locked tableland of Bainsizza, and the rocky, inexorable Carso. These rocks have, perhaps, been more deeply soaked with blood than any other part of the entire Allied line on any continent. Here died many thousands of the bravest and the best of the youth of Italy. "Nella primavera si combatte e si muore, o soldato." How many great lovers, fathers, thinkers, poets, statesmen, that might have been, but never were, lie here! These lands will ever be more thickly peopled with the cemeteries of the dead than with the villages of the living, lands desolate and barren, yet strange and beautiful. Clear and clean is the beauty of those graves in the noonday brightness, delicate and tremulous in the early dawn and in the soft light of a fading day, and for us, who think of those dead with a proud and tender emotion, that beauty is, in some sort, a frail consolation. The dust of strong men from the great mountains is buried here, and of men from the historic cities and the small unknown towns and the little white villages of Italy, and of peasants from the wide plains, and of brave men from the islands, and a handful of Frenchmen and Englishmen along with them, and very many of those tragic soldiers, drawn from many races, who died in the service of the Austro-Hungarian State, fighting against their own freedom. I see again, as vividly as though it were yesterday, those high-hearted legions of Italy, st.u.r.dy men and fresh-faced boys, going forward with a frenzied courage, supported by an Artillery preparation which elsewhere would have been thought utterly insignificant, to a.s.sault positions which elsewhere would have been declared impregnable.

"The world," said Lincoln at Gettysburg, "will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so n.o.bly advanced; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." So may it be! They died for the dream of a greater, a free and a secure Italy, and, the more reflective of them, for a better, more coherent world and no more war. A part of their dream is already come true, but part is a dream still, a debt to them that only we can pay. It will need to be a far better world, with a progress sustained and ever growing through centuries to come, if this tremendous sum of wasted youth, of broken hearts, of embittered souls, of moral degradation, of wounds that cannot be healed until all this ill-fated generation has pa.s.sed away, if this great sum of past and present evil is to be cancelled by future good in the cold balance of historic reality. Of the dead we may say, their task is over, their warfare is accomplished. But not of the living. The future is theirs, to make or mar.