A farewell to arms
back up the road. The sergeant lay in his dirty long-sleeved underwear.
I got up with Piani and we started. We were going to try to cross the
field. When the road entered the field I got down and walked ahead. If
we could get across, there was a road on the other side. We could not
get across. It was too soft and muddy for the cars. When they were
finally and completely stalled, the wheels dug in to the hubs, we left
them in the field and started on foot for Udine.
When we came to the road which led back toward the main highway I
pointed down it to the two girls.
“Go down there,” I said. “You’ll meet people.” They looked at me. I took
out my pocket-book and gave them each a ten-lira note. “Go down there,”
I said, pointing. “Friends! Family!”
They did not understand but they held the money tightly and started down
the road. They looked back as though they were afraid I might take the
money back. I watched them go down the road, their shawls close around
them, looking back apprehensively at us. The three drivers were
laughing.
“How much will you give me to go in that direction, Tenente?” Bonello
asked.
“They’re better off in a bunch of people than alone if they catch them,”
I said.
“Give me two hundred lire and I’ll walk straight back toward Austria,”
Bonello said.
“They’d take it away from you,” Piani said.
“Maybe the war will be over,” Aymo said. We were going up the road as
fast as we could. The sun was trying to come through. Beside the road
were mulberry trees. Through the trees I could see our two big
moving-vans of cars stuck in the field. Piani looked back too.
“They’ll have to build a road to get them out,” he said.
“I wish to Christ we had bicycles,” Bonello said.
“Do they ride bicycles in America?” Aymo asked.
“They used to.”
“Here it is a great thing,” Aymo said. “A bicycle is a splendid thing.”
“I wish to Christ we had bicycles,” Bonello said. “I’m no walker.”
“Is that firing?” I asked. I thought I could hear firing a long way
away.
“I don’t know,” Aymo said. He listened.
“I think so,” I said.
“The first thing we will see will be the cavalry,” Piani said.
“I don’t think they’ve got any cavalry.”
“I hope to Christ not,” Bonello said. “I don’t want to be stuck on a
lance by any —— cavalry.”
“You certainly shot that sergeant, Tenente,” Piani said. We were walking
fast.
“I killed him,” Bonello said. “I never killed anybody in this war, and
all my life I’ve wanted to kill a sergeant.”
“You killed him on the sit all right,” Piani said. “He wasn’t flying
very fast when you killed him.”
“Never mind. That’s one thing I can always remember. I killed that ——
of a sergeant.”
“What will you say in confession?” Aymo asked.
“I’ll say, ‘Bless me, father, I killed a sergeant.’” They all laughed.
“He’s an anarchist,” Piani said. “He doesn’t go to church.”
“Piani’s an anarchist too,” Bonello said.
“Are you really anarchists?” I asked.
“No, Tenente. We’re socialists. We come from Imola.”
“Haven’t you ever been there?”
“No.”
“By Christ it’s a fine place, Tenente. You come there after the war and
we’ll show you something.”
“Are you all socialists?”
“Everybody.”
“Is it a fine town?”
“Wonderful. You never saw a town like that.”
“How did you get to be socialists?”
“We’re all socialists. Everybody is a socialist. We’ve always been
socialists.”
“You come, Tenente. We’ll make you a socialist too.”
Ahead the road turned off to the left and there was a little hill and,
beyond a stone wall, an apple orchard. As the road went uphill they
ceased talking. We walked along together all going fast against time.
CHAPTER XXX
Later we were on a road that led to a river. There was a long line of
abandoned trucks and carts on the road leading up to the bridge. No one
was in sight. The river was high and the bridge had been blown up in the
centre; the stone arch was fallen into the river and the brown water was
going over it. We went on up the bank looking for a place to cross. Up
ahead I knew there was a railway bridge and I thought we might be able
to get across there. The path was wet and muddy. We did not see any
troops; only abandoned trucks and stores. Along the river bank there was
nothing and no one but the wet brush and muddy ground. We went up to the
bank and finally we saw the railway bridge.
“What a beautiful bridge,” Aymo said. It was a long plain iron bridge
across what was usually a dry river-bed.
“We better hurry and get across before they blow it up,” I said.
“There’s nobody to blow it up,” Piani said. “They’re all gone.”
“It’s probably mined,” Bonello said. “You cross first, Tenente.”
“Listen to the anarchist,” Aymo said. “Make him go first.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “It won’t be mined to blow up with one man.”
“You see,” Piani said. “That is brains. Why haven’t you brains,
anarchist?”
“If I had brains I wouldn’t be here,” Bonello said.
“That’s pretty good, Tenente,” Aymo said.
“That’s pretty good,” I said. We were close to the bridge now. The sky
had clouded over again and it was raining a little. The bridge looked
long and solid. We climbed up the embankment.
“Come one at a time,” I said and started across the bridge. I watched
the ties and the rails for any tripwires or signs of explosive but I saw
nothing. Down below the gaps in the ties the river ran muddy and fast.
Ahead across the wet countryside I could see Udine in the rain. Across
the bridge I looked back. Just up the river was another bridge. As I
watched, a yellow mud-colored motor car crossed it. The sides of the
bridge were high and the body of the car, once on, was out of sight. But
I saw the heads of the driver, the man on the seat with him, and the two
men on the rear seat. They all wore German helmets. Then the car was
over the bridge and out of sight behind the trees and the abandoned
vehicles on the road. I waved to Aymo who was crossing and to the others
to come on. I climbed down and crouched beside the railway embankment.
Aymo came down with me.
“Did you see the car?” I asked.
“No. We were watching you.”
“A German staff car crossed on the upper bridge.”
“A staff car?”
“Yes.”
“Holy Mary.”
The others came and we all crouched in the mud behind the embankment,
looking across the rails at the bridge, the line of trees, the ditch and
the road.
“Do you think we’re cut off then, Tenente?”
“I don’t know. All I know is a German staff car went along that road.”
“You don’t feel funny, Tenente? You haven’t got strange feelings in the
head?”
“Don’t be funny, Bonello.”
“What about a drink?” Piani asked. “If we’re cut off we might as well
have a drink.” He unhooked his canteen and uncorked it.
“Look! Look!” Aymo said and pointed toward the road. Along the top of
the stone bridge we could see German helmets moving. They were bent
forward and moved smoothly, almost supernaturally, along. As they came
off the bridge we saw them. They were bicycle troops. I saw the faces of
the first two. They were ruddy and healthy-looking. Their helmets came
low down over their foreheads and the side of their faces. Their
carbines were clipped to the frame of the bicycles. Stick bombs hung
handle down from their belts. Their helmets and their gray uniforms were
wet and they rode easily, looking ahead and to both sides. There were
two—then four in line, then two, then almost a dozen; then another
dozen—then one alone. They did not talk but we could not have heard
them because of the noise from the river. They were gone out of sight up
the road.
“Holy Mary,” Aymo said.
“They were Germans,” Piani said. “Those weren’t Austrians.”
“Why isn’t there somebody here to stop them?” I said. “Why haven’t they
blown the bridge up? Why aren’t there machine-guns along this
embankment?”
“You tell us, Tenente,” Bonello said.
I was very angry.
“The whole bloody thing is crazy. Down below they blow up a little
bridge. Here they leave a bridge on the main road. Where is everybody?
Don’t they try and stop them at all?”
“You tell us, Tenente,” Bonello said. I shut up. It was none of my
business; all I had to do was to get to Pordenone with three ambulances.
I had failed at that. All I had to do now was get to Pordenone. I
probably could not even get to Udine. The hell I couldn’t. The thing to
do was to be calm and not get shot or captured.
“Didn’t you have a canteen open?” I asked Piani. He handed it to me. I
took a long drink. “We might as well start,” I said. “There’s no hurry
though. Do you want to eat something?”
“This is no place to stay,” Bonello said.
“All right. We’ll start.”
“Should we keep on this side—out of sight?”
“We’ll be better off on top. They may come along this bridge too. We
don’t want them on top of us before we see them.”
We walked along the railroad track. On both sides of us stretched the
wet plain. Ahead across the plain was the hill of Udine. The roofs fell
away from the castle on the hill. We could see the campanile and the
clock-tower. There were many mulberry trees in the fields. Ahead I saw a
place where the rails were torn up. The ties had been dug out too and
thrown down the embankment.
“Down! down!” Aymo said. We dropped down beside the embankment. There
was another group of bicyclists passing along the road. I looked over
the edge and saw them go on.
“They saw us but they went on,” Aymo said.
“We’ll get killed up there, Tenente,” Bonello said.
“They don’t want us,” I said. “They’re after something else. We’re in
more danger if they should come on us suddenly.”
“I’d rather walk here out of sight,” Bonello said.
“All right. We’ll walk along the tracks.”
“Do you think we can get through?” Aymo asked.
“Sure. There aren’t very many of them yet. We’ll go through in the
dark.”
“What was that staff car doing?”
“Christ knows,” I said. We kept on up the tracks. Bonello tired of
walking in the mud of the embankment and came up with the rest of us.
The railway moved south away from the highway now and we could not see
what passed along the road. A short bridge over a canal was blown up but
we climbed across on what was left of the span. We heard firing ahead of
us.
We came up on the railway beyond the canal. It went on straight toward
the town across the low fields. We could see the line of the other
railway ahead of us. To the north was the main road where we had seen
the cyclists; to the south there was a small branch-road across the
fields with thick trees on each side. I thought we had better cut to the
south and work around the town that way and across country toward
Campoformio and the main road to the Tagliamento. We could avoid the
main line of the retreat by keeping to the secondary roads beyond Udine.
I knew there were plenty of side-roads across the plain. I started down
the embankment.
“Come on,” I said. We would make for the side-road and work to the south
of the town. We all started down the embankment. A shot was fired at us
from the side-road. The bullet went into the mud of the embankment.
“Go on back,” I shouted. I started up the embankment, slipping in the
mud. The drivers were ahead of me. I went up the embankment as fast as I
could go. Two more shots came from the thick brush and Aymo, as he was
crossing the tracks, lurched, tripped and fell face down. We pulled him
down on the other side and turned him over. “His head ought to be
uphill,” I said. Piani moved him around. He lay in the mud on the side
of the embankment, his feet pointing downhill, breathing blood
irregularly. The three of us squatted over him in the rain. He was hit
low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward and come
out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping up the two holes.