XXII
THE ITALIAN COMMANDO SUPREME
THE approach to the Commando Supreme, as the Italians call the headquarters of their army in the field, is over the plains of Northern Italy and around the foot of the Alps, past a blue lake here and there—all country that Browning has painted for us, even to its grains of dust.
You go by rail and have the feeling that the Italian government ought not to be wasting coal on you. The carriages are jammed. Soldiers and officers everywhere, thickening in numbers as you approach the front. Civilians squeeze in and hold standing room by sufferance. If you desire a wagon lit, or sleeping car, you must take it a week ahead. As to meals, they come according to the old sporting rules of catch-as-catch-can. On the whole, however, it is wonderful that the railways get their trains through at all, crowded as are the lines with supplies, hospital trains, troop trains, and burning, as they do, fuel that is as precious as so much gold.
Be patient, then, if you are shunted off into towns that you never expected to see. And if you are laid out on sidings while a train bearing the general staff or hurried re-enforcements goes tearing by, or if you lie in a station for an hour while a hospital train comes in and all the long lines of sufferers in the berths, whose marble white or cadaverous clayey faces you can see as you walk the platform—their bloody bandages, their upheld stumps of arms and legs—are served with tea or wine, be patient and cheerful, for these people, in their life and death struggle, are so.
At last you are winding on again, ten hours late it may be, but winding on through a country that reminds you a bit of the best parts of Mexico, with its life in the sun and the dust, its white walls, its golden fields. Here and there you see
"That dry green old aqueduct
Where Charles and I, when boys, have plucked
The fireflies from the roof above,
Bright, creeping through the moss they love."
Now and then you see a band of peasants, "dear noisy crew," going to work among the maize. Now and again you see a young woman standing in
"Our Italy's own attitude.
In which she walked thus far and stood,
Planting each naked foot so firm,
To crush the snake and spare the worm."
Then there are the children, shoals of them. Are there any such children as the Italians have? Big dark eyes; round, rosy faces; Raphaels' and Murillos' cherubs and fruit boys. I am sure such beautiful children, in such profusion, flourish nowhere else on earth. An officer said to me: "Our army came. Now are there plenty of children."
I was surprised at the rice fields. Somehow I had never gotten it through my head that Italy grew rice in quantities. But there were the canals and irrigation ditches cutting the fields; and there was the crop, gold ripe, and being cut, acres and acres, miles and miles of it, and there were the threshing floors—great circular, hard-beaten spaces on the bare earth, with the grain in piles around the edges, and the flails beating, the dust rising in the middle. Surely Italy cannot be hard put to it for food this coming winter. She may shiver, but she cannot starve.
Furthermore, there were the mulberry trees, great orchards of them, Edens for the silkworm, who is pampered and nurtured, cared for as sedulously as if he were of royal blood; and royal is his product of Italian silk. But somehow Italy must turn that silk into wool for the winter months. We must help her solve the problem of transportation and lighten for her, if we can, the burden of the coming cold.
All along the way are grapes, pears, peaches, plums, flowers. It is good to be in Italy in late summer, if only for the delicious fruits and the glorious flowers. One may live on fruits at this time of year, a most wholesome living. What a happy country if it were at peace! What a sturdy country while at war! I was not cut to the heart, as in France. People seemed cheerful, seemed to walk with a springy step, seemed confident of the outcome, seemed to have no doubts or disunion among them. Italian soldiers seemed to go to the front with a song in their hearts, if not on their lips; and Italian women seemed to remain behind and sing.
You think of Italy, anyway, as a singing land; and you are not wrong. I heard voices out of the troop trains which could have done justice to Mario's song "that could soothe, with a tenor note, the souls in purgatory." I heard a woman's voice, somewhere in the headquarters town, one morning, echoing through the courts and over the housetops, that was worthy to ring out in La Scala, at Milan. I heard duos and trios in the camps that could have rendered the daintiest bits of Verdi and that brought back memories of years ago when street boys in a town of South Italy stood under a window at night and soothed and serenaded a fevered patient. Sing? Of course Italy can sing. You can't keep her from singing. She is the home of the silk and velvet tone; and, like the fabled nightingale, she sings all the more sweetly, if more poignantly, for the needle in her eye.
That town of the Commando Supreme, Udine, is a dream in the moonlight. The main "place," or square, or as Mexico would say, the plaza, is broken in skyline with Venetian shadow almost Oriental in effect. Arch and colonnade border it, and great stone fountains and columns break it. There is no light but the moon, for bombing airplanes visit it now and again. Every window is heavily blinded; and thick wool or leather curtains hang over shop and cafe doors. The place swarms with life, and you are lucky to have the services of obliging Italian officers to find you accommodations. Nevertheless, you cannot help thinking it would be pleasant to spend the night in the open, under the colonnades.
It is time now, however, to get to the front. You get there fast enough when you start, I warrant you. I thought the French and British soldiers bold practitioners with the motor car; but they are not one, two, three with the Italians. Talk about Jesus! But, then, they have the roads, and they have the engines, and they have had the experience to train up a race of daring but skillful chauffeurs. At first my hair stood on end; then I grew accustomed to the pace. Dust glasses were essential. We were the head of a comet, whose body and tail were one long kilometer of white dust; and we were charging at other comets, passing them and merging into their tenuous tails. Our Klaxon was going all the time, and so were other Klaxons; nor were they like any others you have ever heard outside of Italy. They were like Brobdingnagian canary birds, with a shrill and insistent chirp that split your ears as well the wind. They were not less impudent than the dog bark of American Klaxons, but far more penetrating and weird.
We swept past the old Austrian frontier, past the building that used to be the custom house, and into the conquered and occupied ground. It was a delightful sensation to be, for once, on the other fellow's soil. All other battlefields and front lines are on the lands of our Allies. Now to be rolling forward through towns and villages—some three hundred of them there are in all, with a total population of several hundred thousand—that used to belong to the enemy, was most refreshing indeed. We began to understand the good cheer and the confidence of the Italians.
"Yonder is our rightful frontier," cried the captain with us, pointing away to a range of mountains to the north and east. It was plain as a pikestaff, too, that he was right. No nation could be content with those mountains in the hands of a bullying, hereditary enemy, forever frowning down upon defenseless plains.
"Do they hold them now?" we asked.
"Only in part," he answered. "We are winning them. They are half ours already."
We came to a pause at a divisional post, and strolled through an ex-Austrian town. In the square was a bronze statue of Maximilian, with a wonderful inscription. Hang that British sergeant—that Durham coal miner—who stole my notes. From memory, the inscription runs:
"In honor of Maximilian and the eternal union of these counties of Gorizia and—something else—to the House of Hapsburg."
That eternal union is like the eternal union of Maximilian and Mexico. Eternal union! Methinks he doth protest too much, said Shakespeare. The inscription was all plastered over with General Cadorna's printed notices to the people, but a friend supplied it to me.
The names of streets in all these towns and villages were Italian. The old Austrian names had been torn down, and new and more appropriate ones supplied. Much of the damage done by bombardment had been repaired; and these indefatigable swarms of Italian ants were hard at it, in many places, erecting clean, white new buildings. Still it was odd to see Austrian names and advertisements over the doors of many shops which were open and doing business.
Soon we began to climb up, up, round and round, doubling on our track, but always up. The roads were now under camouflage and the batteries barking around us, under us, above us. Sausage balloons came into view, outlining the battle fronts and hanging where we had never seen them before, over mountain tops. Shells began arriving from the Austrians; and Italian shells began departing in exchange. We were again in the thick of it. But no steel helmets were served out to us and no gas masks, as on other fronts. The Alpine go gaily into battle in their woollen caps; and the batteries are served by Italian soldiery, at least half of whom were without the "tin hats" that one expects to see in the lines.
All kinds of transport were around us, cameons, carts with horses and mules, pack asses and even yokes of oxen. They say that one indication to the Austrian that Italy meant war was the massing of oxen on the Gorizia frontier. It seems odd to see great sleepy white beasts like these in the panoply of modern machine made war. Repeatedly the traffic got jammed. We would swing round a sharp curve with a precipice going down hundreds of feet on the left and sheer rock going up hundreds of feet on the right and butt into a puffing, struggling mass of vehicles and men trying to go both ways. We would, with the uncanny skill of our driver, wind in among them and worm through.
At times we would halt the cameons to let as by; and then I felt guilty, as doubtless did the others, that we should stop, for a single instant, the progress of this war to let by a bunch of civilian drones. Yet, after all, the Commando Supreme must have felt that it was worth while; that we, in a helpless, feeble way, with mere words, might do something to help the good cause along, else they would not have been at such pains to make a path for us.
For the most part it was marvelous how well organized and expedited was all this traffic. The most crowded front in Europe I Four millions of fighting men on a line not over a hundred miles! Yet we saw no cameons stalled by the roadside. Yes, we saw two. One of them had slipped off the road above and had fallen in a sitting posture upon the other on the curve of the road beneath. Of course, the underneath one looked embarrassed, crushed as it were; but busy little men were at work engineering it out, and the eternal stream of the traffic hugged the hillside and crept around. When, in the early days of the war, long lines of motor trucks were speeding with munitions toward the front, no time was wasted upon any one cameon that got out of commission. They simply shoved it into the ditch and sped along, until leisure could be found to give it first aid. So was it in the summer's offensive. They are good organizers, these Italians.
Monte Sabbatino, on the left and Monte Podgora on the right as you approach Gorizia, are like two pillars of Hercules that frame the fighting ground leading up to the Carso. Between them the eye can sweep over the valley of the Isonzo with the city of Gorizia on the banks of the blue river, over Monte Santo, like a Franciscan in a brown cassock and hood, which the Italians wrested from its defenders, over San Marco and San Gabriele, where the trenches of both sides wind, like yellow snakes and seem almost to intercoil, so close are they, and on to the Hermada, the great fortified mountain ridge on which the Italians have their eyes, as the last bar to the road to Trieste.
Can they take it? Of course, they can take it, if we lend them a hand; take it they will, and with it Trieste, the beautiful prosperous, more than half Italian city, where Cunarders used to sail for America, and where in a certain tower, Richard of the Lion Heart was once a prisoner, lost to the world, until his squire, disguised as a troubadour, went through Europe singing an old song his master knew, until the song was answered, the king found and brought to his own again. So also will Italy sing, and, pounding on the gates of Trieste, half-troubadour, half-soldier, bring back to her bosom what belongs to her, many a son and many a daughter who have long endured the bitter Austrian rule.