»Plus the fact that they were restricted to religious subjects.»
»Yes, sir. Then you think there is something to my theory?»
»Sure. I think it is a little more complicated, though.»
»Naturally, sir. It’s just my preliminary theory.»
»Do you have any other theories on art, Jackson?»
»No, sir. That bambini theory is as far as I’ve thought it through. What I wish is, though, they would paint some good pictures of that high country up around the rest center at Cortina.»
»Titian came from up there,» the Colonel said. »At least they say he did. I went down the valley and saw the house where he was supposed to be born.»
»Was it much of a place, sir?»
»Not so much.»
»Well, if he painted any pictures of that country up around there, with those sunset color rocks and the pines and the snow and all the pointed steeples—»
»Campaniles,» the Colonel said. »Like that one ahead at Ceggia. It means bell tower.»
»Well, if he painted any really good pictures of that country I’d sure as hell like to trade him out of some of them.»
»He painted some wonderful women,» the Colonel said.
»If I had a joint or a roadhouse or some sort of an inn, say, I could use one of those,» the driver said. »But if I brought home a picture of some woman, my old woman would run me from Rawlins to Buffalo. I’d be lucky if I got to Buffalo.»
»You could give it to the local museum.»
»All they got in the local museum is arrow heads, war bonnets, scalping knives, different scalps, petrified fish, pipes of peace, photographs of Liver Eating Johnston, and the skin of some bad man that they hanged him and some doctor skinned him out. One of those women pictures would be out of place there.»
»See that next campanile down there across the plain?» the Colonel said. »I’ll show you a place down there where we used to fight when I was a kid.»
»Did you fight here, too, sir?»
»Yeah,» the Colonel said.
»Who had Trieste in that war?»
»The Krauts. The Austrians, I mean.»
»Did we ever get it?»
»Not till the end when it was over.»
»Who had Florence and Rome?»
»We did.»
»Well, I guess you weren’t so damned bad off then.»
»Sir,» the Colonel said gently.
»I’m sorry, sir,» the driver said quickly. »I was in the Thirty-Sixth Division, sir.»
»I’ve seen the patch.»
»I was thinking about the Rapido, sir, I didn’t mean to be insolent or lacking in respect.»
»You weren’t,» the Colonel said. »You were just thinking about the Rapido. Listen, Jackson, everybody who’s soldiered a long time has had their Rapidos and more than one.»
»I couldn’t take more than one, sir.»
The car went through the cheerful town of San Dona di Piave. It was built up and new, but no more ugly than a middle western town, and it was as prosperous and as cheery as Fossalta, just up the river, is miserable and gloomy, the Colonel thought. Did Fossalta never get over the first war? I never saw it before it was smacked, he thought. They shelled it badly before the big fifteenth of June offensive in eighteen. Then we shelled it really badly before we retook it. He remembered how the attack had taken off from Monastier, gone through Fornace, and on this winter day he remembered how it had been that summer.
A few weeks ago he had gone through Fossalta and had gone out along the sunken road to find the place where he had been hit, out on the river bank. It was easy to find because of the bend of the river, and where the heavy machine gun post had been, the crater was smoothly grassed. It had been cropped, by sheep or goats, until it looked like a designed depression in a golf course. The river was slow and a muddy blue here, with reeds along the edges, and the Colonel, no one being in sight, squatted low, and looking across the river from the bank where you could never show your head in daylight, relieved himself in the exact place where he had determined, by triangulation, that he had been badly wounded thirty years before.
»A poor effort,» he said aloud to the river and the river bank that were heavy with autumn quiet and wet from the fall rains. »But my own.»
He stood up and looked around. There was no one in sight and he had left the car down the sunken road in front of the last and saddest rebuilt house in Fossalta.
»Now I’ll complete the monument,» he said to no one but the dead, and he took an old Sollingen clasp knife such as German poachers carry, from his pocket. It locked on opening and, twirling it, he dug a neat hole in the moist earth. He cleaned the knife on his right combat boot and then inserted a brown ten thousand lira note in the hole and tamped it down and put the grass that he had cored out, over it.
»That is twenty years at 500 lira a year for the Medaglia d’Argento al Valore Militare. The V.C. carries ten guineas, I believe. The D.S.C. is non-productive. The Silver Star is free. I’ll keep the change,» he said.
It’s fine now, he thought. It has merde, money, blood; look how that grass grows; and the iron’s in the earth along with Gino’s leg, both of Randolfo’s legs, and my right kneecap. It’s a wonderful monument. It has everything. Fertility, money, blood and iron. Sounds like a nation. Where fertility, money, blood and iron is, there is the fatherland. We need coal though. We ought to get some coal.
Then he looked across the river to the rebuilt white house that had once been rubble, and he spat in the river. It was a long spit and he just made it.
»I couldn’t spit that night nor afterwards for a long time,» he said. »But I spit good now for a man who doesn’t chew.»
He walked slowly back to where the car was parked. The driver was asleep.
»Wake up, son,» he had said. »Turn her around and take that road toward Treviso. We don’t need a map on this part. I’ll give you the turns.»
CHAPTER 4
NOW, on his way into Venice, keeping strictly controlled and unthinking his great need to be there, the big Buick cleared the last of San Dona and came up onto the bridge over the Piave.
They crossed the bridge and were on the Italian side of the river and he saw the old sunken road again. It was as smooth and undistinguished now, as it was all along the river. But he could see the old positions. And now, along each side of the straight, flat, canal-bordered road they were making time on, were the willows of the two canals that had contained the dead. There had been a great killing at the last of the offensive and someone, to clear the river bank positions and the road in the hot weather, had ordered the dead thrown into the canals. Unfortunately, the canal gates were still in the Austrians’ hands down the river, and they were closed.
So there was little movement to the water, and the dead had stayed there a long time, floating and bloating face up and face down regardless of nationality until they had attained colossal proportions. Finally, after organization had been established, labor troops hauled them out at night and buried them close to the road. The Colonel looked for added greenness close to the road but could not note any. However, there were many ducks and geese in the canals, and men were fishing in them all along the road.
They dug them all up anyway, the Colonel thought, and buried them in that big ossario up by Nervesa.
»We fought along here when I was a kid,» the Colonel told the driver.
»It’s a God-damn flat country to fight in,» the driver said. »Did you hold that river?»
»Yes,» the Colonel said. »We held it and lost it and took it back again.»
»There isn’t a contour here as far as you can see.»
»That was the trouble,» the Colonel said. »You had to use contours you couldn’t see, they were so small, and ditches and houses and canal banks and hedgerows. It was like Normandy only flatter. I think it must have been something like fighting in Holland.»
»That river sure doesn’t look anything like the Rapido.»
»It was a pretty good old river,» the Colonel said. »Up above, it had plenty of water then, before all these hydroelectric projects. And it had very deep and tricky channels in the pebbles and shingle when it was shallow. There was a place called the Grave de Papadopoli where it was plenty tricky.»
He knew how boring any man’s war is to any other man, and he stopped talking about it. They always take it personally, he thought
