‘Let’s go then,’ Bonello said. We went down the north side of the embankment. I looked back. Aymo lay in the mud with the angle of the embankment. He was quite small and his arms were by his side, his puttee-wrapped legs and muddy boots together, his cap over his face. He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew. I had his papers in my pocket and would write to his family. Ahead across the fields was a farmhouse. There were trees around it and the farm buildings were built against the house. There was a balcony along the second floor held up by columns.
‘We better keep a little way apart,’ I said. ‘I’ll go ahead.’ I started towards the farmhouse. There was a path across the field.
Crossing the field, I did not know but that someone would fire on us from the trees near the farmhouse or from the farmhouse itself. I walked toward it, seeing it very clearly. The balcony of the second floor merged into the barn and there was hay coming out between the columns. The courtyard was of stone blocks and all the trees were dripping with the rain. There was a big empty two-wheeled cart, the shafts tipped high up in the rain. I came to the courtyard, crossed it, and stood under the shelter of the balcony. The door of the house was open and I went in. Bonello and Piani came in after me. It was dark inside. I went back to the kitchen. There were ashes of a fire on the big open hearth. The pots hung over the ashes, but they were empty. I looked around but I could not find anything to eat.
‘We ought to lie up in the barn,’ I said. ‘Do you think you could find anything to eat, Piani, and bring it up there?’
‘I’ll look,’ Piani said.
‘I’ll look too,’ Bonello said.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll go up and look at the barn.’ I found a stone stairway that went up from the stable underneath. The stable smelt dry and pleasant in the rain. The cattle were all gone, probably driven off when they left. The barn was half full of hay. There were two windows in the roof, one was blocked with boards, the other was a narrow dormer window on the north side. There was a chute so that hay might be pitched down to the cattle. Beams crossed the opening down into the main floor where the haycarts drove in when the hay was hauled in to be pitched up. I heard the rain on the roof and smelled the hay and, when I went down, the clean smell of dried dung in the stable. We could prise a board loose and see out of the south window down into the courtyard. The other window looked out on the field toward the north. We could get out of either window on to the roof and down, or go down the hay chute if the stairs were impractical. It was a big barn and we could hide in the hay if we heard anyone. It seemed like a good place. I was sure we could have gotten through to the south if they had not fired on us. It was impossible that there were Germans there. They were coming from the north and down the road from Cividale. They could not have come through from the south. The Italians were even more dangerous. They were frightened and firing on anything they saw. Last night on the retreat we had heard that there had been many Germans in Italian uniforms mixing with the retreat in the north. I did not believe it. That was one of those things you always heard in the war. It was one of the things the enemy always did to you. You did not know anyone who went over in German uniform to confuse them. Maybe they did but it sounded difficult. I did not believe the Germans did it. I did not believe they had to. There was no need to confuse our retreat. The size of the army and the fewness of the roads did that. Nobody gave any orders, let alone Germans. Still, they would shoot us for Germans. They shot Aymo. The hay smelled good and lying in a barn in the hay took away all the years in between. We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air-rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried treetops, branches and fire-weed where the woods had been. You could not go back. If you did not go forward what happened? You never got back to Milan. And if you got back to Milan what happened? I listened to the firing to the north toward Udine. I could hear machine-gun firing. There was no shelling. That was something. They must have gotten some troops along the road. I looked down in the half-light of the hay-barn and saw Piani standing on the hauling floor. He had a long sausage, a jar of something and two bottles of wine under his arm.
‘Come up,’ I said. ‘There is the ladder.’ Then I realized that I should help him with the things and went down. I was vague in the head from lying in the hay. I had been nearly asleep.
‘Where’s Bonello?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Piani said. We went up the ladder. Up on the hay we set the things down. Piani took out his knife with the corkscrew and drew the cork on a wine bottle.
‘They have sealing-wax on it,’ he said. ‘It must be good.’ He smiled.
‘Where’s Bonello?’ I asked.
Piani looked at me.
‘He went away, Tenente,’ he said. ‘He wanted to be a prisoner.’
I did not say anything.
‘He was afraid we would get killed.’
I held the bottle of wine and did not say anything.
‘You see we don’t believe in the war anyway, Tenente.’
‘Why didn’t you go?’ I asked.
‘I did not want to leave you.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘I don’t know, Tenente. He went away.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Will you cut the sausage?’
Piani looked at me in the half-light.
‘I cut it while we were talking,’ he said. We sat in the hay and ate the sausage and drank the wine. It must have been wine they had saved for a wedding. It was so old that it was losing its colour.
‘You look out of this window, Luigi,’ I said. ‘I’ll go look out the other window.’
We had each been drinking out of one of the bottles and I took my bottle with me and went over and lay flat on the hay and looked out the narrow window at the wet country. I do not know what I expected to see but I did not see anything except the fields and the bare mulberry trees and the rain falling. I drank the wine and it did not make me feel good. They had kept it too long and it had gone to pieces and lost its quality and colour. I watched it get dark outside; the darkness came very quickly. It would be a black night with the rain. When it was dark there was no use watching any more, so I went over to Piani. He was lying asleep and I did not wake him but sat down beside him for a while. He was a big man and he slept heavily. After a while I woke him and we started.
That was a very strange night. I do not know what I had expected, death perhaps and shooting in the dark and running, but nothing happened. We waited, lying flat beyond the ditch along the main road while a German battalion passed, then when they were gone we crossed the road and went on to the north. We were very close to Germans twice in the rain but they did not see us. We got past the town to the north without seeing any Italians, then after a while came on the main channels of the retreat and walked all night toward the Tagliamento. I had not realized how gigantic the retreat was. The whole country was moving, as well as the army. We walked all night, making better time than the vehicles. My leg ached and I was tired but we made good time. It seemed so silly for Bonello to have decided to be taken prisoner. There was no danger. We had walked through two armies without incident. If Aymo had not been killed there would never have seemed to be any danger. No one had bothered us when we were in plain sight along the railway. The killing came suddenly and unreasonably. I wondered where Bonello was.
‘How do you feel, Tenente?’ Piani asked. We were going along the side of a road crowded with vehicles and troops.
‘Fine.’
‘I’m tired of this walking.’
‘Well, all we have to do is walk now. We don’t have to worry.’
‘Bonello was a fool.’
‘He was a fool all right.’
‘What will you do about him, Tenente?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can’t you just put him down as taken prisoner?
‘I don’t know.’
‘You see if the war went on they would make bad trouble for his family.’
‘The war won’t go on,’ a soldier said. ‘We’re going home. The war is over.’
‘Everybody’s going home.’
‘We’re all going
