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.From the patrol s truck, Artilleryman Fiorani addressed whoever wasclosest to him: This time the infantry didn t kid around, did they? he said. What infantry? It was the Arditi who did everything, the traffic coor-dinator answered him.192 Sure, the Arditi too.But there s only one battalion of them, Fiorani ob-served: the battle was big. The Arditi did everything, he insisted.If you want to know, yesterdayI was near General Utili who commands the CIL: I was there as an ordersdispatcher, a few steps away from him.Well. Get out of here, you must have been in some tavern, Fiorani inter-rupted.The traffic coordinator shook his head. I m trying to say that the in-fantry is always the same.I don t know how it was back in the First WorldWar; maybe back then it was different, who knows, many say it was.Butyesterday a battalion called for reinforcements before attacking. What re-inforcements? the general asked, You haven t even started. Yes, but itseems like the Germans want to attack us. He addressed the otherstoo: You understand? The Lord must have created the infantry on the sev-enth day, when he was tired. The Arditi are too few.They couldn t have done everything on theirown, the artilleryman Bertolini intervened, backing up Fiorani. Few but good.They did everything on their own.In fact, they provedto be better than your paratroopers.This time, the Germans weren t evenable to retreat: they almost all stayed on the ground. Pause. Well, it s a good thing that someone else woke up, exclaimed adisappointed Fiorani (a stocky guy, with short legs and a long torso, fromEmilia just like Bertolini and Freddi). Every battle was up to us Nembofrom the moment we entered the line. This time you Nembo, as a matter of fact precisely you artillerymen,seemed to be on the Germans side.Do you know that your First Groupkilled six or seven Arditi? What? What crap are you talking about? I m telling you what I know, because I saw the colonel of the Arditi withmy very eyes.He arrived like a crazy man foaming at the mouth: Who isgoing to bring back soldiers like those nowadays? he yelled. Where am Igoing to find such soldiers again? Well, General Utili stayed silent. At this point, as we could have expected, the artillerymen began arguingwith the traffic coordinator, reminding him that for starters, he was ashirker.In fact, Morandi defined him, with some pertinence, as a shirkertraffic coordinator. I had to intervene to get them to stop. The general wouldn t have let Colonel Boschetti make such a fuss, ifthings weren t really as he said, he grumbled, and moved away, tidying upthe band around his arm.193 Could what that command wretch said be true, lieutenant? I don t know. Later on, we would learn that, unfortunately, the events went exactly ashe had described.We noticed on the shore between the rocks a shoe full of something.Anartilleryman descended from a truck in the column in front of ours andwent to inspect it. The foot is still in it, he announced.He took it andplaced it outside of the road: it wasn t an ankle boot from the Arditi, butan infantry shoe. That traffic coordinator could have removed it, instead of talking rub-bish, Pasquali, the Abruzzese recruit, said, so that the truck wouldn tcrush the rest of mama s boy. As we crossed the river, we grazed a small cart without sides that stoodout in the middle of the water.In spite of a blanket laid out on top, twodead infantrymen, already swollen, stood out on the chute.The mineshadn t spared them, even after they had died.One had to hope that the footwe had found on the shore belonged to one of them.We found our dead and the Germans beyond the lake between the trees.Then, still more dead Germans, isolated or in small groups, continuously.Some had their arms raised to defend their heads from splinters; there weremany.Their half-burnt anti-tank guns lay next to tractors camouflaged in yel-low and brown; around, on the blackened earth, were sharp anti-tank shells.194 17BEFORE NIGHT, the group s eight gunswere once again in position a few kilometers past the river, near a farm.A battery was charged with setting up the group s observation post, clear-ly affronting the platoon.But this doesn t mean that they left us alone.Onthe contrary: that day, like the previous one, we received and executed withexhausting swiftness orders and counter-orders so difficult that the fruits ofthe preceding week s stagnation were lost.As for me, I began to feel not the usual tiredness, but the one typical ofthe front that settles and gathers in the bones like a slow poison, ungrate-ful even to remembrance.That night, after we swallowed our rations, welay down heavily to sleep.Around two o clock, a sentinel groped his way to my tent: LieutenantFrancescoli wants you. A big silence filled the night.The moonlight barely distinguished thestructures of the farm from the straw stacks and our trucks covered by cam-ouflage nets.Only a few stars, intent on following their icy paths, came outin the sky.There was an immense solitude beneath them; the stars were sofar from us a handful of sleeping men and from the dead scattered inthe countryside, each wrapped in his own silence.The only tent that let out some light was that of Francescoli, the com-mander of the unit. One moment, he said as I entered. I ll finish this off,and I ll be with you. An unusual noncommissioned officer who was takingorders in front of him looked at me, afraid that I would cut in front of him. I ll wait on the threshing-floor, I said.I went to sit on a stump protruding from the grass, under the intangibleface of the sky.As I did this, I strangely seemed to feel my angel seated bymy side on the stump, as a human would be.It wasn t the first time duringthose weeks that I felt the presence of my guardian angel (I had felt it also195 many times, and as intensely, on the Russian front).Urged on by such ex-periences, at times here in the Marches I even tried to imagine it.How isan angel made? I had tried to put together, in a single figure, the differentangelic attributes collected here and there in sacred texts [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.From the patrol s truck, Artilleryman Fiorani addressed whoever wasclosest to him: This time the infantry didn t kid around, did they? he said. What infantry? It was the Arditi who did everything, the traffic coor-dinator answered him.192 Sure, the Arditi too.But there s only one battalion of them, Fiorani ob-served: the battle was big. The Arditi did everything, he insisted.If you want to know, yesterdayI was near General Utili who commands the CIL: I was there as an ordersdispatcher, a few steps away from him.Well. Get out of here, you must have been in some tavern, Fiorani inter-rupted.The traffic coordinator shook his head. I m trying to say that the in-fantry is always the same.I don t know how it was back in the First WorldWar; maybe back then it was different, who knows, many say it was.Butyesterday a battalion called for reinforcements before attacking. What re-inforcements? the general asked, You haven t even started. Yes, but itseems like the Germans want to attack us. He addressed the otherstoo: You understand? The Lord must have created the infantry on the sev-enth day, when he was tired. The Arditi are too few.They couldn t have done everything on theirown, the artilleryman Bertolini intervened, backing up Fiorani. Few but good.They did everything on their own.In fact, they provedto be better than your paratroopers.This time, the Germans weren t evenable to retreat: they almost all stayed on the ground. Pause. Well, it s a good thing that someone else woke up, exclaimed adisappointed Fiorani (a stocky guy, with short legs and a long torso, fromEmilia just like Bertolini and Freddi). Every battle was up to us Nembofrom the moment we entered the line. This time you Nembo, as a matter of fact precisely you artillerymen,seemed to be on the Germans side.Do you know that your First Groupkilled six or seven Arditi? What? What crap are you talking about? I m telling you what I know, because I saw the colonel of the Arditi withmy very eyes.He arrived like a crazy man foaming at the mouth: Who isgoing to bring back soldiers like those nowadays? he yelled. Where am Igoing to find such soldiers again? Well, General Utili stayed silent. At this point, as we could have expected, the artillerymen began arguingwith the traffic coordinator, reminding him that for starters, he was ashirker.In fact, Morandi defined him, with some pertinence, as a shirkertraffic coordinator. I had to intervene to get them to stop. The general wouldn t have let Colonel Boschetti make such a fuss, ifthings weren t really as he said, he grumbled, and moved away, tidying upthe band around his arm.193 Could what that command wretch said be true, lieutenant? I don t know. Later on, we would learn that, unfortunately, the events went exactly ashe had described.We noticed on the shore between the rocks a shoe full of something.Anartilleryman descended from a truck in the column in front of ours andwent to inspect it. The foot is still in it, he announced.He took it andplaced it outside of the road: it wasn t an ankle boot from the Arditi, butan infantry shoe. That traffic coordinator could have removed it, instead of talking rub-bish, Pasquali, the Abruzzese recruit, said, so that the truck wouldn tcrush the rest of mama s boy. As we crossed the river, we grazed a small cart without sides that stoodout in the middle of the water.In spite of a blanket laid out on top, twodead infantrymen, already swollen, stood out on the chute.The mineshadn t spared them, even after they had died.One had to hope that the footwe had found on the shore belonged to one of them.We found our dead and the Germans beyond the lake between the trees.Then, still more dead Germans, isolated or in small groups, continuously.Some had their arms raised to defend their heads from splinters; there weremany.Their half-burnt anti-tank guns lay next to tractors camouflaged in yel-low and brown; around, on the blackened earth, were sharp anti-tank shells.194 17BEFORE NIGHT, the group s eight gunswere once again in position a few kilometers past the river, near a farm.A battery was charged with setting up the group s observation post, clear-ly affronting the platoon.But this doesn t mean that they left us alone.Onthe contrary: that day, like the previous one, we received and executed withexhausting swiftness orders and counter-orders so difficult that the fruits ofthe preceding week s stagnation were lost.As for me, I began to feel not the usual tiredness, but the one typical ofthe front that settles and gathers in the bones like a slow poison, ungrate-ful even to remembrance.That night, after we swallowed our rations, welay down heavily to sleep.Around two o clock, a sentinel groped his way to my tent: LieutenantFrancescoli wants you. A big silence filled the night.The moonlight barely distinguished thestructures of the farm from the straw stacks and our trucks covered by cam-ouflage nets.Only a few stars, intent on following their icy paths, came outin the sky.There was an immense solitude beneath them; the stars were sofar from us a handful of sleeping men and from the dead scattered inthe countryside, each wrapped in his own silence.The only tent that let out some light was that of Francescoli, the com-mander of the unit. One moment, he said as I entered. I ll finish this off,and I ll be with you. An unusual noncommissioned officer who was takingorders in front of him looked at me, afraid that I would cut in front of him. I ll wait on the threshing-floor, I said.I went to sit on a stump protruding from the grass, under the intangibleface of the sky.As I did this, I strangely seemed to feel my angel seated bymy side on the stump, as a human would be.It wasn t the first time duringthose weeks that I felt the presence of my guardian angel (I had felt it also195 many times, and as intensely, on the Russian front).Urged on by such ex-periences, at times here in the Marches I even tried to imagine it.How isan angel made? I had tried to put together, in a single figure, the differentangelic attributes collected here and there in sacred texts [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]