Unto the Sons (53 page)

The major, who was standing in the sun talking with the Bersaglieri, gave a perfunctory look at the volume Antonio held before him, and told him he could have it. Major Reina was in a very agreeable mood. He had just wired his superiors that he had taken over the Austrian village without any opposition whatsoever, and he had reason to believe that the enemy troops atop the mountain might have fled behind the civilians. The Austrian guns had been strangely silent along the peaks ever since the Italians had swarmed into the village. Perhaps they had lacked sufficient manpower up there, or had run out of ammunition. In any case Major Reina thought it was a perfect time to move boldly to the top; and after discussing his strategy with the Bersagliere officers, the major told his sergeant to assemble the troops so that he could make his announcement.

The Italian troops at this time were still ambling around the village, enjoying the novelty of moving unguardedly in the daylight and basking in whatever glory accompanied an unchallenged triumph. Many soldiers
were gathered near the spring, splashing water on their faces, rinsing their shirts, and some were even jumping naked into the shallow water for a bath or a short swim. Muffo and Branca were wallowing in the water, and Antonio, after slipping his book into a compartment of his knapsack, wandered over to join them. It was not quite noon, the sun was burning brightly over the snowcapped mountains, and the sergeant had not yet blown his whistle.

Slipping off his knapsack and unbuttoning his shirt, Antonio watched his naked friends for a moment, enjoying the sight of the fun they were having as the water cascaded over their laughing faces and flailing arms; and since the water was only waist-deep, Antonio confidently prepared for what would be another affront to his hydrophobia. But as he was about to climb over a granite ledge into the basin, the water suddenly stopped coming down; a barricade of timber had been laid. Antonio and the others looked up, squinting in the sun. There, at the top of the cliff, a few hundred feet above their heads, was a row of helmeted enemy soldiers with guns, their view now unimpeded.

Then the bullets and grenades rained down, and explosions blasted through the water, setting off flying rocks and clouds of smoke streaked with yellow flame. As the Italians hurled themselves screaming out of the basin, tumbled to the ground, and raced for cover toward the forest, Antonio ran behind them—but not before he had seen Muffo and Branca disappear into the basin, their bodies riddled with bullets, darkening the color of the water that trickled over the mountainside.

25.

T
he surprise attack that killed Muffo, Branca, and two other soldiers in Antonio’s unit and injured half a dozen more was one of many setbacks suffered by Italian reconnaissance patrols in the early summer of 1915; and things only worsened in the weeks and months ahead, as the big battles began—battles characterized by the attempts of thousands of mountain-climbing Italians to scale the strategic peaks and topple the enemy perched along the jagged and crusty four-hundred-mile front. But it soon became apparent that more Italians were being shot down than were charging up, and the casualty figures at the end of the year shocked
the nation. More than 62,000 Italian soldiers were dead, 170,000 were injured, and Italy had nothing to show for it except mortification and grief. The Austrians still controlled the dominant cliffs, and there was no reason to believe that this situation would change.

This is not what Italians had expected when the country entered the war in May 1915. At that time Italy’s involvement was seen as a limited adventure, not unlike the recent campaign in Libya, with much to gain and little to lose. It was believed that Austria, already at war with Serbia in the Balkans and with Russia on its eastern front, would offer scant resistance along its southern borders to the encroaching Italians. Italian strategists, however, had underrated the Austrian army’s strength and tenacity; and now after the unanticipated bloodshed there were angry debates in the Italian parliament, protests in towns and villages, and calls for the resignation of the Italian commander, General Count Cadorna.

But General Cadorna refused to blame himself or his staff entirely for the depressing turn of events. It had been the politicians, not he, who had drawn Italy into this war; and the war he had inherited had forced his inexperienced young troops into uphill battles whenever they ventured into enemy territory, while the inadequate supply of Italian weaponry and ammunition lent an added edge to the better-equipped Austrians. Italy’s industrial capacity, even at maximum efficiency, was no match for Austria allied with Germany (Italy had no coal, and before the war had relied extensively on Germany for hardware and machinery); and contributing to the low morale of Italian fighting men, General Cadorna believed, was the antiwar propaganda of the nation’s Socialists and other unpatriotic citizens who were spreading dissension and doubt.

Among the general’s doubters, however, were several of his own senior officers and veteran soldiers. They often saw him as a pawn of the other Allied commanders, a man who had needlessly sacrificed troops in risky assaults against the Austrians in response to the wishes of his high-ranking colleagues. But the French and British had also suffered heavy losses on the western front, as had the Russians on the eastern front; and the last thing these nations wanted, especially since their Serbian allies had seemingly gone into hibernation in the Balkans, was an unaggressive Italian army taking the pressure off the enemy along the southern border of Austria. Still, with nearly a quarter of a million Italians out of action in 1915 without achieving a single important object, General Cadorna’s wisdom as a leader was certainly open to question; and many Italian soldiers were also disturbed by persistent rumors of unfair conscription policies on the home front that permitted able-bodied young men, primarily
from privileged families, to avoid the draft by getting jobs in the much-needed munitions industries. These men were denounced at the front as
imboscati
—shirkers.

As the war continued to go badly in 1916, and as resentment grew against the increasing numbers of
imboscati
, many troops refused to fight, feigning mental illness or various ailments that excused them from frontline duty; and some soldiers even shot themselves in the legs to avoid what they saw as the ceaseless and almost callous annihilation of the underprivileged. While Antonio remained at the front during this time, rejoining the Forty-eighth Infantry Battalion after his shattered reconnaissance team had been disbanded—he was among the lucky few to escape the attack without injury—he did share the sentiments of the most disgruntled foot soldiers. Like him, a majority of these malcontents were conscripts from the rural areas of the south; and it seemed to them—and published reports later confirmed their suspicions—that the southern boys were being disproportionately victimized by the war because, lacking the influence to gain a fair share of the deferments or rearguard assignments, they were the most exposed to battle. The young men from the north, on the other hand, on the average better educated and more literate than southerners, were viewed by their commanders (who were predominantly northern-born) as more qualified for clerical jobs and other rearline military assignments. And since Italy’s industrial enterprises, insufficient as they proved to be in the early part of the war, were located mostly in the north, the jobs there and the deferments went more often to northern men.

Thus the Italian army was divided as the nation itself was divided. The unification of Italy more than a half-century before had failed to unite the south with the north; and southerners like Antonio felt no more assimilated nationally in 1916 than had his grandfather Domenico in 1861 after the Risorgimento and the fall of the Bourbons.

In Antonio’s letters home, and in his diary, he expressed his complaints and those of his fellow soldiers. He told of seeing many
imboscati
during his brief furloughs in northern cities, men strolling merrily through the streets and sitting contentedly in the cafés. These “vital” workers, he commented sourly, earned five times more than the troops risking life and limb at the front. Worse, he pointed out, Italy’s war industry was producing much defective equipment. Shells failed to explode. Small amounts of mud could jam a rifle. The grenade launchers quickly overheated, and sometimes blew up the soldiers who were doing the loading and firing.

Heavy rains made swamps of what limited flatland existed between the mountains, and the Italian cavalry was virtually useless as a fighting force. Antonio described proud equestrian officers, their boots and riding breeches submerged in mud, holding on to the tails of their horses while crossing the swamps; and he repeated an often quoted line used by one senior officer to describe the Italian infantry: “Pieces of walking mud.” This phrase, which appeared in Italian newspapers, had offended General Cadorna, and he criticized the officer who had said it. But although General Cadorna raised barriers against the press and instituted censorship over the soldiers’ mail, he was unable to halt the increasing number of demonstrations against the war by the unhappy families of servicemen.

While Antonio saw the war from the vantage point of a southerner—in his view, everything above Naples was north—there were also underprivileged families in northern and central Italy with relatives in the army who fought side by side with southerners and endured every hardship with a similar sense of weariness and wrath. There were citizens’ antiwar protests in Mantua, Florence, and other northern and central cities. Protests in the south, however, seemed more frequent and more passionate. Southern leftist leaders could point to the war as yet another example of the south’s being sucked dry by the north. It was the old class struggle—the powerful profiting at the expense of the powerless; the urban bourgeoisie being favored over the rural poor. Government administrators were more efficient with their pension and private assistance programs in the cities than in the countryside; but their efficiency noticeably improved in the rural areas when it came to forcing the sale of livestock, and requisitioning timber, and drafting farm workers to meet the needs of the war. Widowed women with young children were often left to operate large farms by themselves, with unfortunate results. There was a marked increase in soldiers’ mutinies in such outposts as Catanzaro; and in such villages as Maida, there were nightly rallies against the war, and ultimately a riot in which young Joseph participated.

It erupted on a Sunday evening in the early spring of 1916. Although the riot was led by Socialist leaders who were not residents of the village, it was widely supported by the local people, and among the most actively involved were pre-draft-age teenagers from Maida who had been recruited into the Young Socialists club. Joseph, who was not yet thirteen, had been brought into the group by a politically engaged older cousin of his mother’s who had been drawn back by the draft from a job in America with Keasbey & Mattison Company. Neither Joseph’s mother nor his grandfather Domenico contradicted his leftist politicization; even local
churchmen, who during the previous year had preached in favor of national obedience, now voiced no objections to the Socialists’ war policies. Five of Maida’s native sons had already died at the front—five of the original thirteen who had been called up with Antonio—and three others had been seriously wounded. And the Talese household’s opposition to the war was additionally influenced by the fact that Joseph’s brother Sebastian, who had recently turned seventeen, had received his notification to report at once to Catanzaro for military training.

Both his mother and his grandfather had visited the municipal building to protest to the recruitment office, and his uncle Francesco Cristiani had traveled to Catanzaro to appeal to the review board at the army base, emphasizing that Sebastian was needed on the farm and was the main support of his widowed mother, who had four younger dependent children. But the army desperately needed troops, and no exception was made for Sebastian.

A week after the conscription of Sebastian and a dozen of his Maida contemporaries, a particularly rancorous nocturnal rally was held in the square, drawing a large crowd carrying torches and also some shotguns. When one speaker suggested that everyone march on the municipal building and burn the town records, which the military consulted for conscription purposes, loud cheers greeted the proposal, and soon more than three hundred individuals paraded through the narrow streets toward the dark stone structure some blocks from the square, singing, shouting slogans, and blasting out overhead lamps along the way. Oddly, there were no police posted to block their path, nor had there been any on patrol in the square. Joseph, following the example of other marchers, picked up stones along the road and hurled them up at the streetlights, and later also toward the windows of the municipal building, where again there were no guards—even though the precinct house was a few doors away, lights glowing within but the officers on duty seemingly deaf to the hue and cry of the crowd. It was obvious that
nobody
in town wanted to prevent the upheaval, and that the dissenters represented every level of local society. There was the principal Don Achille; the butcher Nicholas Pileggi; the stonemason Nicola Muscatelli (recently returned from America); the chemist Dr. Fabiani; the aristocrat Don Torquato; and also Padre Panella (the child he had supposedly fathered was now rumored to be in the care of a neighboring nunnery). There was the poet Ciccio Parisi; Lena Rotella, who ran the orphanage; the spinster Nina Bevivino, grandniece of the late, lamented Antonio Bevivino (who got a hole in his head while fighting under Murat on the Russian front in 1812); and the shepherd Guardacielo,
accompanied by his dog wearing a collar studded with steel spikes. There were Joseph’s uncle Francesco Cristiani; Joseph’s maternal grandfather, Sebastian Rocchino (Joseph’s paternal grandfather and the women of the Talese family were attending the nightly Mass); and Joseph’s fellow Young Socialists: fourteen-year-old Nicholas Pileggi, one of the butcher’s sons; fifteen-year-old Francesco LaScala, who worked after school in his grandfather’s carriage repair shop; sixteen-year-old Gino Giglio, the blacksmith’s grandson and a recent school dropout, who grimly awaited his draft call; and sixteen-year-old Giuseppe Paone, a student and vegetable vendor who, despite being cross-eyed, feared that he would be acceptable to the Italian army.