Take off is putting it very cleanly and pleasantly. Sure, he thought, whenever you over-simplify you become unjust. Remember all the fine ones in the Resistance, remember Foch both fought and organized and remember how fine the people were. Remember your good friends and remember your deads. Remember plenty things and your best friends again and the finest people that you know. Don’t be a bitter nor a stupid. And what has that to do with soldiering as a trade? Cut it out, he told himself. You’re on a trip to have fun.
“Jackson,” he said, “are you happy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Shortly, we are coming to a view that I want you to see. You only have to take one look at it. The entire operation will be practically painless.”
I wonder what he’s riding me for now, the driver thought. Just because he was a B.G. once he knows everything. If he was any good as a B.G. why didn’t he hold it? He’s been beat up so much he’s slug-nutty.
“There’s the view, Jackson,” the Colonel said. “Stop her by the side of the road and we’ll take a look.”
The Colonel and the driver walked over to the Venice side of the road and looked across the lagoon that was whipped by the strong, cold wind from the mountains that sharpened all the outlines of buildings so that they were geometrically clear.
“That’s Torcello directly opposite us,” the Colonel pointed. “That’s where the people lived that were driven off the mainland by the Visigoths. They built that church you see there with the square tower. There were thirty thousand people lived there once and they built that church to honor their Lord and to worship him. Then, after they built it, the mouth of the Sile River silted up or a big flood changed it, and all that land we came through just now got flooded and started to breed mosquitoes and malaria hit them. They all started to die, so the elders got together and decided they should pull out to a healthy place that would be defensible with boats, and where the Visigoths and the Lombards and the other bandits couldn’t get at them, because these bandits had no sea-power. The Torcello boys were all great boatmen. So they took the stones of all their houses in barges, like that one we just saw, and they built Venice.”
He stopped. “Am I boring you, Jackson?”
“No, sir. I had no idea who pioneered Venice.”
“It was the boys from Torcello. They were very tough and they had very good taste in building. They came from a little place up the coast called Caorle. But they drew on all the people from the towns and the farms behind when the Visigoths over-ran them. It was a Torcello boy who was running arms into Alexandria, who located the body of St. Mark and smuggled it out under a load of fresh pork so the infidel customs guards wouldn’t check him. This boy brought the remains of St. Mark to Venice, and he’s their patron saint and they have a cathedral there to him. But by that time, they were trading so far to the east that the architecture is pretty Byzantine for my taste. They never built any better than at the start there in Torcello. That’s Torcello there.”
It was, indeed.
“St. Mark’s square is where the pigeons are and where they have that big cathedral that looks sort of like a moving picture palace, isn’t it?”
“Right, Jackson. You’re on the ball. If that’s the way you look at it. Now you look beyond Torcello you will see the lovely campanile on Burano that has damn near as much list on it as the leaning tower of Pisa. That Burano is a very over-populated little island where the women make wonderful lace, and the men make bambinis and work day-times in the glass factories in that next island you see on beyond with the other campanile, which is Murano. They make wonderful glass day-times for the rich of all the world, and then they come home on the little vaporetto and make bambinis. Not everyone passes every night with his wife though. They hunt ducks nights too, with big punt guns, out along the edge of the marshes on this lagoon you’re looking across now. All night long on a moonlight night you hear the shots.” He paused.