“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 IV
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.”