The article here below by Bruno
Marcuzzo and translated by Julia Owen comes from the book La grande guerra tra terra ed acqua.
Storie e memorie nelle terre basse tra Livenza, Piave e Sile fino al mare (see here to flip the full book and here for text in Italian). We invite you also to surf the site laguerradihemingway.it
Each one of us has at
least one place which represents a moment which changed our life. For Ernest
Hemingway - more than he could ever have said (1), nor we imagined – the river
Piave (2) was that place.
Ernest arrived there as
a boy (3). He thought of war as a football match and the enemy as the away team
(4). He wore a made-to-measure uniform on which the stripes of a second
lieutenant were stitched . Whatever their age, all the American Red Cross boys
were at least second lieutenants, so, as far as the troops were concerned, they
were officers. The Italian officers spent time among them, in the canteens and
at the command posts; these were educated men and some of them spoke English. They
were certainly much more mature than Ernest. Even the infantrymen, marked by
years of combat and discomfort, seemed older. With them he shared wine and
women and all those experiences which would have been unthinkable at home in
America. The American Red Cross had entrusted him with running a canteen post,
putting men and materials at his disposal, and even a bicycle on which he could
move around without asking anyone's permission. He was a protected boy in a
grown-up world, and he was held in consideration both as an officer, and also
as an American. What more could anyone
have asked for in that particular time of life when unexpected freedom suddenly
throws open the doors onto a seemingly limitless world?
But soon the serenity
which came hand in hand with ignorance, his sky high self esteem, and the epic
myth of battle,would all lie buried in a trench on the bank of the river,
Despite ARC volunteers
being forbidden to go near the front line, it was not the first time that
Ernest had gone to look at the Austro-Hungarian trenches. That place where the
river points in an 'L' shape towards Fossalta is famous (5): just before the
last battle the Czech Lieutenant Stiny went by with the Italians bringing
important news about an attack. His friends from the Ancona Brigade were right
there, they would not cause problems. He left his bike leaning against the last
houses at the foot of the river bank and climbed the short slope. It was hot,
and the men were sleeping in holes dug out under the top of the bank. By day
one could sleep, it was darkness which made everything difficult: all the eyes
in the world would not be enough to see what was going on on the other side of
the river. In the dark all you saw was fear.
On the curve behind the
river bank there was a large dug out protected by earth where he used to go to
chat to the soldiers. It was dark by the time he left the command post dug out
at the foot of the river bank. He went up to the trench at the top of the bank,
and made his way down towards the side of the river, before walking along the
tow path which passed in front of a house whose roof had been blown off by
mortar fire. The smell of day's heat had been replaced with the sound of the
front line. A little further on, the reflection of a flare died on the still
water of the river. In the gun emplacement were gunners and a machine gun. It
does not take many men to control enemy lines; there would not be any sense in
sacrificing more men than necessary on a position that far forward. It was an
excellent position because from that point you could see down the river in both
directions. The trenches were so close that each had a clear idea of what was
going on on the other side.
A whispered
conversation, the glow of a cigarette, or an unexpected sound, and the
Austro-Hungarians on the other side, suspecting action, would send back a
bombardment on the Italians (6). ''Through the other sounds I heard a cough,
then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh, and then there was a flash''. The aim was
perfect.
The explosion, white,
then red, then purple, and the movement of air, carried him with it while
taking the air from his lungs. He had no time to think, he only felt himself
dying. He finished up, semi buried beneath sandbags, beams and other detritus
which continued to rain down even into the water; first the largest pieces,
near the Italian bank, and then smaller and smaller across onto the opposite
side. In the darkness he realised that near him one of the soldiers was dead,
another was crying out. The shock of the explosion had anaesthetised him (7) so
that he did not feel the many splinters of shrapnel which dug into his legs. All
he could hear with his ears was the buzzing of shattered metal. His heart must
have been bursting in his breast while the adrenaline warmed his veins.
He should not have attacted
the attention of the enemy, indeed he should never have been there at all. Now
he could have stayed where he was, pretending to be dead, waiting for help to
arrive; instead, automatically, he began doing what he had been taught to do
which was to pick up the wounded. The height of the average Italian soldier at
that time was 1.60m while he stood not far short of 1.90m. He slung the small
soldier across his wide shoulders and started making for the the trench below
the bank. The Austro-Hungarians, pleased to have hit their target, launched a
flare to see what was going on; it exploded high, illuminating the trench and
the ruins of the house on the river bank. This scene, in a yellow flash, remained in
Ernests' eyes, becoming the synthesis of his perception of the moment. The
image of that house on the river bank would remain in his nightmares as the
representation of distress.
From the other side of
the river they began to track him with machine gun fire and hit him first on
his left thigh and his right foot. He got to his feet again, made his way for
another fifty meters trying to reach the shelter of the bank. He was walking
badly, inside his boots his feet felt as though they were squelching in hot
water. He was bleeding from a head wound and thick blood ran down his neck. He
was hit by a second burst which hit him on the right knee and which sent him,
and the wounded man, tumbling down into the trench on the bank where he passed
out.
At first he was given
up for dead. The officers were alarmed, not merely on his account but because
of the trouble he had caused. They would have to answer for a great many
things. Meanwhile, the Italians, put on the alert by the explosion, thinking it
was an attack, started firing their artillery across the river, and the orther
side immediately began firing back. The night of 8th July 1918 should have been
a quiet one.
This experience
destroyed any myth he might have had of a 'just war', fought with force and the
purity of ideals.
He realises that many
Italians do not want war. He sees signs of their mistrust towards governments,
and orders that are far removed from ordinary people who want victory even when
faced with the unspeakable sacrifices of soldiers, they are insulted by
propaganda.
He will write (8): 'I
suppose it is just the loss of the immortality... well, in a way, that is quite
a lot to lose'.
The immortality to
which he refers is also that of his youthful ideals, the myths of truth and
justice which were killed not so much by the explosion as by the betrayal
perpetuated by greater interests which held sway over the wishes of the people
and drew advantage from that. He was not frightened of dying, something that at
that point he believed to be quite simple, but of dying in order to pay someone
else's bill without meaning to.
The young man's
illusions die on that river bank and, from there, a man who no longer believes
there is anything worth fighting for walks away.
This is the detachment
of the 'lost generation' - the period in which he lived in Paris that was
characterised by a resigned individualism but which would slowly disappear as
the tensions in Spain led to civil war. Ernest returns to pure ideology,
choosing to align himself with the wish for self-determination, an absolute
value which cannot fail. He defends the idea of the Repubblic because it is the
only form of democratic government which he believes possible.
The war in Spain will
teach him that no one can fight for what is right without remaining marked by
it; you cannot fight a war without getting dirtied; someone, on one side or the
other, will feel authorised to justify the violence and twist truth into
propaganda thus perpetuating the betrayal of truth, of justice, and of robbing
the sacrifice of the dignity of purity.
For years to come, he
and his pen will fight on. But he will have his eyes wide open and firmly fixed
on the the true wishes of the people. He will denounce the manoeuvres of the
various systems of interests and he will remain steadfast in the struggle,
which he believes to be the only true measure of the dignity of man which, even
when faced with the certainty of losing, cannot betray itself.
He returned to Italy
one more time to work on 'Across the River' with the old soldier spewing forth
confused memories. In the silence of the morning, gazing at a lagoon landscape
of almost heartbreaking beauty, he rediscovers his love for this country, a love
which now he finds in a time of peace. He returns to the river bank one last
time, not like those veterans do as they search for their lost youth, but in
order to settle his accounts with the fear of having sacrificed himself without
properly understanding or making a conscious choice.
On the river bank every
trace of the trenches had disappeared, the wind caressed the grass on the top
of the ridge. Ernest saw once more the house on the river bank, it had stood
witness to all the events but it remained standing, and it still is now,
although rebuilt. In front of the house he searched for the crater of the
explosion, then he pulled down his nut-brown trousers (9), and with the
delicacy of an old knight (10), he prepared for a cerimonial evacuation of his
bowels. But nothing came, so he dug a
small hole in the earth and buried a thousand lira banknote which corresponded
exactly to the value of the pension which received, then he filled in the hole
and stamped down the earth, just as people do after planting seeds.
His sowing of the seeds
had begun in 1918 with the burial of youthful illusions; it was a carelessly
made sacrifice and his voluntary efforts to an ideal had been betrayed. If he had not returned to justify his actions
then his would have remained a useless sacrifice. The mature man, who had given
form to his own ideals, could not leave that sacrifice without justifying it,
so he returned to tie together all the paths it had taken.
He put the money in the
hole. He did not want anyone else to pay for the sacrifice he himself had made.
He had not done it for the money. He left the money gladly to this earth which
still needed so much support.
''It's fine now,' he
thought (11). 'It has merde, money, blood; look how that grass grows... It has
everything. Fertility, money, blood and iron. Sounds like a nation. Where
fertility, money, blood and iron is, there is the fatherland.'"
The Second World War
had just finished and there were great expectations of the future. Through that
ceremony he found again his careless youth, he recognised it again as the
sower, justifying his sacrifice as part of the birth pangs of a new nation, and
it returns to him the dignity of blood spilt by the pure of heart.
Before leaving, he
concluded his visit to the old front with another ritual. He stood up between
the reeds on the river bank, raised his eyes and looked across the river to the
point where the enemy lines had once been, and he spat.
''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...'' (12)
Even a failure to spit
had its justification. As a boy he had discovered that if you were frightened
your mouth went dry and you could not spit. During the civil war in Spain his
writer friends in the combat used to try the spitting test. ''There was not one of them...who could not
make a joke in the imminent presence of death and who could not spit afterwards
to show the joke was real (13).''
They did not make jokes
out of boastfulness. Hemingway believed that truly brave men are always
cheerful. The fact that he now succeeded in spitting well, right there on the
very spot where fear itself had bewitched him, was proof that he had finally
worked through the idea of how one might die for a just cause without remorse. Above
all it was proof that the old sacrifice he had never 'wished for' now
demonstrated itself to have been shared by those men alongside whom he had
contributed to both freedom and its political consequences.
On the bank of that
river at Fossalta where the careless young man died, another man returned; the
river saw that he had never ceased to fight even with his incapacity to justify
human fear. This return concluded another cycle. The man who spat now was no
longer the young Ernest, but neither was he Hemingway the mature combatant. Another
man went away from the Piave river: it was an old man who will no longer write
of soldiers and wars because ''he declares a separate peace'', a peace where
destiny welcomes courage and fear without perceiving any difference between
them. Now he would write of an old man fishing in a sea he knows well, a sea
which is capable of containing both good (fish) and evil (sharks), challenging
both himself and destiny.
The sea is God, the
patient one, who asks no questions, and allows those who wish to do so to play
according to their own natures. It is in that very awareness and the wish to be
part of that game that the old man finds peace: he is now at one with his role.
Notes:
(1) Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into
the Trees, ''This country meant very much to him, more than he could, or would
ever tell anyone''
(2) Originally the grammatical gender of the
river Piave was femminine as 'la Piave'
(3) His 19th birthday would fall on 21 July 1918
(4) Ernest Hemingway,
Letters
(5) Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into
the Trees
(6) This
type of armaments, defined as trench artilliary, were the precursors of modern
mortars. The sound when it was fired was generally more muted than that of
common artilliary, so that it could indeed be confused with the sound of
someone coughing. Ernest describes the mortar as having a 5 gallon or 20 liter
keg which might lead us to deduce that it was a 225 m Bohler Minenwerfer. The
shells launched were not stabilised in flight like artillery shells, so that
during their revolution the different effects of the air produced different
sounds.
(7) The energy of an explosion expresses itself
in vibrations of differing frequencies, therefore just as loud noise can cause
deafness, so vibrations are capable of killing nerve endings.
(8) Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into
the Trees
(9) Giampiero Malaspina writing in the Piccolo of
Trieste, November 1976
(10) On the front line a soldier would never leave
his trench to do his business for fear of being hit; he did it where he was and
then threw it out with a shovel. The delicacy of his companions came from their
taking no notice.
(11) Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into
the Trees
(12) Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into
the Trees
(13) Ernest Hemingway's Introduction to Gustav
Regler's The Great Crusade, 1940
