“Fragment of the Chronicle of Marco Leccio and His War on Paper at the Time of Europe’s Great War ”
(“Frammento di cronaca di Marco Leccio e della sua guerra sulla carta nel tempo della grande guerra europea”)
Translated by Miranda MacPhail
How to cite this work:
Pirandello, Luigi. “Fragment of the Chronicle of Marco Leccio and His War on Paper at the Time of Europe’s Great War ” (“Frammento di cronaca di Marco Leccio e della sua guerra sulla carta nel tempo della grande guerra europea”), tr. Miranda MacPhail. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2023.
This long short story underwent several phases in its publication history. It was first printed serially under the pseudonym “Grildrig” in the Roman periodical Il Messaggero, where it had the title “The War on Paper” (“La guerra su la carta”) and appeared in five installations, each with their own title as well: “The Twenty-First of July” (“Il ventun luglio,” August 2, 1915), “What Isn’t Seen” (“Quello che non si vede,” August 11, 1915), “The Bayonette” (“La baionetta,” August 22, 1915), “The Lion and the Lamb” (“Il leone e l’agnello,” September 6, 1915), and “September Flies” (“Mosche di settembre,” September 22, 1915). These five serial installments correspond to the first ten sections of the present story; the eleventh and final section was added as a conclusion when Pirandello revised the story to collect it in Berecche and the War (Berecche e la guerra; Milan: Facchi, 1919). There, it was placed together with other works that focused on the Great War, including his autobiographical short story “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi,” 1915) and the title story, “Berecche and the War.” When this latter story was revised and significantly expanded (from three chapters to eight) for inclusion in Pirandello’s fourteenth Collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), also titled Berecche and the War, it absorbed a significant amount of material from “Fragment of the Chronicle of Marco Leccio and His War on Paper.” This may explain why Pirandello never collected “Fragment…” in his Stories for a Year as a separate entry. It was instead added to the Appendix (Appendice) posthumously in 1938, together with other stories that were not collected into the volume by Pirandello himself. The version collected in the Appendix of 1938 was partially truncated, as the editors removed the material that had been reused by Pirandello in “Berecche and the War” to avoid duplication. The version of “Fragment…” translated here is the full text from the 1919 edition, including material that would later be repurposed as part of “Berecche and the War.”
This short story is long and complex, developing a series of themes central to Pirandello’s work while also serving as an opportunity for him to reflect on the unfolding war and his own relation to it through the displaced lens of his characters. Pirandello’s own eldest son, Stefano, volunteered when Italy entered the war in 1915, and he was taken prisoner by Austrian forces on the front lines; his younger son, Fausto, was called to serve but did not deploy due to health reasons. The war was thus personal for Pirandello, as it was for so many families at the time – indeed, to an unprecedented degree. Likewise, Pirandello’s family history was tightly connected to the Risorgimento movement to unify Italy, which unfolded in the late 1850s and 1860s in a series of conflicts against Austria-Hungary. This personal connection to the history of Italian unification is detailed in Pirandello’s long historical novel, The Old and the Young (I vecchi e i giovani, 1913), as well as in short stories like “Interviews with Characters.” That story, like “Fragment…” and “Berecche and the War,” examines the complex relation between the patriotic fight to unify Italy by kicking out the “foreigners” who had long held power in various regions of the peninsula (the Risorgimento of 1861) and the new nationalist patriotism of the early twentieth century that pushed for Italy’s intervention into the Great War against Austria-Hungary in an effort to reclaim the “unredeemed” (irredenti) territories that were still under foreign rule. This story is thus simultaneously a window onto the personal family history of the author as well as a study of the attitudes and ideas circulating around the contentious moment of Italy’s decision to enter the war. Additional short stories from the period that also touch on the Great War include “The Waiting Room” (“La camera in attesa,” 1916), “War” (“Quando si comprende,” 1918), and “Yesterday and Today” (“Jeri e oggi,” 1919).
In addition to this focus on the war, the story also highlights conceptual ideas and themes dear to the author’s heart. One of these is located in the protagonist Marco Leccio’s rejection of the mechanization of war and the modern notion of a dehumanized “strategy” for waging it, which dovetails with Pirandello’s growing distaste for mechanized modernity, which was expressed most poignantly in the novel that he had begun to write precisely during the war years, Shoot! (Si gira…, 1916; later republished as Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore, 1925). In that novel, the machine is figured in the form of a cinematic camera, not just recording life but devouring it and stripping the individual of identity and vitality in the process. Likewise, “Fragment” also repeats common Pirandellian reflections on the nature of identity and, particularly, the social masks that are imposed on us by others such that we have no single identity at all but are rather many and no one all at once. These themes emerge through the lens of the characters’ confrontations with cultural views of nationality and ethnicity in the context of the war, as well as in more general confrontations between the incommensurate views that people hold of one another and themselves. Furthermore, the Pirandellian theme of escaping suffering through imagination recurs here in various ways, but most notably in the central occupation of the protagonist, who after being rejected for military service is left imagining the war “on paper,” playing at battles on the maps he has unfolded in a make-believe war room of sorts. The displacement of emotion into imagination is a central aspect of the story, and also of Pirandello’s broader existential outlook.
The Editors
I
Every year without fail, in Marco Leccio's home, July 21st has been celebrated as the anniversary of the Battle of Bezzecca and, therefore, the name day of his eldest daughter Mrs. Bezzecca Truppel.[1]
This year, the first year of our own War, with our little forces already almost within sight of Trento, the holiday should have been more deeply-felt than ever but, on the contrary, for two rather unfortunate reasons it was ruined. Firstly, there was Marco Leccio's son-in-law Mr. Truppel, a German Swiss native, although it wasn't really ruined on his account; indeed he's a sweet man, averse to politics, no longer Swiss let alone German, even though he's not yet Italian. It was all on account of his surname.
Mr. Truppel neither gave nor chose that surname himself. It came from his father, who died in Zurich many years ago; and Mr. Truppel doesn't particularly care about it.
Perhaps up there in Zurich it meant something to be called Truppel, but, outside his native country, that’s to say, outside the sphere of connections, relations, and acquaintances, what’s a surname anymore? As for a stranger, one might as well go by the name of Truppel, as call oneself… , ’et's say, in any other way whatsoever, if it we’en't for the need to have all ’ne's credentials in order.
For his part Mr. Truppel, inside, knows himself to be a peaceful soul, with no surname, with neither civil status nor nationality; a soul with two eyes open, here as elsewhere, to the deception of things which are certainly not as they appear, if seen one way then another according to ’ne's disposition and moods. He does everything in his power not to have to change his way of doing things and he is satisfied with even a little, because he knows how to enjoy wisely and in peace that small amount, for instance the innocent pleasures of nature which, truth be told, belong to everyone and know neither homelands nor boundaries.[2]
Unsullied and tender-hearted as he is, Mr. Truppel especially likes the days of light cloud-cover following rain, when there's a hint of damp soil in the humid air and plants and insects have the illusion it's spring once more. At night he observes those clouds extending over the stars and drowning them out before allowing them to reappear on short deep openings of sky blue. Gazing at those stars, he dreams without dreams, and sighs.
During the daytime Mr. Truppel considers himself, in life, to be a good man. A good man, just like that, and it's enough. Not only in Rome, that's to say in Italy, or elsewhere – no, in life. Just so, there you have it. Rather, more properly put, a good clockmaker in life.
Behind the store window of his workshop in via Condotti,[3] where everything is contained within the area of his workbench, covered with a white wax-cloth, he places his collapsible magnifier in his right eye and, bending over the press attached to the counter that holds the piece to be fixed, employs, one after another with untiring patience, the many miniature tools of his painstaking trade such as files, saws, and calipers, in the silence pricked by the steady low ticking of the one hundred clocks round the workshop.
It doesn't come close to occurring to him, during his infinitely delicate use of those miniature tools on the fragile, complicated clockwork, that, elsewhere, throughout the greater part of Europe, at that same moment, millions of men just like him are wielding other devices – rifles, canons, bayonets, hand grenades – for a job opposite to his own clock repair; and that the silence vibrating around him, through that barrage of constant ticking, here barely perceptible, is mangled elsewhere by the dreadful booming of howitzers and mortars.
His world and life, during the day, are concentrated here, inside a clock's back casing; just like, at nighttime, when his true spirit, finally released from all earthly preoccupations, is absorbed in contemplating the harmony of rather different spheres, the celestial ones.
Although Mr. Truppel appears to be stupid, you could swear – from the way he smiles while turning, when you call him away from those celestial contemplations of his – that he doesn't consider the firmament a clockwork system.
So in the days of upheaval before the declaration of our war on Austria, he stood thunderstruck when a large rabble of protesters abruptly hurled themselves, like a hurricane, against his workshop, shattering in an instant the shop sign, shutters, windowpane, and everything else.
II
Once Mr. Truppel's first astonishment over the shattering of broken glass had subsided, his fear wasn't so much for himself as it was for his brother and partner in the clockmaking business, who had quite a different character from his own, being rough, gloomy, and brutish.
Mr. Truppel, plump and blond, jumped up – guarding himself with his fat white hands, with eyes full of tears, those same eyes that usually smile like clear sapphires – to yell to those demonstrators that he was Swiss, not German, Swiss not German, Swiss, Swiss; a resident of Italy for twenty-five years, with his father-in-law a Garibaldi veteran and survivor of Bezzecca; his wife named Bezzecca, too; and his son, already in combat, an acting ensign, acting ensign, an acting ensign of the 82nd Infantry.
Alright, but who did he shout this to? To his workshop's neighbors who already know him and are well aware of what a jewel of a man he is. The protesters, having done their damage, had already moved off some time before, feeling very sure they'd accomplished a deed which, although not exactly heroic, was certainly very patriotic. But the damage, that too, away with it, it's small stuff. The problem, the real problem had to do with his brother, who Mr. Truppel had assumed was still in the workshop but instead, no, he was gone. Terteuffel! [4] His brother had torn off in a brutish rage after the protesters.
Well then, it just so happened that this event – which for the peace-loving Mr. Truppel was no more important than a mere misunderstanding between himself and the people of Rome, on account of his German surname (a deplorable misunderstanding at that, but nothing to get worked up about) – would certainly never have been reason enough to cancel the July 21st festivities at his father-in-law’s house if the deed itself, when recounted to Marco Leccio, hadn’t become damned complicated because of the latter’s violent reaction.
In his fury Marco Leccio laid no blame on the protesters who had shattered his son-in-law’s shop windows, a vandalic gesture easily excused when considering the people’s rage, having rightly spread like wildfire, against lowdown and criminal German maneuvering contrary to Italy’s interests and respectability. He blamed his son-in-law for, as he called it, that “obscenity” of his German surname.
By God! After twenty-five years of living in Italy, why on earth did his Swiss son-in-law still have to use that surname which, nowadays, had become a mark of infamy? He should have already applied, some time ago, for Italian citizenship and changed the grossness of that surname. He was registered as Livo or Godolivo Truppel?[5] Well then, he could become Livo Truppa! There, that's all there is to it: Truppa, Truppa! A magnificent surname, which rises to the occasion!
No objections from good Mr. Livo Truppel. Smiling he announced, for his own part, his readiness to execute these wishes. But there remained the problem of his brother and the shop they shared. To persuade his brother to change his name and that of the business would be no slight undertaking. Marco Leccio declared he himself could peaceably accomplish the task, but the outcome was a suit for defamation and threats brought by Mr. Guglielmo Truppel against the Garibaldi veteran Marco Leccio, who received a suspended sentence from the court along with a forty-three-lire fine.
That same day Marco Leccio was forcibly thrown out of the courthouse because, on hearing the sentence, he began shouting like a madman that he wanted to pay the fine, of course, but he didn't want the suspended sentence. Take these forty-three lire.[6] He was going to call Mr. Truppel a “swine” once again! They thought they could muzzle him for five whole years? Muzzle him in a time like the present?
“You honor, I must raise my voice against the rich lords of the Roman aristocracy, who never give a dime to the list of civic organization committees, and also against the privileged city institutions who also have withheld any support or else have signed on for laughably small amounts! And then there are the tax collectors and the home owners! There are bloody truths to be called out against all those who, at the supreme hour, don't perform their duty as Italians!”
The judge covered his ears and ordered the court to be cleared, bringing an end to the proceedings. However, after the sentencing, poor Mr. Truppel, given his easy-going nature, couldn't have found himself in a worse position. Caught, on the one hand, between his brother and partner in the clock business, who was also a guest in his home, and, on the other hand, his wife and father-in-law.
To tell the truth, the brother didn't insist on Mr. Truppel leaving his wife or the marital home they shared in order to live with him in a separate house. No, but he did insist, and indeed made Truppel promise and swear, he would at least never set foot again in his father-in-law's house, and that – should his father-in-law come some evening to his home to visit his daughter and Truppel be unable to find an excuse to leave the house at such short notice – he wouldn't speak a word to him after the first greeting, which he would follow up by spitting on the ground.
Spitting on the ground?
Yes, spitting on the ground, like this.
With a most afflicted expression, Mr. Truppel looked at his brother's spit on the ground and resisted the temptation to pull out a pocket handkerchief and set to work cleaning it up.
“No! No! Spit on the ground!” his brother shouted, “Spit on the ground. Like this!”
He spat once again.
But in the holy name of God! What if he, for the good person he was, didn't know how to spit, if he had never even spat into his own handkerchief? Yes, yes, alright, Mr. Truppel promised, swore in order to placate his brother. But once the early days had passed, we all know what certain promises and sworn oaths are worth even for those to whom they'd been made.
In any case, with regard to the July 21st party at his father-in-law's house, good Mr. Truppel was quite unable to attend.
III
However, even if he had been able to attend, the party still wouldn't have taken place for another and more distressing reason.
In order to understand this other reason, you really need to know fully what July 21st represented for the Leccio family. It wasn't just the anniversary of the glorious battle fought by Garibaldi's troops; not just the name day of the eldest daughter; but the very reason for the family's existence, which had originated precisely with the Battle of Bezzecca.
At the age of eighteen Marco Leccio had taken part in the Trentino campaign with Defendente Leccio, his father, and a certain Casimiro Sturzi, a bosom friend of his same age and an orphan. During the famous bayonet charge at Bezzecca, Marco Leccio lost both father and friend. He didn't even have time to cry for them. To his friend dying in his arms, who urged him to take care of his sister Marianna, who would be all alone in the world, Marco Leccio promised that, if he escaped death – far from a sure thing given the hardships of that campaign but, if he did escape – he would marry his sister.
Of course, in making this promise he didn't expect, just four days later when the whole Trentino region was occupied and Trento was about to fall, Garibaldi would have to reply “I'll obey” to La Marmora's command.[7]
Let's not talk about it, for goodness' sake, because even today – with our soldiers up there, almost in view of Trento – when he hears it mentioned, Marco Leccio, thinking of his dead father and dead friend, of the dreadful exertions endured in vain, of his proud republican zeal struck down by those words – he feels his blood turn bitter, his liver go to ruin, and he still snarls like a ferocious beast from whom one is well-advised to keep a distance.
Four years later, in 1870, once Rome was taken,[8] he kept the promise made to his dying friend on the battlefield, and married Marianna Sturzi almost perforce.
Almost perforce because poor Marianna who, out of charity was being lodged by a distant relative, a certain Lanzetti woman in her home in via del Governo Vecchio, seemed to have a very shy understanding with the only, very shy son of Lanzetti: Agostino, aged nineteen.
The fact is there was quite a bit of weeping, and if Marco Leccio didn't receive a cutting refusal, it was more owed to the consternation of the two women and the shy youngster in the face of the overbearing and impetuous self-assurance with which he came to impose his right: the right bequeathed him by the sacred promise made to a brother in arms dying heroically.
“Love? What about it! Nonsense! Duty.” A God-given commitment one cannot refuse. Hadn't he, a republican, followed Garibaldi who fought in the name of the king of Italy?
When a precise duty is established, there's no love to withstand it; everything must be sacrificed to it. He, too, was marrying reluctantly because he didn't feel well-suited to the married life. But it's easy to do what we like; we must do what's difficult and obey a duty even when we don't like it.
And never did Marco Leccio think that dying Casimiro Sturzi's sole wish in urging him to take his sister Marianna was that she not remain alone but find support throughout life; that her having found that support in the young man with whom she perhaps would have been happier, might have allowed him a way out of the promise to marry her. He didn't think it, he didn't want to think it. Or rather he didn't want to acknowledge this thought because it seemed to come from his own self-interest, like some despicable settlement of his own conscience.[9]
So, marriage it was to be!
And he married. If the bride wasn't well suited to that kind of marriage, he had such impetuousness within him and so much patriotic fervor to make up not only for his wife, but for all the offspring that would follow: ten, fifteen, twenty; he wouldn't count them.
Eight of them came along: five boys and three girls, and here's the list in order of age:
1st Giuseppe (Garibaldi), already aged 44, but we mustn't mention him.[10]
2nd Bezzecca, aged 41, wife of the good Mr. Truppel.[11]
3rd Anita, aged 38.[12]
4th Defendente, aged 33.[13]
5th Nino (Bixio), aged 29.[14]
6th Teresita, aged 24.[15]
7th Canzio, aged 21.[16]
8th Giacomo (Medici), aged 18.[17]
“Women,” says Marco Leccio, “should never be left idle. I made my wife have children until the age of 47.”
And he continues with pride, “Giacomino, my youngest one, is one year younger than my daughter Bezzecca's first child. Even as a grandfather, I still wanted to be a father and my wife a mother, even as a grandmother.”
He doesn't say how much worry and hardship it cost him to feed and educate them, with his particular disposition always ready to submit to the yoke of the bitterest and most drastic necessities, true, but also ever opposing all those petty dealings and mortifications, to which all those who wish to obtain a stable and respected position in life must bow.
The political struggles, his open profession of the republican creed, and his fierce dislike for all the acts promoted by Italy's wretched nationhood throughout the very many years caused him, three times, to lose his hard-earned living. Twice he was sent to prison and once was banished to a place very far from home; each time he had to start over. Twenty years spent in the Agro Romano,[18] in the successful bid for a land reclamation project from which, at the end, he emerged with his body so wracked by aches and pains, he had had no choice but to retire; those years had given him, certainly not comfort, but enough to live on, modestly, at rest now in his last years, with his wife and the three children still remaining at home.
It should be noted that their patriotic marriage didn't prevent Signora Marianna from being an excellent wife and excellent mother, just as it didn't prevent Agostino Lanzetti, who, moved by grief soon after her wedding, took his vows as a priest and now goes by the name of Don Agostino, from remaining a good friend of the Leccio household despite opposing political opinions and despite the deep grief Marco Leccio had in his life and for which Don Agostino was actually responsible; that is to say, the degeneration of the eldest son who now worked as a clerk in a church furnishings store in Piazza della Minerva.
Knowing about his profession as a teller in a church furnishings shop allows one to deduce in what sense Marco Leccio called his first son degenerate.
Right from the baptismal font [19] he had given his son the name Garibaldi; now the very few times he happens to say his name at all, he calls him, with an expression of disdain and derision, San Giuseppe.[20]
Don Agostino Lanzetti promised and swore he'd had no hand in it, he felt no responsibility for those feelings and opinions, which had caused the son to estrange himself from his father many years before. However, nowadays he no longer promises and swears. He no longer promises and swears ever since Marco Leccio called the priest aside and, in order not to offend his wife, spoke to him in private.
“Don Agostino, hold your tongue! The fault is yours. Yours because my wife, upon conceiving that rascal during the first year of our marriage, was always weeping, and she was weeping for you because you'd become a priest. So that son of mine was born already with the tonsure. Understood? Now hold your tongue.”
It was indeed fortunate the ecclesiastical influence could exert itself so strongly only on the first-born, who was followed by two girls, Bezzecca and Anita, in which the same influence gradually attenuated until it almost disappeared. The fourth and fifth children, Defendente and Bixio, had also pained his republican heart when they wanted to join the royal militia. But nowadays Marco Leccio is happy and proud that both the former, a captain of artillery, and the latter, an infantry lieutenant, are already at the front with son number seven, Canzio, who's a second lieutenant in the reserves of the Sardinian grenadiers.
As for young Giacomo... that brings us to July 21st, anniversary of the Battle of Bezzecca...
IV
All ready, all ready... Red shirt with commemorative medallions pinned over the breast – not for vainglorious ceremony but rather to cloak, in proper garb, his intention of enlisting as a volunteer at the age of sixty-seven to fight a war promising to be a continuation and culmination of the war of 1866.[21]
On July 21st, the anniversary of the Battle of Bezzecca, Marco Leccio had shut himself inside his study which, ever since early August of the previous year, had become not only a battlefield but quite a few battlefields. Together with the old veteran Tiralli, his aide-de-camp, or rather his humblest attendant, he was waiting for young Giacomo to go rent a carriage since he didn't want to go so far on foot, in this attire, as the 82nd Infantry headquarters.
So this was all that was lacking. His spirit was up, his willpower was up. Isn't one's will possibly all that counts?
Don Agostino Lanzetti, over the years of persevering in Latin studies, had become in disposition, similarly to his body, extremely slight, and as sharp as his mind, and as witty as his nose. In order to calm the ladies in the dining room, that is Signora Marianna and their daughter Teresita, he replied with a “no”: a no as smooth as his little dry carob face. No, one's will wasn't all that counts: God's will was, yes, of course, but that of man... “does it perchance walk on its own, this will of men? It needs two good legs to be able to walk.”
"And don't worry about Marco," he said. "He walks with a stick."
Sciatica. Marco Leccio got it in the Roman countryside, shortly after turning forty. One of those bad pains!... But one of those really bad pains!...
He did everything in his power to get rid of it. Heroic cures. Even cauterization. Nothing had worked. And because of the frequent abscesses, often lasting a month or more, his right leg had shrunken slightly. More than slightly. However, he refuses to admit the fact and maintains this shortening of his leg isn't true.
With a cigar in his mouth, twinkling eye, and walking stick raised, Marco Leccio wants to be credited for walking quickly, and carefree, despite the constant torment of his pain. A blunt pulsing pain. A mad pain that makes his leg now cold, now hot, with moments of itchiness and numbness... No more. He will be stronger than his pain, at all cost.
At the age of nine, back in 1857, in order to learn how to suffer for the fatherland he made his playmates pull out one hair at a time from his scalp. He would lower his head, scrunch up his eyes, and hug his crossed arms over his chest, then order: "Go on, pull them out!" Now that he's getting on in age, with that affliction upon him, he grits his teeth and forces himself, in the nights of torture, to apply pressure on the thigh of the affected leg, only, though, when the abscess isn't one of the classic ones, because then his spasms are so dire he can't bear even the sight of a hand that looks like it might pass through the air above his leg. He cries out, as if it were really touching him. Sometimes, just holding his breath, his breath turns into a cry, "Ow!" And when he grows heated in anger with someone or something (which, it should be said, happens frequently), no matter how much he declares he wants to talk reason, in the middle of reasoning, it happens that he suddenly shoots off a swear or a fierce curse, stunning everyone around him, leaving them open mouthed, because it seems that cursing doesn't have anything to do with the matter at hand. And indeed it doesn't, rather it's directed at the sciatic nerve, which wants nothing to do with these bouts of heated anger.
It wants nothing, nothing at all, that goddamned nerve! So Marco Leccio, when he is most infuriated, always sets about tidying up the room, using his hands to put small objects back on the shelves. It seems strange, like a curious incongruity, but it's not. When his soul is in such turmoil, he instinctively makes those gestures in order not to disturb but to ease his sciatica, which requires order, calm, and rest; since he's unable to realize these qualities inside himself he endeavors to achieve them outside and all around his body. But how stubborn that bitch is! All of a sudden, it betrays him by inflicting a sharp pain, it pinches him; and then, bang! Marco Leccio hurls to the floor the little object he was about to put away, with such delicate civility, in the midst of his fury.
"The will," added Don Agostino Lanzetti to the two women in the peaceful dining room on the morning of that July 21st, "I'm talking about men's will, is something men want to favor at all cost. When the will doesn't conform to the limits of what's possible, in order to save their will they call it vain aspiration. If a woman wants to be a man, if an old man wants to be a young one... aspiration! Ridiculous and truly pitiful things. You'll see, Marco will have a hard time of it: he won't be able to will; and if he doesn't want to understand this, others will make certain he gets the point. You can rest assured."
Then there was young Giacomo who couldn't make up his mind to go summon the carriage, and not because it seemed it would take him a thousand years to reach the headquarters to enlist, he too, as a volunteer, but because he had to show up there alongside his father.
It's often a great displeasure and a deep mortification to offspring to note that other people don't and can't give their father the same treatment they do. For the children the father is the one they love and respect, at home, within the family, for the whole part of their lives bound and subordinate to paternal love and authority. But outside, in relations with other people, it makes a very sad impression on the children to see their father detach himself from their reality in order to enter into the one provided by others. The children immediately detect what this other reality is and they suffer for it. The father doesn't realize what's going on and, looking into his son's eyes, notes that he has in some way left him alone, abandoned him; that the son flanks him in a pained and disconnected attitude. Why? What's happening? He no longer feels self-assured; he feels as if a support were missing, the support of his own reality as he usually finds it in his son. "How's that? What's wrong?"[22]
"Nothing, Dad," the son replies with a pained smile and he feels, in that moment, he'd like to take his father away at once, in order to stop exposing him to that ridiculous view of reality he's accepted because of the others, his dad who's aging and doesn't realize no one thinks like that nowadays, no one goes around dressed like that anymore, with such a hat, for example, neither do they talk nor laugh like that anymore, and so on. But how can one speak to one's father of these things?
That morning young Giacomo shuddered and felt his insides wrench just thinking about his father's attitude and stance, dressed in such a way, when he'd present himself to the conscription commission at headquarters; or thinking about the speech he'd direct to the commission, without understanding that nowadays the offering of oneself should be undertaken with humility and gravity.
That's not to say young Giacomo thought there might be anything unserious in his father's intention to offer up his life. He knew very well what kind of man his father was and in what consideration he held life and his dearest things, not only when faced with a debt to be honored, but even for a fruitless point of honor, as he had so often demonstrated. But his ways! His manner! Everything his father had been saying, for the last eleven months about the European war inside his studio with the veteran Tiralli, bent over first one map and then another one, bristling with little flags, about the various war fronts, opened up across several panels held up by sawhorses. God forbid he should repeat these discussions in front of the commission!
Young Giacomo broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about it. Don Agostino Lanzetti pushed him to go out for the carriage. "Go, go on, son; don't keep him waiting too long. You know what he's like... For now, he's finding some distraction in there with Tiralli, but, if he realizes it's getting late, there will be trouble!"
Young Giacomo left and soon afterwards, alas, actually suffered everything he had imagined he would have to suffer at the 82nd Infantry headquarters.
V
The conscription commission was made up of a lieutenant colonel, a major as supervisor, a captain doctor and a captain account keeper, all gathered in the health wing.
Marco Leccio turned up, frowning proudly, with gritted teeth, stiff jaw and flaring nostrils from which he emitted gasps like two cannon rounds of smoke. But this wasn't on account of any patriotic emotion nor to give himself a certain appearance, as young Giacomo believed. It was for something quite different! In descending from the carriage in front of the headquarters entry, Marco Leccio had felt a well-known sharp pain in the point where the buttock bends and he was now making a Herculean effort to make it seem like nothing, now he was going before the commission.
The tortures suffered by young Giacomo were three. First when the lieutenant colonel wanted to give a fine greeting to the Garibaldi veteran who had come to offer his service as a volunteer, his father, moved by emotion, had laid a hand on his heart and said,
"This is a war, Signor Colonel, that only we should have fought! Us. Because it's our war. The one they forced us to cut short in the middle, back in 1866! The shame, the repugnance we've felt for over thirty years towards this hateful alliance with our enemy, stoked by contempt, by the horror of the atrocities committed by our allies of yesterday, Signor Colonel, have gnawed away at the constraints of terrible patience. And now these constraints have finally broken, now the disgust and suppressed hatred accumulated for over thirty years overflow and precipitate, here we are, this is the state we find ourselves in, Signor Colonel. We, that's to say all of us in this disgraced generation of ours, after Bezzecca, to whom befell the shame of forbearance and the ignominy of alliance with the irreconcilable enemy. We find ourselves old now, and almost at the end, and yet we have to send our children on ahead of us, those who, unlike us, are unshaken by contempt, and unscathed by hate! But not us, Signor Colonel, not us! However old we are, we should be sent ahead of all the others! Just like, at Bezzecca, my father was sent ahead of me! The children must see us old ones fall, so the spark of hatred and the fury for revenge will catch in them like a flame just as it did in us, and the same goes for their strength which we old ones are lacking! I already have three sons out fighting and I've come to bring the youngest one. We want to be simple foot soldiers, Signor Colonel, an equal treatment for me and my son. I also have two grandsons up there at the border: one's a priest, a corporal of the medical detail, son of my eldest son, while my daughter's son is a reserve officer. My wish, Signor Colonel, is to be an infantryman under the command of this grandson of mine!"[23]
The colonel and the other commission members were, at first a little bewildered by his speech, but then, fortunately, they greeted the verbose figure with a kind smile of approval.
Young Giacomo's second torture was the review of the papers, when the major supervising his father's record noticed three convictions for political reasons.
"Annulled! Those have already been annulled, Major!" exclaimed Marco Leccio with dignified pride. "I annul them myself just by the fact of my being here now, volunteering. These convictions were meted out to me because I've never known how to keep silent in the face of that deep shame of which I spoke a moment ago, and three times I rebelled alongside my companions of republican persuasion. Now that in Italy there are no longer political parties, now that Italy does its duty, these convictions fall away on their own, they're annulled. There's a fourth one, to tell the truth, Signor Major, that isn't written there because it's a sentence with conditions.”
"Oh, really? A fourth one? Why's that?" asked the major.
"Because, Signor Major, I said Truppel was a swine."
"Truppel, the German admiral?"
"No sir, Truppel the brother of my son-in-law. A German-Swiss swine. My daughter's name is Bezzecca, Major, and I've been unable to tolerate that this name be joined to that revolting German surname. My son-in-law, who's a good man, was willing to change his surname but his brother wasn't having it, and so... nonsense, a lawsuit for libel... a fine of forty-three lire... a conditional sentence..."
The last torture, which was the most painful of all, consisted of the medical examination.
As for young Giacomo, a nice big young man in the pink of health with shoulders out to here, there was nothing to object to; he was immediately accepted, a volunteer Bersaglieri cyclist [24]. But when it came time to examine the father...
There, clearly seen on his thigh, good Lord, were the marks of cauterization. The marks of so many festering blisters he had treated with epistatic ointment, suction cups, and limpet mine casings. No sir! He must assert and maintain that it wasn't anything; that he could march, even for days at a time; that only a few times, at the beginning, he'd felt a certain stiffness of motion but then, almost immediately, his movements had loosened up and become as agile as they'd always been. "What's that? The leg? Shortened? How ridiculous, shortened! No! Where? Absolutely normal!"
If it hadn't happened that, at a certain point, the Captain doctor made the slightest movement as if to touch the affected part and Marco instinctively recoiled and made to shrink back, almost flinching. For half an hour he'd been suffering hellish pangs of pain, there, on his feet!
A fine upstanding man, the Lieutenant Colonel was impressed, moved, and even smiled at the artlessness of that generous faking, despite the signs of pain so clearly visible on his thigh; he tried to make Marco Leccio understand that the commission was very willing to enlist him because, without beating around the bush, usually the tendency was to take an ample number of veterans for the prestige of both their appearance and their past. So he would certainly have let him wear the uniform but he couldn't, in all conscience, send him to the front. But he could make Marco useful, very useful, by having him serve in the battalion commander's office, etc. More than this he couldn't do.
Marco Leccio didn't jump to his feet or remonstrate, outwardly; he wasn't even offended. Still he couldn't hide a certain contempt for the proposal: not so much for the proposal itself, as for how it undercut what he had intended to achieve.
"To dress as an extra actor? Surely not, Signor Colonel! The battalion commander's office means... pushing a pen? Sitting here writing on paper? Paper or map, Colonel, I have them all at home, the maps of the war. I'll wage war on paper from my home."
So it was that young Giacomo remained, while he returned alone in the carriage, glowering, defeated, with such a dark surly expression etched in his face that it couldn't completely be ascribed to his desperation over that disappointment.
Indeed his mood didn't depend on this alone. After all he hadn't been lying to himself; he'd foreseen this outcome. Of course he would have liked to go up there to die in a fine way, but this wasn't the only reason he'd almost desperately tried to enlist. The knowledge of his physical condition might have dissuaded him from the attempt. It was another reason that had been spurring him on, that he didn't want to anyone to see, not even himself: young Giacomo.
Once revealed to him, to have denied or been contrary to his youngest and favorite son's determination to go enlist as a volunteer in order to follow in the footsteps of his three older brothers, this was something he couldn't do, wouldn't do. For the youth's entire lifetime, and the way he'd been brought up, he couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. But taking leave of this son, this last son, who had made him feel what maybe all the others taken together had not brought him to feel, paternal affection taken to the level to believe himself to be capable of any cowardice at the sole thought he might run any risk; to take leave of this son was something he didn't even know how to do. And this was the only reason why he'd made the attempt.
Now he wasn't pained by anything else. Those who didn't know (and nobody knew) might have found his desperation ridiculous, all on account of not having been enlisted as a volunteer at age 67.
VI
Only a rather coarse soul doesn't notice the disgust felt by a magnificent sofa of rounded gravity, a soft armchair with a fringe down to one's feet, if, on a little table in front of it, a manservant comes to haphazardly place a steaming coffeepot straight from the kitchen; or, if, maybe to more speedily attend her master's summons, a maid should absentmindedly forget there a used rag or a molting feather duster.
Pieces of furniture also have a sensitivity that should be respected.
In this regard, Marco Leccio's study had by no means felt offended in its transformation into several battlefields, right from the outset of the great European war. It had been predisposed for some time and for a stretch had already been set up for it.
As a study it had only ever had a smallish shelf of books, all of them on subjects of history or war, dealing with the Italian Risorgimento and the conspiracies of secret societies. There was a very old-fashioned veneer desk of the kind that have the custom-made hidden compartments in front for keeping correspondence. Next to this desk there stood a cupboard containing the old accounting books from the Agro Romano estate, a period of life from which, as mentioned, Marco Leccio's most conspicuous earning was sciatica. The four surrounding walls were covered with engravings and these, too, all depicted war themes: the Battle of Catalafimi,[25] the expedition of Sapri,[26] the Battles of San Fermo[27] and Aspromonte,[28] the Departure from Quarto,[29] the Death of Anita;[30] as well as portraits: of Mazzini[31] and of Garibaldi, it goes without saying, but also of Nino Bixio and of Stefano Canzio, as well as of Menotti,[32] of Felice Orsini,[33] and of Guglielmo Oberdan.[34] What's more, Marco Leccio had hung on the facing wall, like a panoply or trophy, as a souvenir of the Trentino campaign, his big old regulation rifle in a crisscross with the officer's saber that had belonged to his father Defendente Leccio. Over the arrangement large letters spelled out the words of Garibaldi's motto: Be Eagles;[35] and, in the middle, hung both his Garibaldino red cap [36] and a velvet armband – of course, red – where his medals were pinned. In a frame just below, a letter dated July 19, 1886 he had written to a friend in Rome, while at the fort of Ampola,[37] with a scrap of the Austrian flag taken down in the captured fort.
So it makes sense that all those books on the history of unification and those portraits and those war scene engravings and those sabers and that rifle couldn't be offended by the first large map showing the theater of war on the Western Front, pinned to an engineer's drawing table held up by sawhorses; nor could they be affected by the second map, just as large, of the theater of war on the Eastern Front on another table also supported by sawhorses; nor by a third smaller one of the area from the Balkans to Asia Minor; nor, finally, by the two most recent additions of the current war: one a map of Trentino and the other of Venezia Giulia.[38]
Over each of these maps there hangs by a cord from the ceiling an electric light bulb with its plate shade. Five electric lights, all switched on in the evening, making a lovely sight to see.
In discussing the Germans' or the Allies' various strategic designs, advances, retreats, sieges of fortresses, or the resistance afforded by the fields of trenches, either with the old veteran Tiralli or even with Don Agostino Lanzetti, Marco passes with lightning speed from one theater of war to another, and he wants his indications, his marks, his moves to be seen and followed clearly.
Of these light bulbs, four are white and one is light blue. The light blue one hangs over the theater of war in Trentino, which isn't really one of the usual maps, but a model in painted paper-maché relief with all the area's lakes and rivers, mountains and valleys, glaciers, fortresses, passes, villages, cities and, in short, every detail so it seems someone can live in the middle of it and walk about feeling the cold of those glaciers, the shade and cool breeze of those valleys, especially someone who has already been there and knows those places as well as Marco Leccio: Salò on Lake Garda, the passes of the Val Sabbia, the Lake of Idro, Storo alle Giudicarie, Val Trompia and Val Camonica, Rocca d'Anfo, the valleys of the Chiese River and Lake Ledro with Ampola, and the Conzei valley...[39]
Marco Leccio turns out the other four bulbs, leaving on only the bluish light spreading a darkening light from above, a bland moonlight able to preserve and intensify the illusion of reality contained in that colored relief. And right away Lake Garda and those valleys and those mountains aren't so small because they're fake, made of painted paper-maché; no, they're that small because he's looking at them from very, very far off. Doesn't he really have them there in front of his eyes? Yes, it's true. But far off, in memory, is the day from which he's looking at them. Yet that removed distance, which is temporal, still has this effect, it truly does, to make him see as very small those well-known real places.[40]
He spends entire nights there, with dreamy eyes, knowing that up there, on the highest peaks, in the most difficult passes, amid the snow, on the glaciers, among the rocks, fighting is going on even at nighttime, to repel the enemy's treacherous attacks, to gain yet other passes, other peaks; and that on one of these most contended peaks there's his son, an artillery captain, the one who bears his father's name. What is he doing at this late hour? To cherish in his breast the ardor of belief even in the icy high mountains, ice that bites and disheartens, and in the midst of the stinging sleet, in the fog that exiles one to the despair of a dumbfounded and terrifying bleakness, in the middle of the snowstorms, in the solitude of nature which are so immeasurable that the company of a few men isn't enough to be of comfort, it's so hard! The mountains take revenge on the little men who dare violate the eternal peace of those heights. And it's the very mountains who are the most formidable enemies. Perhaps, at this hour, his son, from the bolt hole excavated behind a deep trench, is engaged in a nighttime duel of artillery. From one moment to the next, who knows what might happen! His artillery might be spotted, and then... a grenade...
Marco Leccio pulls back with his hands outstretched to ward off the sight, his face convulses for the spasm, as if the grenade was reaching him in this place. Then he screws his eyes shut tightly and he forces himself to distract his spirit from the image of his son in danger, recalling the old memories of the Garibaldi campaign up there. And a little at a time the recollections become life again, once more causing him the anxieties, shivers, sorrows, joys, pains, and rages of that time. He wheezes, snorts, opens his eyes wide then squints them, he wrinkles his nose, then all of a sudden he lights up with his mouth open in a blissful smile, and a tear slowly leaves his eye. Why? For nothing! One evening he entered a house in the countryside of the val di Ledro.[41] The monumental fireplace is in the middle of the rustic room, under the mantle, which is like an enormous upside down feed trough, all sooty inside. The wind wails constantly from the fireplace's black throat, where a chain lets down a hook ending in a steaming cooking pot. Around it, in the niches under the mantle, the farming members of the house are seated, speaking in low tones through the constant voice of the gloomy wind... Well then, is this why he's crying? No, it's an anguish of regret which, to anyone passing by chance through a place, renders the stable life of others in that very place a glimpsed life, tasted for a moment only, so intensely that the soul is imbued in it forever and, through memory, can return to relive it, to taste it again, to enclose oneself in it, as if on the outside there were no longer the many matters of before and after, the uncertainties and hardships of the path, the desires, the thoughts that know no respite!
The veteran Tiralli understands nothing of all this; and Marco Leccio is contemptuous of him and often treats him badly because he desires, at least by Tiralli, to be understood and abetted in this illusion that, in a certain way, there in his study, bent over all of those papers, they, too, are engaged in serious battle
VII
To tell the truth, poor Tiralli is too inwardly focused on his own poverty. Absolute poverty and yet in no way simple, since it's complicated by his condition as a veteran of the patriotic battles, which confers a certain dignity on him so that, the more he thinks about it, the more it dazes him.
The veteran Tiralli doesn't eat every day, but every day he does carefully brush the woolly hair that, by the grace of God, is left him; every day he sets about a long shave, using the stub of a candle to stiffen his collar and his yellowed, frayed shirt cuffs. If he always wears his medals on his breast it's not out of vanity but rather to detract the attention of passersby from his shoes and suit and also because not a day passes that he doesn't preside a funeral march.
One by one he has accompanied all his fellow soldiers, older and also younger than himself. One can be sure that in every doorway to every home where a veteran has died, next to the table where visitors' signatures are gathered, he's there, Tiralli, with the medals on his chest, crying in a very dignified way.
Once the escorting is over, he remains with those eyes, he walks with those steps, he speaks with that voice, as if he were still following the funeral wagon.
Marco Leccio assists him as he can and often has him stay to dine together, and tries in every way to shake that funereal stupor. But he shakes him up too much, thus overwhelming him even more. Cries, shouts... and what's more he demands that, right there on the battlefields of the study, he perform certain duties of moving the little flags, which poor Tiralli almost always blunders, weak as his eyesight is and as trembling as his hands are.
"How now? What have you done? This is La Haute Chervauchée![42] What does La Haute Chervauchée have to do with anything? You stick the French flag there? So where? When? Don't you understand once and for all that the French aren't moving? Captured? When? What a maneuver! There might or might not have been a few cannon shots exchanged!"
In recent days poor Tiralli has undergone extreme exertion, with his body constantly shaking in fear of making a mistake as he ran with the German and Austrian flags marking the Russians' withdrawal, first from the Carpathions, then from Galicia, now from Poland![43]
If only it were a precipitous retreat, undertaken at breakneck speed, so much so that there was nothing more to keep tracking. Out of the question! It's a retreat of the kind that only someone who really knows how to see it can follow what's going on. A retreat of wondrous expertise, and Marco Leccio sings its praises so fervently that it bodes badly if a little German or Austrian flag held between his trembling fingers should run too forward and be pinned to a place still strenuously defended by the Russian rearguard. Two days before the fall, Tiralli had mistakenly pinned a little German flag on Kowno [44] and, only by a miracle, wasn't devoured by Marco Leccio's wrath.
"Ah, you fiend, you're already taking over Kowno from me, are you? Take that little flag away this instant! Kowno is putting up a fight and will fight for some time to come, let me tell you!"
Now that Kowno has fallen, Tiralli could point out to him that, when all's said and done, his mistake was only slightly off the mark. Instead he said nothing. He re-positioned the flag. Watching him, Marco Leccio growled:
"Tell the truth, you just couldn't wait! But we still have to see it happen, don't we? With your great besieging strategist Mr. Hindenburg!"[45]
Strategy, not only of the strictly German sort but more generally everything regarding modern scientific strategy, had provoked and continued to provoke the utmost disgust in Marco Leccio.
It's just that, in conversation with him, someone had had the bad idea to touch on something, which really shouldn't have been touched on at all. They had said to him that, in comparison to this war, all the others fought by humanity down to today, and not just the Garibaldi wars but also the Napoleonic ones, are like child's play. That's right, just consider, for example, that all the combatants of the regular armies and the volunteers of our Risorgimento, added together, never saw as many dead and wounded as this war produces in certain everyday scuffles that are below the notice of the High Command's reports.
This is what they'd had the courage to say to him, Marco Leccio, at the beginning of the war. He still can't keep his calm, nor forget what was said, and he takes it out on poor Tiralli, as if he had been the one to pronounce these ideas, as if poor Tiralli were a staunch supporter of modern strategy.
"Is that so? That so?" he sneers from time to time. "Few casualties, eh? Few wounded?"
Then he goes after him:
"And the so many dead today and the so many wounded today, millions of them, who did that, where do they come from and what are they up to? You creatures who never think! Can't you see that they're the product of this idiotic and monstrous machine of your modern strategy that eats lives, ravages flesh and blood, and all for nothing? Can you tell me what it accomplishes, what it's accomplished down to today?"
Tiralli, mute, standing stiff with one eyebrow up and the other down, watches him in a pose similar to a faithful dog, wrongfully scolded by his master.
"Don't you see that what always puts an end to it," continued Marco Leccio, "still today as always, is instead the old weapon, the glorious weapon, our Garibaldi weapon: the bayonet? Our bersaglieri prove it to you everyday along the Isonzo and up on the Carso![46] And these mechanical Germans of yours, these vermin who take their strength from the shelters prepared and built upon your famous strategic science, as soon as they see it, the real bayonet weapon, dependent upon bravery, not science, fall to trembling, raise their hands and cry for mercy!"
Thus speaking, he goes to Tiralli, with furious eyes, leaning towards him with arms drawn back but fists raised, clenched, as if gripping bayonets, intending to make him truly tremble; but since Tiralli doesn't tremble and stands, mute, gravely nodding his head, he backs off exclaiming with derision:
"Strategy, you idiots! The art of making a battle last a century when, before, the impetuous soldiers and the officer masterminds resolved everything in a trice, at the most in the course of a single day! Technical studies, warfare material, is that how it's referred to? Warfare, ha! Howitzers, ‘huff-puff’, are all you can talk about, 305 or 420 mortars, quick fire rifles, machine guns, dirigibles, airplanes, hand grenades, types of shrapnel, choking gas, fire bombs, mechanical tractors, tanks, machine-dug trenches, armored vehicles, land mines, barbed wire, wire, cheval de frise barricades, foxholes, projectors, rockets, flares, ‘boom-pow-zing’, it seems like a pinwheel, and where's the war? No one sees it anymore! Before men used to fight standing up, the way God made them! Nowadays, no sir, it's not enough to kneel but you have to lie flat on the ground like snakes, and those who can stick it out must take cover. Not us, no, not our men, by the Virgin! They jump to their feet, they burst out, and charge forward, bayonet affixed to their rifles, ‘Savoia!’[47] This is what's needed! A far cry from your machinists and pharmacists! Strategy... chemistry... I know it's nothing but a monstrous and cowardly device designed to lose, in vain, yet more time and even more human lives! It's all a building of machines, obstacles, and shelters in order to find a way to tear them down again; and so it really wasn't very worthwhile erecting them in the first place if, at the end, what really decides the outcome is the opposing man who jumps up from the rubble of those cowardly obstacles and runs straight into the teeth of the attack? I'll tell you what all this science is really for: it's for not having war to fight! In times of peace it serves to threaten, to inspire fear in those who want to fight; but then, once war is declared, that's it, what's its purpose, you see? To never let it end...
At this point, as silent as a shadow, Don Agostino Lanzetti speaks up from the dining room. He listens to the last words, nodding approval several times in silence, and then says:
"Yes, dear friend, it's all exactly to never let it end. And you can rest assured, Marco, that this is not a war that will be resolved militarily."
"Oh, no?" yells Marco Leccio.
"No," is Don Agostino's firm reply before adding: "You know what they say about the ancient Goths?"
Marco Leccio glowers at him.
"Would you cut it out with constantly telling these silly little stories of yours... I don't have time for them!"
"They are the ancient forefathers of the Germans today," answers Lanzetti calmly and with his usual facetious little laugh. "This one's a silly story that might do you good. So they say the ancient Goths had the wise habit of discussing twice every undertaking to be achieved: the first time, drunk, and the second time, fasting. The drunk discussion made sure their deliberations wouldn't lack daring; while the debate on an empty stomach allowed for cautiousness. Now it's quite clear the modern Germans have lost their forefathers' wise custom. They discussed and considered this endeavor only as drunks. Let's hope, with fasting, they may soon reconsider their first plan. However, unfortunately, it will still take awhile, a rather long time – don't fool yourself! A rather long time... "
"Right!" roars Marco Leccio. "A rather long time! But do you know why?"
He stops abruptly; he makes as if to bite his hands; he shouts through clenched teeth, twisting his fingers in front of his face. "I can't say it! I can't say it! But it will take something more than the Germans fasting to end this war! By God, it'll take everyone to do as we're doing. There I've said it! Look, it'll take..."
He jumps up to that trophy on the wall and rips the bayonet as long as a rotisserie skewer from the big old regulation rifle and pretends to stab it into Tiralli's belly.
That modern strategy has undermined the powers of the supreme leader of a war not unlike the one Marco Leccio follows with such tenacious constancy for some thirteen months, a tireless study over those maps with their pins, lines and positions, is for Marco Leccio, when all is said and done, a rather paltry consolation.[51]
He is the supreme leader, the strategist, in that study, standing before Tiralli who follows and assists his every move with dismal obedience; but thanks! Because he can't do anything else...
Of course if a move he'd foreseen in this or that theater of the war, on the basis of those strategic points, those lines, and those positions, occurs precisely as he'd predicted, he's pleased about it; as soon as word arrives from the High Command reports he looks to Tiralli with bright smiling eyes, his whole face lit up with satisfaction, and he doesn't even bother to notice anymore if the predicted move favors the Germans and damages the Allies since art, of any kind, is the realm of unselfish sentiment, a reason for it often becoming the cruelest function imaginable; an example might be found in a doctor who congratulates himself on the correctness of his prognosis of death, even if he's pronounced this prognosis about his own condition and means to say: Very well, my dear, you are a dead man.
But that's not it! That's not what Marco Leccio wants to do! He couldn't care less if the supreme leaders of today fight wars, just like him, on paper! Some kind of supreme leader that is! A soldier, a beardless soldier, like his young Giacomo who left, yesterday, for the front lines, that's what he would have liked to be. And he wasn't able!
Yesterday, at the station, just before the train departed, while his son was looking at him through the window of the railway carriage, he was looking at him as if he had wanted to engrave in his soul those shiny, intense eyes full of restrained emotion, he'd been tempted to jump on that train, to mix with and hide among the soldiers, in order to leave, he, too.
Then he felt the bite of shame as he recalled how he'd been found out and pulled down from the train by his ear, just like a little boy.
Then even stronger and more angrily he was cut to the quick by regret when, at a carriage door a bit farther down, he saw another volunteer in infantry uniform, old, older than he, with a white beard and the old medals across his breast, who waved his arms and jubilantly answered the waving hands, the call of wishes, the applause.
He wasn't able to stand this scene; he had to leave, leave before the train started off taking his young Giacomo who was now waving to him, who knows, possibly for the last time!
"Can you tell me," he says now, with an expression more disgusted than indignant, to Tiralli who stands before him in the study, almost at attention as if listening to one of the many funeral eulogies, which are to him what daily mass is to the devout. "Can you tell me how you think you're going to die?"
Tiralli, with his eyes lowered, one eyebrow up and the other down, doesn't reply.
"Answer!" Marco Leccio yells at him.
And Tiralli shrugs his shoulders and extends his lips a bit, making a very slight gesture with his hand. "Die? Uhm... As God wills..."
To tell the truth Tiralli hadn't given it any thought.
Marco Leccio went on:
"How many days do we still have left to live, me and you?"
Tiralli repeats his slight hand gesture, yet he furrows his brow, as if doubting that his general is really demanding of him, on such an argument, an outright, precise answer.
"Another four days!" Marco Leccio yells in his face.
And so Tiralli quickly says yes, yes with his head, several times.
"Oh yes, four days..."
"Do you call this life?" Marco Leccio kept after him, "aren't you ashamed? What are you doing, still standing there?"
Tiralli, overwhelmed, looks around in search of a chair to sit down.
"No!" Marco Leccio yells at him. "I mean, still alive! How many years have you been living in this agony? You've dried up because of it, become a cadaver over it. And aren't you ashamed when, every evening reading about how many young men aged twenty have died up there, and how many elderly aged sixty, seventy, up to age seventy-six have volunteered and gone to fight from Sicily, from Calabria,[52] from the Abruzzi, from Romagna, from Lombardy, and they go to the front lines to fight as simple soldiers? Your face, look at me, here, look, don't you feel it burn with shame? Did you see that old man on the train yesterday? He must have been seventy, at least, and he was on his way! Think of it, think of how that old man is going off to die, and think of how you'll die! We'll soil the bed, you and I, while that man will die upright! You and I in bed, you with a death rattle and I coughing, while he will have a yell in his throat, ‘Long live Italy, my sons! Forever forward!’ Do you understand? Just like Lavezzari![53] The lion's death! At dawn, the charge: all down the line it just takes one jump with the bayonet: Savoia! Well ahead of them all, he, Lavezzari, who swore to die up there! Running, getting as far as the farthest enemy trench! Standing tall up there, he tears open his jacket and showing his red shirt in order to die like that, as a soldier of Garibaldi! Do you understand that? He will have thought, At age seventy-six, I've been able to do this charge, this bayonet attack, again, but what about another one, tomorrow? Who knows whether my strength will still hold out for me? And so now it's time, here, that's all; here's my breast, here's my true uniform, here, aim up here at my red shirt, I want to die like this! And he died. You'll soil the bed, I'll soil the bed, and meantime we're here playing with maps and little flags like two foolish children! Argh!"
IX
He hadn't yet finished commemorating the old lion Lavezzari's death when a wail reached his ears, followed by the sobs of three women, from the adjacent dining room. Immediately afterwards the door to the study opened and there, on the threshold, appeared the pale and dismayed countenances of Don Agostino Lanzetti and good Mr. Truppel.
"Defendente?" cried Marco Leccio, with his eyes wide and holding his hands before him as if to ward off bad news. "Nino? Canzio?"
Right away Don Agostino and Truppel say no three times, with heads and with hands. Then Don Agostino adds softly, half closing his eyes in grief:
"Marchetto..."
"Marchetto? How's that?" exclaims Marco Leccio, proudly furrowing his brow. "My grandson? He was in the medical unit! How is it possible? Did they fire on the Red Cross? When? Is he dead?”
"While he was picking up the wounded... " murmurs Don Agostino.
"Dead?"
"He only had enough time to pen the names of his father and mother. Like a saint, he died..."
And so saying Don Agostino cries, and even good Mr. Truppel's usually laughing blue eyes go glassy with tears.
"Vermin! Murderers! Criminals!" roars Marco Leccio, raising his clenched fists before the face of Tiralli who remains standing stiffly during the death announcement. "Do you comprehend? They fire on the wounded and those who go to them! They fire on hospitals! They fire from behind the cover of the dead! Murderers! Criminals!"
Then turning to Lanzetti, he asks:
"When did the news arrive?"
“This morning," replies Don Agostino. "But the letter took six days to get here, and it was put with a message from the command and another letter, of condolence, from the army doctor at the battlefield hospital where poor Marchetto was in service. And you should hear what this captain says about him! The gentleness, the divine serenity of his courage, his abnegation; and of how he spoke before giving up his soul to God! He spoke of you, too... his final farewell to you is also in that letter. 'Tell my grandfather,’ he wrote, 'that I died well... '."
No matter how hard Marco Leccio tried to contain himself, he burst into two almost overpowering sobs.
"Hold on," Don Agostino adds hurriedly. "He says here, 'The clothes I'm wearing, he didn't want to believe they were soldierly, too, and resented me bearing his name while wearing this outfit. Now I'm sure he won't think so anymore...’."
The mother and her two daughters, Mrs. Bazzecca Truppel and Teresita, have entered the study, crying, all three ready to go to the home of that son repudiated so many years before by Marco Leccio. They're all aware there will be a hard time of it and much art of persuasion to be used to induce the father to reconcile with the oldest son, in a situation of this kind. Marco Leccio, with his eyes closed against his tears and feelings, moves away from everyone and says without more ado:
"Yes, yes... Let us go, let's go... poor Marchetto, my little one... Let's go..."
With his hat on his head and leaning on Tiralli's arm, he pauses before the doorway and lifts his walking stick and adds in a menacing tone:
"He had the lad leave without coming here to say good-bye! When he dressed him up like a priest, yes, he sent him to me, to allow me to spoil him, my poor little grandson! But when he was dressed up as a soldier, before leaving for boot camp, when I could have kissed and blessed him, no, he didn't want to let me see the lad again! But it doesn't matter now, it doesn't matter, I'll go all the same... Let's go."
Even before reaching the little door of the house in via Cestari, they can hear the sobs and wails of the women, that is of the mother and three sisters of the young man who was killed. A number of people moved by curiosity are gathered in front of the little door, and they relate that the father has quite gone off his head, cursing everyone, and shouting vituperations against the king, against Italy, against the war.
Don Agostino Lanzetti makes his way to the very front. Before starting to ascend the stairs, he turns to Marco Leccio and with a look and a gesture advises him to keep calm, to commiserate, for pity's sake. He will enter first and try to appease him. With the help of the womenfolk, he will prepare the other to receive his father's visit. Let everyone stand back and wait for a while, here on the landing, just before the last flight of stairs.
"Yes, yes..." they say to him, and, with their hands, they gesture for him to get on with it.
Don Agostino ascends the last steps, knocks, and enters. But shortly afterwards the sobs, the wails, become even more accentuated, in the midst of a great bustle, as if there were a struggle going on. Suddenly the door bursts open and there, furious, with wild hair, torn clothing, and ready to lash out against the relatives and only restrained by many arms, is Giuseppe Leccio, yelling:
"Murderers! Murderers! Go away! Away from here or I'll kill you! Murderers of my son! Get out of here!"
At a loss the mother and the two sisters call his name and make supplicating gestures. They try to take a few steps upwards, encouraged, pushed by Mr. Truppel. At the top, Don Agostino succeeds in pulling the angry man back, away from the doorway; he makes him sit on the bench inside the little room. There he points to a large crucifix hanging on one wall, giving the room the air of a sacristy, and with many exhortations and kind words, finally manages to tame his ire, to make him weep.
The women have entered with Mr. Truppel. Marco Leccio has stayed where he is with Tiralli on the landing. A short time afterwards the daughter-in-law leans out the door and invites him upstairs, but the son, as soon as he sees him, jumps to his feet and is once more overwhelmed by fury. He fixes terrible, wide-open eyes on him and starts panting horribly, raising his claw-like hands.
Marco Leccio pauses to observe him for a moment then says:
"Remember I'm a father, too. Four of your brothers are up there. The last one left yesterday!"
"To slaughter! To slaughter!" shouts his son, allowing himself to be bent back by the arms holding him, to sit down again and cover his face with his hands.
Marco Leccio continues:
"Tomorrow it might be me receiving the same news that you've had today; and then day after! then another day after! and then another day after that!"
In response, his son uncovers his face and shouts at him:
"I curse the fatherland!"
Marco Leccio makes a forceful effort to restrain himself before saying:
" I came here to cry with you, but not the way you cry! Yours are tears of hate and anger. Remember that such tears cannot be accepted even by your son! You only lock him in your grief and in this hatred of yours for the homeland. But remember it was for the homeland your son died and, by grieving in this way, you're cutting him off from the grief of others, from my own, which he himself would have wanted. If you don't want it, then farewell!"He leaves the three women there with his son-in-law and Lanzetti, and he returns home, grieving, leaning on loyal Tiralli’s arm.
Along the way, dragging his bad leg which, for the sudden heat of anger, had started hurting again, he thinks this is truly a holy war, if a lion like the old romagnolo Lavezzari and a poor little lamb like his grandson Marchetto can die like this, blessing it.[54]
X
For the past week, spent among the many battlefields that clutter up the study, Marco Leccio has been alone.
Poor Tiralli came down sick, not exactly because Marco Leccio yelled in his face the shame of continuing to live his agony while so many of their old army comrades were going to find death in the same places up there where they had sought it out as young men, against the same enemy and for the same reasons as back then but, being old, a draft of air, a precipitous drop of temperature and they come down sick.
It has rained so much during this first year of the Great War!
Physicists have ruled that air, even though it doesn't seem so, is a body; it, too, is a feeling body and the too many gunshots, the fury of the too many canon shots have upset her. More poetic in their ignorance the old women of the area have believed in a giant weeping of the sky over the disgraceful folly of mankind.
The fact is, for too many rains, there have been a great number of temperature shifts, and poor Tiralli was not only drenched often, from head to toe, but hasn't been able to give his bones the usual amount of sunshine, standing like a pole – caryatid of the dignified monument to his poverty – for hours and hours in some sheltered spot by the roadside.
Marco Leccio is very irritated. He especially aims his anger at one damn obstinate fly, which keeps coming back to land on his Trentino map, while he, God only knows with how much suffering on his part, has set his temperament way, way back in time in order to generate the illusion of distance needed to be able to see the map in front of him as a living reality. There it is again, the damn thing! Coming suddenly once again to break up his illusion, nonchalantly walking up and down the peaks of those mountains, over those lakes, and through those valleys, here and there leaving certain black specks, which might be mistaken for fortresses or hamlets.
A hundred thousand times he's swatted it away, and a hundred thousand times that damn, filthy, disgusting, German, Tyrolean fly has come back, and so they start all over again!
But it's not just the fly. Or rather, yes, it is the fly but not just that which, in the waning sunshine of September, settles on and enjoys not giving rest to the hands, the brows of men, but also that other one, that eternal fly which, throughout time, has always enjoyed breaking every illusion inside the soul of man.
By now for months and months, every evening while reading the newspapers, Marco Leccio constructs the illusion that finally, soon, the Allies will strike back with force. The Russians, who had already routed the Austrians and occupied Galicia almost as far as Krakow (good God, almost as far as Krakow!), and then, going beyond the Carpathians, were already descending on the rich grain fields of Hungary; the Russians, who had already invaded Eastern Prussia, were now forced to withdraw from almost everywhere, to give up Warsaw, all Poland with its line of fortresses as well as Courland almost as far as Riga. Tomorrow the Russians will finally block this colossal invasion of three Austro-German armies. And the French, the French who, after the roaring reveille of the Battle of the Marne,[55] have been standing still for some eleven months, as if they were at home in the trenches, as if they'd pledged to become worms there – finally, tomorrow they, too, will resume their campaign; they'll break the German front at Arras and force the Kaiser to rush to recall his troops from the eastern front. And the English, with their eight-hundred thousand men amassed near Calais will finally break into Belgium to begin liberating that country. And meantime down there in Gallipoli, with the new disembarkation in the Bay of Suvla,[56] in concurrence with the Italian expedition, which at this time will have already set sail from Taranto – they'll at last force the Dardanelles and take Constantinople.
Every evening, all these illusions. The following evening, yes sir, for each one there's a black fly. In every High Command bulletin, for every illusion there's a fly. The Russian retreat continues and it's shoo the first time; the French don't move and it's shoo a second time; the English don't move and it's shoo a third time; and in Gallipoli the new attempt at outflanking has failed once again and it's shoo, shoo, shoo... And the Czar has undertaken the high command of his armies: ah, this fact must mean something! And General Joffre has come to the Italian front to bait Cadorna; and this fact, also, must mean something. And it's a sure thing the Turks have run out of coal and are short of munitions...
This is how the illusions are regenerated for the new flies of tomorrow evening.
But meantime, night after night, Marco Leccio finds himself alone in urging on the Allies, in his violent dreams. Every night he dreams of terrible and unprecedented brutality: of Russians who counterattack at Grodno and break through Hindenburg's armies, killing seventy-thousand men and taking another seventy-thousand prisoners, including Hindenburg himself who is hit several times by a gigantic Cossack wielding a notched riding crop. Or of the English who, at last, swoop down on Yser[57] and, with a barrage, mow down all the Germans in Belgium. Meanwhile the French, too, break through the enemy front, and, once they cross the Rhine, march off to Berlin! The Italians, by way of Malborghetto,[58] are off to Vienna! And the two capitals, razed to the ground!
He gasps, moans, snarls, cries hoarsely in his sleep, his arm with a clenched fist stretched across the back of poor Signora Marianna who, suddenly feeling herself almost pitched out of the peaceful marriage bed, awakes with a fearful start and, on hearing such moans and gasps, cries out:
"Marco! Marco! God, are you sick again? Is it your leg?"
"My ass!" Marco Leccio utters as, choking on a gasp, he sits up in bed. "I was about to finish the war in such a satisfying way!... "
And now just try to go back to sleep!
Ever since young Giacomo left, the anxiety for his three sons scattered along the war's three fronts has grown and doesn't leave him even a moment of peace of mind.
He turns on the electric light; from the drawer of his bedside table he takes out the most recent letter in which young Giacomo, seven days ago, had written him that the following day he'd be leaving for the line of fire; Marco rubs the sleep from his eyes, indeed the eyes of the elderly become watery at night and breed dense humors of sleep, and he starts to peruse it, frowning as he rereads that letter.
How well young Giacomo writes! How much poetry there is in this letter from the field on the eve of his departure for the outposts!
The whole camp is silent! It's late at night. I'm in my tent sitting on my cot, the ink pot on the blanket, and I prop this writing on my left leg. The artillery crackles far off between the cannon fire. I lit a cigarette at the candle set near the sight of my rifle. The candle is long enough so it can burn away as I write to you. In any case, it's the last night I have any use for it. Tomorrow morning at three thirty, we new arrivals will go up to high ground overlooking all the army positions; a captain from the High Command will point them out to us one at a time and tell us the actions that have taken place there, are ongoing, and those we'll be completing.
Complete... an essay question, once in the past.
Sitting on the rifle, near the candle, is a very lovely white butterfly, with open wings and antennae upright. It hasn't moved in a very long while.
I hear the wail of the large shells passing over our heads to bring death far away. It's a strange and nightmarish hissing sound. Who knows what you're all doing now... It must be just after midnight. The little wristwatch that kind Livio gave me stopped working a few days ago. Probably the cold here damaged it.
The cigarette is finished and I've changed position; now I'm writing on my right leg and drinking a sip of coffee.
The little white butterfly is still there, immobile, as she warms her wings. Or maybe she's dead? I won't touch her.
The places where we'll be taking up our position are difficult, we'll be going to the side towards the plain, to wage war by night.
I'm pure, strong and, in the silence of the night, I resonate with the calm beating of my sturdy, well-proven heart. I won't sleep perhaps. I see one of my fellows in the next tent who's rereading, one by one, all the letters he's received.
Four hours from now one stage set of this action will have changed. Farewell, my dear ones. Sleep. I'm about to smoke another cigarette. Good night. Sleep well. On the eve of a march towards the unknown I feel peaceful if I turn my thoughts to you.
The little white butterfly has stirred; I'm extinguishing the candle to save her life, good night once more, with all my kisses.
Over seven days Marco Leccio must have read this letter seventy times. Each time he felt his throat choke up with a harrowing fear and tears well up in his eyes, thinking of the spirit of this his adored child, as tall as the night standing with him as he wrote these words, and as pure as the white butterfly settled on his rifle.
There's been no more news for seven days! And yet he's certain that, in these past seven days, young Giacomo has written, because, before departure, he promised he'd send word of himself every day. Unless... But no! Damnation! It comes back to him, always, that dire thought... Once more he sees young Giacomo looking at him from the train, looking at him as if he wished to impress upon him, pierce into his soul, those watery and intense eyes full of restrained emotion: and he makes a fist, heaves a sigh, and sobs.
"It must be the Post Office’s fault," murmurs his wife next to him, guessing the reason for those deep sighs and sobs.
She hides her praying, in silence. She's done nothing else for the last three months, three rosaries a day, each made up of fifteen sections. Plus a fourth now, since young Giacomo left. She always seems to be dazed and not fully understanding what's said to her; but that's not true, it's just that she's praying, praying, and she's so absorbed by her prayer, she often doesn't hear what's said to her. She prays for young Giacomo, but maybe more for the other three sons who seem neglected by their father.
"Right, yes... perhaps," grumbles Marco Leccio. "It's everyone's complaint, this damned inefficiency of the mail service! Letters that never arrive or take six or seven days to arrive, and before there arrives a letter that was written afterwards... and it's useless to lodge complaints and claims. Never has there been such a spiteful creature as the postal clerk. The more you complain, the worse he does. We all know this from our experience at the postal counters. Beware not to show any hurry; they do it to you on purpose; they start fiddling with the rubber stamp that doesn't ink, with the rubber that doesn't print, with the postage stamp that won't stick... And it must be seen to be believed when they turn their insolence on you for your slightest observation.”
The following morning he, too, takes it out on good Mr. Truppel who comes, on behalf of his wife, to give news of their son and to ask the same of his in-laws.
"Well, that's a nice wristwatch you gave young Giacomo! He wrote it's stopped working."
The good Mr. Truppel, with smiling bright blue eyes, tries to show him that a wristwatch in war, latched on to a soldier's wrist, cannot help but suffer; the little wristwatch is such a highly sensitive and delicate organism...
"Right, right..." complains Marco Leccio. "And in your country they don't make them anymore, do they? Go on, that's a nice country of yours, your country! All the watch-making factories have been converted into industries for producing bullets... What a great deal the war turns out to be! Even for the United States of America, yes! Big deals, big deals... I can believe it, with this war that none of us can see! It takes ten-thousand rounds to hit a man... There have been some dead, there's no use denying it; but, go on, there's even been some smokescreen. Not to mention the canons! Thousands of lire to arm each canon shot, even the soldiers often laugh about it... A fine thing for all the suppliers, this modern strategy is... Invented by the Germans, and that says it all. Meantime Switzerland throws its money around. You, too, should also start, with your brother, fabricating ammunition. But maybe your brother would smuggle it into Austria... Not you, because you're a good man..."
Mr. Truppel lets it pass. He reads the letter from young Giacomo that, in the meantime, Signora Marianna has fetched from the bedroom.
"Oh, the little white butterfly... " Mr. Truppel smiles at a certain point.
And this sudden exclamation on good Mr. Truppel's smiling lips provokes sadness in Marco Leccio, who knows why! For the first time it occurs to him that the white butterfly who chose to sit one night on young Giacomo's rifle might have been death. With this his thoughts all darken and he gapes almost hatefully at his son-in-law, big and blond and round, who continues to read, smiling. Truppel, Troop, bah![59] No matter what his name is, he'll still be Swiss for all eternity! If only he'd show a little emotion while reading that beautiful letter! Nope, there he goes, smiling again over that little white butterfly, which perhaps seems to him to be an eccentric detail of young Giacomo's letter.
That smile so irritates Marco Leccio, he would almost snatch the letter out of his hand.
And since his gaze falls on the map of the Balkans, in order to ease his irritation, he throws himself, still in a bad mood, into a charge against the Allies, who insist on demanding an agreement and the help of those states he calls a bunch of bandits. Treaty, help, without comprehending that the more importance you give them, the stronger the impression that the war's outcome must almost depend on them, so they're more likely to make a noose and pull hard on it.
At this moment, something dark becomes present, like a shade that could be carried off by a breath of air; it's poor Tiralli, still convalescing, with one eyebrow up and the other down.
Signora Marianna, Mr. Truppel, and Teresita all welcome him cheerfully and, just to comfort him, congratulate him on his recovered health. Interrupted in the midst of his furious rage, Marco Leccio says nothing and looks at him as if he were an enemy. Then he grumbles:
"So you've come? Well, stay. But you could have saved yourself the trouble of coming. No one's on the move, did you know? No one. Look... look over here!"
He takes him by an arm and leads him in front of the map in relief of the Trentino.
Poor Tiralli regards it. The others draw near, too, for a better look. No one understands what's new to see.
So Marco Leccio yells:
"But don't you all see there's a fly walking about on it?”
XI
This year summer ended in accordance with the calendar. We’re now in the first days of October, and it's cold outside early in the morning and in the evening. Towards the damp sun the trees in gardens, the trees along avenues, fearfully stretch their leaves which, by now, either sit or don't sit on the branches. And they are even annoyed by the birds and afraid that – with any little heat – the birds get the wrong idea and hopping cheerfully from one branch to another, give the final nudge to those poor dry leaves that are barely holding on.
"This autumn the leaves aren't falling for us," Marco Leccio says with sullen gravity to Tiralli.
Showing signs of having suffered yet very well groomed, with the wide woolen band wrapped for now just once around his neck, Tiralli, by way of reply, emits a loud snuffle.
"This autumn," Marco Leccio repeats, "the leaves aren't falling for us."
Tiralli, another snuffling sound.
"Well, blow your nose, for God's sake!" Marco Leccio yells at him, exasperated.
That nasal sound of a head cold bothers him for being a reality too imminent and distressing, there in the silence of the studio, among the maps laid out on the tables, bristling with little flags. It's a nuisance that prevents his thought from taking its distance in order to concentrate.
Tiralli knows it's useless, but right away, obeying, he blows his nose.
And for the third time Marco Leccio repeats:
"This autumn the leaves aren't falling for us..."
Except that now Tiralli is no longer snuffling, the rest of his speech doesn't flow. Marco Leccio, frowning, remains thoughtful. And Tiralli, in rigid silence, points at him like a hunting dog.
He's there? He's not there? Marco Leccio is under the impression he's not there anymore. And at a certain point he fires:
"Well say it! Get a move on! Are you at least hearing what I'm saying to you?"
"Eh," says Tiralli. "Of course. The leaves... this autumn, you were saying..."
"Don't fall for us," snorts Marco Leccio, jumping up but as he does so: "Ouch!"
And he grabs his leg slightly raised with his whole face contorted by the spasm.
"Damn them! Damn! Damn!"
Hearing him swear like that, Tiralli breathes a large sigh of relief. He was expecting the swearing to be addressed to himself, instead of the sudden pang of sciatica. Now he understands for whom the leaves will fall this autumn. And all cheerful he asks:
"You were talking about the Germans, eh?”
"I guess," grimaces Marco Leccio, sitting back down with his leg still between his hands. "It took a lot, didn't it? To make me shout like that... If the Czar, my dear, what was I saying?"
"The Czar..."
"Yes, alright, but what did the Czar do?"
Tiralli looks perplexed and asks:
"The one in Russia?"
"No! The one on the moon!" Marco Leccio yells at him. "What other Czar is there? Do you want me to go on about that big-nosed Austrian in Bulgaria? What are we talking about? Operettas? I'm saying Nicholas II, the Czar, what did he do?"
"He assumed high command of his armies..."
"Very good! And why?"
Thus called upon, Tiralli begins to have his doubts that maybe the Czar had assumed the high command of his armies in order to wear him out, he who was convalescing from an illness that had kept him in bed for days; he really doesn't believe, in all conscience, to deserve such treatment. He answers:
"Heaven knows... Maybe he grew dissatisfied with his high general the Grand Duke's maneuvers..."
"Bollocks!" cries Marco Leccio. "The Grand Duke maneuvered like a god! And let me tell you, if the retreat maneuvers had continued, the Grand Duke wouldn't have been exonerated from the high command of the Russian armies."
"And so?" Tiralli asks.
"And so," Marco Leccio replies, "I'm a beast."
Tiralli looks at him, dumbfounded. He could have imagined all conjectures, starting with the premise that this autumn the leaves won't fall for us, all except this one.
"Yes," said Marco Leccio. "A beast. I've been a beast every day you were sick. There are so many flies here, my friend! Here, and inside this soul of mine! A beast, beast, because I didn't understand right off that, if the Czar assumed the high command of his armies, this was a sign that, in terms of retreats, it's over, not to be spoken of anymore; and it's also a sign that all the acts of betrayal have been discovered and foiled; so far the acts of betrayal have been..."
And here, abruptly, ends the Chronicle of Marco Leccio and, with it, his war on paper. The war continued to rage in Europe for about three more years, but the Allies committed so many, and such serious errors, one after another, that at the end Marco Leccio, disgusted, aimed a great kick at all those maps in his studio and wanted nothing more to do with them.
Endnotes
1. The Battle of Bezzecca was fought on July 21, 1866 between Italy and Austria, during the Third Italian War of Independence. At that time, the recently unified Kingdom of Italy (1861) was still missing Venetia and the region of Trentino, which were both under Austrian rule. At Bezzecca, the Italian troops only managed to weaken the Austrian resistance until an armistice between Austria and Italy was declared on August 12, 1866, while Garibaldi was ordered to leave Trentino and abort his mission. As far as the story goes, Garibaldi replied to this order by simply saying “I’ll obey” (“Obbedisco”), a concise phrasing that became a popular Italian saying ever since. Trentino remained under Austrian control until the end of WWI.
2. This description of Mr. Truppel replicates many of Pirandello’s common literary tropes and theoretical reflections, such as his critique of society’s tendency to take external factors like a name or other markers of supposed identity as reflecting a true, inner reality. The critique of social convention and the “masks” imposed by it is one of the most consistent elements of Pirandello’s oeuvre. At the same time, Truppel’s choice to instead seek refuge in nature is also consistent with many of Pirandello’s other characters and his more general outlook. A similar pairing of this critique of social convention and exterior forms together with the valorization of nature as an escape can be seen in Pirandello’s famous last novel, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1926).
3. Via dei Condotti (commonly abbreviated in Via Condotti, as in this story) took its name from the ancient pipelines (‘condotti’, in Italian) that transported water from the Pincian Hill to Campus Martius. Via Condotti soon became, and still is, the most fashionable shopping street in Rome.
4. This expression, ‘Terteuffel!’, is in German in the Italian original, as well; it could be translated as ‘Good heavens!’ or perhaps ‘the devil take you!’, as it has been by Julie Dashwood in the short story “Berecche and the War” (“Berecche e la Guerra,” 1919), where the same German expression appears.
5. Godolivo is an Italianized version of the German name Gottlieb. In turn, the Italianized surname that is suggested here as an alternative to Truppel, ‘Truppa’, reflects the same sounds but also contains a play on words: ‘truppa’ is also a word in Italian, translating to ‘troop’ and thus fitting from Marco Leccio’s perspective given the bellicose context.
6. The lira was the currency of Italy between 1861 and 2002, before becoming the Euro. It was subdivided into 100 centesimi ("hundredths" or "cents").
7. General Alfonso Ferrero La Marmora (1804-1878) was a major figure in the Italian Risorgimento, both as a military leader and as a statesman. He led an army corps in the Third Italian War of Independence of 1866, fighting against Austria-Hungary. However, his tactics were questioned, and many held him responsible for Italy’s strategic failures, most notably a significant loss at the Battle of Custoza (June 24, 1866).
8. Pirandello refers here to the Capture of Rome taking place on September 20, 1870 and marking the end of battles that led to the unification of Italy and the defeat of the Papal States ruled by Pope Pius IX, which were annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy. In January 1871, the capital of Italy was transferred from Florence to Rome.
9. Ironically, Marco Leccio’s sense of duty can be read as another sly reference to German thought and cultural heritage – here, however, not in the figure of the “too-Germanic” Truppel but rather in Leccio himself. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the most famous philosopher of European modernity, expounded a system of moral philosophy based in notions of duty similar to what is described here, particularly in Kant’s, and Leccio’s, fear of duty being contaminated by self-interest. Kant’s moral philosophy is worked out in his second critique, Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
10. The child was clearly named Giuseppe to honor the Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi.
11. Bezzecca is an unusual name to be given to a child, since it refers not to a person but a battle (and thus place). The bizarre decision attests to the protagonist’s desire to pick not just the names of prominent figures, but also of places linked to the Risorgimento. This, of course, renders Leccio’s patriotism so overblown as to be laughable.
12. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro di Garibaldi, best known as Anita Garibaldi (1821 – 1849), was the fearless wife and comrade-in-arms of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Born in Brazil, Anita became famous for her extraordinary courage and the determination with which she fought for individual liberty both in South America and Italy.
13. Likely named in honor of Defendente Sacchi (1796 – 1840), a writer and journalist who took part in the Risorgimento. Sacchi was also the author of the sentimental novel La pianta dei sospiri (The Plant of Sighs, 1824).
14. A Genoan soldier and politician, Gerolamo “Nino” Bixio (1821 – 1873) played a prominent military role in the fights that led to the unification of Italy. He was also one of the organizers of Garibaldi’s 1860 Expedition of the Thousand against the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
15. Teresa Garibaldi (1845 – 1903) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, while Garibaldi was fighting in the Civil War. She was the third child of Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi. She was known by the nickname Teresita (little Teresa), which Pirandello also uses here.
16. This name honors Stefano Canzio (1837 – 1909), a brave officer of Garibaldi’s fabled Thousand who later married Teresita, Garibaldi’s daughter, and became the first president of the port authority of Genoa.
17. Non to be mistaken with a member of the famous banking family who ruled Florence in the fifteenth century, Giacomo Medici (1819 – 1882) was a military general and politician who fought in the revolutions of 1848, a popular insurrection seeking to dismantle Austrian control in Italy, as well as in the Risorgimento battles in both northern Italy and Sicily.
18. The Agro Romano is the ring of rural territory around Rome that, over the course of centuries, was the object of massive land reclamation works managed by the Roman power of the particular period. [Translator’s note]
19. Right from the baptismal font: the reference is to the Catholic Church's refusal to baptize children with names from outside holy sources like the Bible, etc. [Translator’s note]
20. By adding the title ‘San’ before his name, Leccio is ironically labelling his son a “saint” (“Saint Joseph,” literally), and thus signaling that his child has embraced religious ideals that render him less patriotic (and likely less “manly”) in his father’s eyes. After the annexation of Rome in 1870, the Catholic Church stood against the Italian state, setting in motion longstanding official hostilities between church and state that would not be resolved until Mussolini’s pact with the Vatican to shore up support for his Fascist government in 1929 (the Lateran Treaty).
21. Pirandello is referring here to the tumultuous period leading to the Third Italian War of Independence, which saw the soldiers of the Kingdom of Italy fighting against the Austrian Empire. The bloody Battle of Custoza that took place on June 24, 1866, set the start of the conflict, although the Italian army led by King Victor Emmanuel II suffered a heavy defeat.
22. The reflections in this paragraph articulate one of the most common and central motifs in Pirandello’s writing, the notion that we inhabit fixed forms that are perspectival. That is, each individual is not essentially themselves but rather is a different version of themselves in the mind of each person who knows them and thinks about them. Instead of being “one,” then, we are all many – many different versions of ourselves, viewed from outside. The pain that can come from confronting these different versions of oneself, or of our subjective realities, with one another is a basic source of the existential suffering experienced by many of Pirandello’s characters. The most famous articulation of this theme is to be found in Pirandello’s theatrical masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921/25), where the Father repeatedly reflects on and theorizes this dilemma; but it is pervasive across all genres in Pirandello’s corpus, from his novels like The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904) and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1926) to short stories like “Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, her Son-in law” (“La Signora Frola e il Signor Ponza, suo genero,” 1917), which was the source text for another play, Right You Are (If You Think So) (Così è (se vi pare), 1917).
23. Leccio’s speech, while clearly meant to be humorous on some level, also reflects very real sentiments that were common enough among many Italian patriots of the era. The idea that the Risorgimento had been incomplete and that there were “unredeemed” (‘irredenti’) lands still held by foreign powers, particularly Austria-Hungary, was one of the primary arguments that helped push Italy to join the Triple Entente and enter World War I in 1915 after previously declaring their neutrality when war broke out in 1914. This irredentismo continued after World War I, as well, when the peace conference at Versailles failed to deliver the promised territories to Italy despite their participation in the war; Pirandello’s contemporary, the poet and war hero Gabriele d’Annunzio, famously called this outcome the “mutilated victory” of the Great War, which contributed to Italian nationalist fervor that fed into the development of Italian Fascism.
24. The bersaglieri form a special, and probably the most famous, unit of the Italian infantry, still in service today but widely associated with the war for independence. Over the course of their history, they included bicycle and motorcycle brigades. [Translator’s note]
25. Fought on May 15, 1860, the battle of Calatafimi marked the first victory of Garibaldi during his invasion of Sicily, when his Thousand (I mille) defeated the Neapolitan army that had been sent from Palermo to block the way to the Sicilian capital.
26. Located in the far south of Campania, very close to the border with Basilicata, Sapri is better known as the theater of a tragic expedition led by the Neapolitan republican and socialist Carlo Pisacane on June 28, 1857, which paved the way for Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand.
27. Thanks to the victory won in the battle of San Fermo (May 27, 1859) in Lombardy, Garibaldi forced the Austrian army to abandon Como.
28. Named after a nearby mountain in Southern Italy, the Battle of Aspromonte was fought on August 29, 1862. During the conflict, the Royal Italian Army defeated Garibaldi, who was wounded and taken prisoner while marching from Sicily towards Rome in the hopes of annexing the city to the Kingdom of Italy.
29. Garibaldi and his army (the “Redshirts”) sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, on May 6, 1860, and landed in Marsala, Sicily, a few days later aiming to conquer the entire island.
30. Sick with malaria and pregnant with their fifth child, Anita Garibaldi passed away on August 4, 1849 in a farm near Ravenna, where she was hiding with her husband and his army while escaping to Venice from Rome.
31. A republican revolutionary and nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 – 1872) founded the secret revolutionary society Young Italy (Giovine Italia). He is considered a Risorgimento hero for his vision of a free and independent Italy, which inspired young nationalists to fight for their country’s unification.
32. The eldest son of Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi, Domenico Menotti Garibaldi (1840 – 1903) was a politician and soldier. He was among the volunteers who fought for Polish independence during the January Uprising of 1863.
33. A revolutionary and leader of the Carbonari, a secret society founded by Mazzini, active between 1800 and 1830 and aiming to protect Italian interests against foreigners, Felice Orsini (1819 – 1858) attempted to assassinate the French Emperor Napoleon III, who at the time was seen an obstacle to Italian independence.
34. An anti-Austrian conspirator, Guglielmo Oberdan (1858 – 1882) attempted to assassinate Emperor Franz Joseph as a sign of protest at the death of Garibaldi. Oberdan was executed for the attempted murder and became a symbol of patriotism and sacrifice for the cause of Italian unification.
35. Pirandello builds here on a widespread Risorgimento motto referring to the idea that an expedition had to move swiftly and boldly.
36. With no budget for uniforms, Garibaldi wanted his volunteers to be dressed in red, and so the color became identified with his soldiers and their cause. The expression “red shirts” is still used to refer to his troops who wore a red top and a red felt cap. [Translator’s note]
37. Built in 1861 by the Austro-Hungarian Empire to cut-off enemies’ access to the Tyrol area, the Fort of Ampola became crucial during the Third War of Independence in 1866, when Garibaldi’s army advanced towards Trentino.
38. Located in northeastern Italy and bordering Austria, Slovenia, and the Adriatic Sea, Friuli-Venezia Giulia owes its name to the Romans who called the public marketplace built in the city of Cividale the Forum Julii. The name of the city was later extended to the whole region (Friuli), with the addition of Venice Giulia to honor the Venetian inhabitants and the Gens Iulia, the family of Julius Caesar.
39. Pirandello here lists a great deal of geographical detail about the mountain area between the Veneto and Trentino, around Lake Garda.
40. The theme of distanced vision is a common trope in Pirandello’s works, especially when he depicts the status of a subject removed from the world either through aesthetic distance or a perspectival shift meant to render big events smaller and more manageable. This theme emerges in his series of short stories on the nature of literary characters, for instance; see especially “A Character’s Tragedy” (“La tragedia di un personaggio,” 1911) and “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi,” 1915), where the distance in question is likewise being taken from the tragic events of world history and, in the latter case, the Great War itself. “Interviews with Characters” was published together with “Fragment of the Chronicle…” and the very long short story on the Great War, “Berecche and the War,” in the 1919 collection Berecche and the War (Berecche e la guerra), published in Milan by Facchi.
41. Val di Ledro, named after the local Lake Ledro, is situated close to Garda and part of the same municipality of Bezzecca.
42. Ossuaire de la Haute Chvauchee is an ossuary in Lachalade, France, containing the remains of the many soldiers who fell in the Argonne Forest during World War I.
43. Pirandello is likely referring to the Battles of Dunajetz fought between the Russians and the Germans in May 1915 as part of the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive during World War I. The German forces were fighting to push the Russians out of Galicia and Vistula land (the present Poland). As a result, the Russian army retreated to the Carpathians.
44. Internationally known as Kaunas, the territory of the Government of Kowno was part of the Grand Duchy of Poland–Lithuania until 1795, when it was annexed by the Russian Empire. Pirandello is using the Polish name (Kowno). Kaunas is one of the largest cities in Lithuania.
45. Paul von Hindenberg (1847 – 1934) reached impressive popularity during WWI for his strategic victories against the Russians. Under his leadership, Germany defeated Russia and managed to advance on the Western front, even though by 1918 the German successes were reversed, and the country capitulated to the Allies as part of the armistice. Hindenburg retired from military service in 1919 and later became the President of Germany from 1925 to 1934.
46. The eleven battles of Isonzo were fought between 1915 and 1917 along the Isonzo River in northeastern Italy as one of the main military offensives against the Austro-Hungarian Empire during WWI. The first attack started on June 23, 1915 with artillery hitting the Austrian defenses and the 2nd Army moving towards Gorizia, while the 3rd Army tried to move towards the Carso plateau, which extends across the border of southwestern Slovenia and northeastern Italy.
47. A common battle cry used by Italian soldiers before starting a fight during World War I. Meaning “Onwards Savoy!," the cry expressed the soldiers’ pride in the Savoy family as the rulers of the Kingdom of Italy.
48. General Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre (1852 – 1931) was commander in chief of the French armies on the Western Front during World War I. After abandoning its stance of neutrality in May 1915 and declaring war on Austria-Hungary, Italy formed an alliance with France.
49. A top British military commander, John French (1852 – 1925) was appointed commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) at the start of World War I. Criticized for his indecisiveness, French resigned his post in late 1915.
50. Marshal of Italy Luigi Cadorna (1850 – 1928) was given command on the Austro-Italian frontier when Italy entered World War I by declaring war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915.
51. This difficult sentence also sounds strangely truncated in the Italian original, which reads, in fragemntary fashion: “Che la strategia moderna abbia ridotto l’ufficio del duce supremo d’una guerra non molto dissimile da quello a cui Marco Leccio attende con tenace costanza da circa tredici mesi: studio indefesso lì sulle carte dei punti, delle linee, delle posizioni, è per Marco Leccio in fondo una assai magra consola¬zione.”
52. Calabria here is actually ‘le Calabrie’ (in the plural) in the Italian original, because at the time Calabria was subdivided into provinces.
53. Pirandello is referring to a well-known episode from the contemporary news of a fabled hero who had fought as a young man in the Risorgimento, survived, and later fought in World War I at the age of seventy-six. Lavezzari thus became the legendary fighter in a popular song, a “march toward glory and death” as it is described by Piero Zuma (“Ancora rievocazioni della <<Grande Guerra>>”, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 1970, p. 450).
54. A romagnolo is a person from the region of Romagna, which is in north-central Italy, now part of Emilia-Romagna.
55. Fought from September 5 to 12, 1914, The Battle of the Marne was a strategic operation that managed to push the German army back and save Paris from capture.
56. Located on the Aegean coast of the Gallipoli peninsula in European Turkey, the Bay of Suvla was the site of a disastrous landing by the British troops on August 6, 1915 in the hopes of liberating the peninsula from Turkish armies and so to open the Dardanelles Straits to Allied warships, enabling an attack on Constantinople (Istanbul).
57. A long river flowing through France and Belgium into the North Sea. During WWI, the Battle of the Yser took place on October 1914 and saw the Belgians fight to halt the German advance in their territory.
58. A hamlet located in the Province of Udine in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Malborghetto was a fort site consisting of two large buildings guarding a key mountain pass used by Austrian troops to protect themselves from the Italian attacks.
59. This idiomatic phrase cannot quite be captured in English, as it plays on the meaning of the alternate name for Mr. Truppel proposed earlier on, ‘Truppa’, which is not really a surname bur rather the equivalent of the ‘troop’ in English. The Italian phrasing here reads: “che Truppa e Truppa.”