After a while, trudging over these frozen brothers, he no longer saw them. They were like the multi-coloured pebbles on the seabed, greys and ivories and whites, shapes. If they threatened to become again what they really were, he blinked and crossed his eyes a little, recasting his focus. He prayed for their souls as he went. Though he was not religious he was religious; this didn’t confuse him. Emotionally he was religious; politically not. If walking up this ladder of dead men demonstrated his commitment to a better future, so be it. If it helped the redemption of the Trentino, the Alto Adige, Trieste, he would do it. If Italy needed him to see men die; to run screaming at strangers, to sleep in barns, to walk forever, to gaze helplessly at the Isonzo week after week, and lurch himself at it over and over like a chained dog at a window, then he would do it. To end the war you had to fight the war. Only then could you rebuild. Those mountains, though. Those ravines and cliffs and zigzag paths – he’d be happy if he never saw a mountain again.
Confusion was his strongest memory; a confusion which leached between what had happened and how he felt about it still. He had not been able to make sense of what he had actually done. At Caporetto in October 1917, he had not run away – though 400,000 other people had. And 300,000 had been taken prisoner. Of each division which had deserted, afterwards, one in five men had been shot in punishment, platoon by platoon, and some of them shot their officers, and anyone without a rifle was shot, because why didn’t you have your rifle? You threw it away to run away faster didn’t you?
No Sir—
DIDN’T YOU?
NO SIR
and nobody knew if they’d be lined up and shot or lined up and made to shoot the others. That was the end of the war.
It was not a time for clarity. It was hard to know, in fact, if you had deserted or not. He thought, as best he could put it together in his mind, that having done his honest best he had found himself in the firestorm alongside someone who was trying to organise an orderly retreat, and he went with that flow. He was driven back among his fellows, and found himself way back in the Veneto, shamed and furious, and all around him men spoke of Russia, Russia – where the Bolsheviks were taking unspeakable liberties with authority.
And deserters – men he knew had deserted, properly deserted, deserted their companions who depended on them – were walking around, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and talking about the future—
Everything he had thought he was protecting was broken. The Pope said the war was a scandal, a useless slaughter – the Pope should be taken off and hung. And the government – talkers! Neutrals! Old men! They knew nothing. They had never really been behind the army.
Aldo coming home, in uniform, 1919, was mocked in the street. In Bologna a gang of youngsters, working men, thin desperate men, jostled him, shouted at him that he was a lackey and should be ashamed. He stopped, unafraid, to remonstrate with them. ‘Ragazzi,’ he said, ‘I’ve been in the war, what’s the matter with you? I’ve been fighting to win back Italian lands that were stolen from us – this is no shame, this is honour.’
And the least uncivil of them suggested he had been fighting for the rich and powerful, that the working man would see no benefit till the communists set Italy free – and the most uncivil of them spat at Aldo’s worn-out boots. ‘The war starts now, brother,’ they said, ‘here, in Italy, now’ – and Aldo stared at them with such total incomprehension that instead of passing on by they laughed and cried, ‘Come with us!’ and he could not get away.
So Aldo, aged twenty-three, trying to get back to Rome, thinking of his mother’s soup and a better world, in that order, found himself in the tight middle of a crowd of howling demonstrators and strikers all hurling stones and chanting. Occupying a factory? Rioting? He hardly knew, it disgusted him so. These children with their lock-outs and their strikes – and men old enough to know better. Communists, anarchists, Marxists: the shame of Italy, uncontrolled by the weakness of parliamentarians and liberals. The rot. What future would this build? No wonder the greybeards at Versailles were disrespecting Italy even now.
Aldo, the young man, was full of love, full of desire. He was in love with his saviour, Italy; his homeland, Rome. He saw it suffering: no food, harvests lost, families shredded, everything torn up by the war. He had read Dante; Mazzini; Crispi: he saw a bigger picture. As when the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, for whose inspired and glory-filled passages he had always had the greatest respect – now there is a man of the future! There is an Italian! – headed for Fiume with his band of freedom fighters and reclaimed the disputed city and just took it! And ruled it with such a manly, fiery sweep of inspiration! D’Annunzio! There was a man who was prepared to actually bloody DO SOMETHING. But Aldo had been away from home for too long. This chaos across the country frightened him, and his very bones ached for his own city. There were so many voices caterwauling round this precarious Tower of Babel: not just the communists and the anarchists but all kinds of rebels and crazy people, nebulists, idealists, cliques and recidivists, all blaming each other and leaping headlong to conclusions. Italy has not existed for very long. How can she hold when her children are in such a state?
Aldo had such a very different idea of how his world should be. He longed to mend, to heal, and to get on and build. He nurtured an idea of great glory: the Third Rome. After the ancient Empire when Rome ruled the known world, and the glories of the Renaissance when the wealth and creativity of Rome was without comparison, should Rome not rise again a third time? The Risorgimento had not, after all, been completed … Think what we could do with this magnificent country, if we could only harness our abilities and our strengths, if we could organise ourselves – Imagine if we could drain our malaria-infested marshes to make good farmland. Imagine if we could help the contadini to farm more easily, more fruitfully; if we could build up the industries of the north, mine our minerals and educate our children. Imagine the roads, the bridges and tunnels, the aqueducts and the plumbing, clean fountains at every corner, electricity. Imagine if we could bring water to Sicily …
It was quite a thought, when you were slogging home, in someone else’s boots.
So, he had studied, qualified himself in engineering, with a sideline in surveying and hydraulics, married his wife and started fathering his children. He started straight in, working, building, helping.
In particular, Aldo was grateful that after all the weakness and chaos of the birthing pains immediately after the War, Italy had moved into such a magnificent period, where the struggle was clear, the direction was forward and the leader was strong. It was a wonderful time to be Italian. In fact if there was anything wrong for him it was that he was always slightly distracted by the possibility that his gratitude for being released from the ghetto and left unbothered might not have been adequately expressed to the authorities concerned. But then his optimism would burst through – left unbothered? Ha! No, you are part of it … You are part of it!
He was looking forward to next year, 1929. The Duce had taken to Parliament the proposal to drain the great swamps south of Rome, the Agro Pontino, and Parliament had accepted it. Next year they would start the clearing and levelling. Left unbothered! Far from it – he would be joining in!
The train scooted on. He could smell some late stubble burning, over the metal smell of train. They should be ploughing by now, he thought, looking out over the framed land. We’ll make so much more farmable land. The ditches and canals we’ll dig, the roads we’ll lay, the lovely fields and homesteads and little towns … He knew the stories about the Agro Pontino, of course – the snakes as long as a man, the quicksands, the bandits, the treacherous tangled forest and scrub. Stagnant pools and backwaters, seasonal riverlets with nowhere to drain, ghosts and wicked spirits, streams drying out, nothing but frogs and eels and mosquitoes can live there, malaria, malaria, malaria … And it wasn’t consistent: from one dip to another it would shift and trick you – and it changed with the seasons, and the weather: lush with green weed one week, underwater the next, mud the month after that. Putrid clay-clad pools that never dried out. Islets and strips of land that might look secure, but only a fool or a drowned man would dare to step on them …
This