Free The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson Page B

the company in the crowded carriage (‘two Florentines … a Roman … a Sicilian … one from Livorno’) soon became tiresome. A sergeant in the reserves made ‘loudly incomprehensible speeches about humanity, barbarism, sacrifice, duty and many other muddled concepts’. Looking for distraction from the chatter, Stuparich noticed a silent figure in the corner of the carriage. ‘He is not listening or talking, he is the only one rapt in a preoccupation that he cannot account for, but it fevers his expression and stiffens his limbs, paralysing his soul in an intense stupor.’ His mouth hung open, his eyes were fixed and shining. He was a peasant in uniform, perhaps leaving home for the first time in his life, probably fluent only in dialect. The nameless man was still far from the front, but even now he could not grasp what was happening. Wrenched from his family and routine for reasons neither explained nor understood, he was in shock. While the writer saw this and was moved, too much separated them for a friendly word to be uttered.
    At Mestre station, outside Venice, the men see wounded soldiers waiting for transport away from the front. ‘There are thousands of them!’ says one of the Tuscans in a trembling voice. (Thanks to censorship, he would have had no idea of the initial casualties.) Smells of blood and iodine seep into the carriage. Like the peasant in the corner, the wounded say nothing. The train moves on towards the front. Marching to the border, the men are nervous, starting at shadows by the roadside. Beyond Cervignano, there are tree trunks across the road. Bersaglieri speed past them on bikes, raising trails of dust. 3 A public fountain slakes their thirst. They sleep on their capes under the stars, and awaken spangled with dew. Ordered to carry heavy cauldrons, Stuparich – a bespectacled, intense, 25-year-old intellectual – notes euphorically that his body alone could not have borne the weight; ‘my strength is sheer willpower’.
    They cross the Isonzo on 5 June, ‘a tremendous, foaming azure current cut by pontoons’. His rucksack no longer weighs him down. Near the front, smells of putrefaction emanate from the roadside bushes, but the men are too hopeful to be gloomy. Marching towards Monfalcone on 8 June, they talk excitedly about reaching Trieste within a fortnight. Giani dreams of being one of the first to enter the main square, covered in dust. Next day, he reaches the Carso. The unit is sheltering from Austrian fire in a dyke. They clamber out, and come face to face with a rocky, barren hillside. ‘A chilly gust of wind hits me, a bullet whistles over my head, then another, then more buzz past my ears with a softer, keening sound.’
       

       
    The Carso figures in this story as a landscape, a battlefield, practically a character in its own right. It is a triangle of highland with vertices near the hill of San Michele in the north, Trieste in the south, and somewhere around the town of Vipava – deep inside Slovenia – in the east. To the south and east, it merges into the limestone ranges that reach into Slovenia and Croatia, and ultimately stretch all the way along the eastern Adriatic coast to Montenegro. In the north, it is bounded by the valley of the River Vipacco. It is from the west, however, that the Carso shows its most impressive aspect, at first like a bar of cloud on the horizon, then surging from the ground.
    There is a legend about the origins of the Carso. God sent an archangel to take away the stones that stopped people from growing crops. The devil saw the angel flying high over a land with beautiful woods and streams and meadows, carrying a huge sack. Hoping for treasure, the devil approached the archangel from behind and slashed his sack with a knife. Out poured the stones, covering the beautiful country below. God was sanguine: ‘No harm is done. The people in that country sheltered the devil instead of praising my name. Let this be a lesson to them. Let