Free A Winter's Night by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Christine Feddersen-Manfredi

burrow deep under his bedcovers. Nor could he stand the smell of blood. Now blood was everywhere and it was the blood of twenty-year-old boys. He had learned to shoot, to use a bayonet, to crawl through tall grass, to interpret the whistle of a mortar bomb. But he still couldn’t understand anything of what was happening around him. It was like being in another world or inside the nightmare of a madman. At least the umbrella mender, buried head down like they’d found him, wouldn’t be seeing any of this slaughter. Lucky him.
    Once he saw the enemy. An Austrian or Croatian soldier, blond as a corncob, white as a washed rag, stone dead at the bottom of a cannon’s crater. He didn’t look much like Floti, who was shorter, with black hair and a tough beard, but he didn’t look so terrible, either. He looked like a kid who’d grown up too fast.
    At the end of every offensive, when the battlefield was strewn with dead bodies, there would be a period of weeks on end where they’d settle into the trenches and wait for a sign of the enemy or for orders for a new operation. It was almost worse than attacking. The heat was insufferable, the stench of sweat and excrement, the flies that fed on that filth and then got into your eyes, your mouth, your ears, the fleas and lice that never let up, neither day nor night, the impossibility of washing, the futility of scratching, the revolting food and scant water . . . Floti realized that there was a lot worse in life than beating hemp in the midday sun or tossing sheaves of wheat with a pitchfork under the scorching roof of the hayloft. The worst jobs were tolerable when you knew how long they’d last and when they were followed by a dive into the Samoggia and dinner with freshly-baked bread and cold sparkling wine.
    Floti’s intelligence and his ability to read and write correctly soon helped him shift into tasks involving more responsibility and less danger. By winter he found himself working in an office, and the full accounting of that massacre began to flow across his desk: thousands, tens of thousands of deaths, boys like him mown down by machine guns, riddled with bayonet wounds.
    One of his jobs was to write the letters that announced that “first name” and “last name” had fallen in the line of duty on “day, month, year” and to send them to the army postal service, which would see to getting them delivered. Every letter finished with a stamp: “Signed by General Cadorna.”
    As if Floti were the supreme commander of the army.
    He’d write letters of his own at times, to his parents and his sisters: “Dear mother and father, I am keeping well and I hope the same is true of you at home . . . ” but he never spoke of the battles and the butchery at the front; the censors would never let his letter through. They had to safeguard the morale of the civilian population, after all.
    He thought of his brothers and wondered where they were. If they were still alive. As the ledgers of death piled up, the statistics became clear: out of the seven of them, three or four would die and one or two more would be wounded. Who would it be? Who among the seven brothers would be the only one to come through unharmed? Who would be writing up the first and last names of the others?
    He saw many requests for information from parents desperate over their missing sons, and he sorted out the bureaucratic replies of the military authorities: “Corporal Martino Munaretto does not appear on the list of soldiers killed in action.” Who was this Martino, anyway? A boy from Veneto, blond as a corncob himself? A craftsman? A shoemaker or a day laborer or a carpenter? There was a story behind that name, a story that had come to a sorry end. On the other hand, the same thing could have happened to him when he was at the front. You had to try to keep going somehow.
    The bond that joined the brothers was plain and