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

straightforward, with no room for sentimentality. Meaning that, if they could, they helped each other, but each one of them knew how to get by on his own. If Floti was partial to anyone, it was his sisters, towards whom he felt tender and protective. He doted on the younger one, Maria. He was worried that the women would be stuck with the tough jobs, now that nearly all the men in the household were gone, and hoped that they wouldn’t get hurt doing heavy lifting or using a shovel or hoe. Savino was still home, but they really couldn’t rely on him too much since he wasn’t even fully grown yet.
    He tried assiduously to contact other administrative offices in the other army corps for news of his brothers but his letters often went lost; any answers took months to get back to him, and by that time the troops had been moved, transferred, sent out as replacements to units that had been decimated. The only one he knew anything about was Checco, who was the brother he felt closest to, and that was only through their parish priest who read the boys’ letters to Clerice and Callisto and wrote back their answers.
    Floti knew well that seventy divisions with nearly a million men were deployed along the Isonzo River, from the sea to the Dolomites. Trying to find anyone was like looking for a needle in a haystack. He had made his parents promise that any message they got from his brothers be sent to him through the parish priest, since his office was stably positioned at a distance from the front and could provide a certain point of reference.
    Little by little, this strategy began to work: by the end of 1916 he’d heard from Gaetano and Armando, who had both written home with another soldier’s help. They were alive. He used any free time he had to search for them. He learned to use a telephone and to communicate with the other offices. As time passed, the slaughter only got worse, and the number of deaths could not be calculated. The troops were sent to attack the enemy in their trenches, the logic being that there had to be more soldiers than the number of rounds that their opponents’ machine guns could fire. When there were no more bullets, the survivors would take out the enemy emplacement.
    One day, when he was given the job of transferring certain papers to division headquarters, he met up with a unit of special soldiers called
Arditi
. Their very name meant “daring,” and he’d heard speak of them any number of times: they were shock troops, sent out on the most dangerous missions. They were trained in hand-to-hand combat with a dagger and in the use of grenades, and they carried an automatic pistol that not even the officers could boast of.
    The uniform they wore was different than his, with a high-necked sweater instead of a shirt, and a cap like the ones the
Bersaglieri
wore, but black. Their battle flag greatly impressed him: black again, picturing a skull with a dagger between its teeth. They spoke softly and smoked fragrant oval-shaped cigarettes instead of the strong-shag Milits the ordinary troops smoked. They never sang.
    In the late fall, a lad from Romagna was sent in to help with office duties. The dialect he spoke was a bit different than Floti’s but they managed to understand each other quite well without making themselves understood to their officers, who were from Abruzzo and Sicily.
    His name was Gino Pelloni and he came from Imola, a friendly fellow. His grandfather had stood with Garibaldi in the pine forest of Ravenna as they made their way towards Venice, besieged by the Austrians in 1849. The things he said were unheard of:
    â€œWar is a dirty trick invented by the ruling classes to kill off proletarians while they earn a ton of money on weapons and equipment. Have you ever read Marx?”
    Floti was dumbfounded. “Who has time to read?” he protested. “I barely know who the guy is.”
    â€œWait, are you telling me you’ve never heard