A farewell to arms

“Come on,” I said. We would make for the side-road and work to the south of the town. We all started down the embankment. A shot was fired at us from the side-road. The bullet went into the mud of the embankment.

“Go on back,” I shouted. I started up the embankment, slipping in the mud. The drivers were ahead of me. I went up the embankment as fast as I could go. Two more shots came from the thick brush and Aymo, as he was crossing the tracks, lurched, tripped and fell face down. We pulled him down on the other side and turned him over. “His head ought to be uphill,” I said. Piani moved him around. He lay in the mud on the side of the embankment, his feet pointing downhill, breathing blood irregularly. The three of us squatted over him in the rain. He was hit low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward and come out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping up the two holes. Piani laid his head down, wiped at his face, with a piece of the emergency dressing, then let it alone.

“The —,” he said.

“They weren’t Germans,” I said. “There can’t be any Germans over there.”

“Italians,” Piani said, using the word as an epithet, “Italiani!” Bonello said nothing. He was sitting beside Aymo, not looking at him. Piani picked up Aymo’s cap where it had rolled down the embankment and put it over his face. He took out his canteen.

“Do you want a drink?” Piani handed Bonello the canteen.

“No,” Bonello said. He turned to me. “That might have happened to us any time on the railway tracks.”

“No,” I said. “It was because we started across the field.”

Bonello shook his head. “Aymo’s dead,” he said. “Who’s dead next, Tenente? Where do we go now?”

“Those were Italians that shot,” I said. “They weren’t Germans.”

“I suppose if they were Germans they’d have killed all of us,” Bonello said.

“We are in more danger from Italians than Germans,” I said. “The rear guard are afraid of everything. The Germans know what they’re after.”

“You reason it out, Tenente,” Bonello said.

“Where do we go now?” Piani asked.

“We better lie up some place till it’s dark. If we could get south we’d be all right.”

“They’d have to shoot us all to prove they were right the first time,” Bonello said. “I’m not going to try them.”

“We’ll find a place to lie up as near to Udine as we can get and then go through when it’s dark.”

“Let’s go then,” Bonello said. We went down the north side of the embankment. I looked back. Aymo lay in the mud with the angle of the embankment. He was quite small and his arms were by his side, his puttee-wrapped legs and muddy boots together, his cap over his face. He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as any one I ever knew. I had his papers in my pocket and would write to his family. Ahead across the fields was a farmhouse. There were trees around it and the farm buildings were built against the house. There was a balcony along the second floor held up by columns.

“We better keep a little way apart,” I said. “I’ll go ahead.” I started toward the farmhouse. There was a path across the field.

Crossing the field, I did not know but that some one would fire on us from the trees near the farmhouse or from the farmhouse itself. I walked toward it, seeing it very clearly. The balcony of the second floor merged into the barn and there was hay coming Out between the columns. The courtyard was of stone blocks and all the trees were dripping with the rain. There was a big empty twowheeled cart, the shafts tipped high up in the rain. I came to the courtyard, crossed it, and stood under the shelter of the balcony. The door of the house was open and I went in. Bonello and Piani came in after me. It was dark inside. I went back to the kitchen. There were ashes of a fire on the big open hearth. The pots hung over the ashes, but they were empty. I looked around but I could not find anything to eat.

“We ought to lie up in the barn,” I said. “Do you think you could find anything to eat, Piani, and bring it up there?”

“I’ll look,” Piani said.

“I’ll look too,” Bonello said.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go up and look at the barn.” I found a stone stairway that went up from the stable underneath. The stable smelt dry and pleasant in the rain. The cattle were all gone, probably driven off when they left. The barn was half full of hay. There were two windows in the roof, one was blocked with boards, the other was a narrow dormer window on the north side. There was a chute so that hay might be pitched down to the cattle. Beams crossed the opening down into the main floor where the hay-carts drove in when the hay was hauled in to be pitched up. I heard the rain on the roof and smelled the hay and, when I went down, the clean smell of dried dung in the stable. We could pry a board loose and see out of the south window down into the courtyard. The other window looked out on the field toward the north. We could get out of either window onto the roof and down, or go down the hay chute if the stairs were impractical. It was a big barn and we could hide in the hay if we heard any one. It seemed like a good place. I was sure we could have gotten through to the south if they had not fired on us. It was impossible that there were Germans there. They were coming from the north and down the road from Cividale. They could not have come through from the south. The Italians were even more dangerous. They were frightened and firing on anything they saw. Last night on the retreat we had heard that there had been many Germans in Italian uniforms mixing with the retreat in the north. I did not believe it. That was one of those things you always heard in the war. It was one of the things the enemy always did to you. You did not know any one who went over in German uniform to confuse them. Maybe they did but it sounded difficult. I did not believe the Germans did it.

I did not believe they had to. There was no need to confuse our retreat. The size of the army and the fewness of the roads did that. Nobody gave any orders, let alone Germans. Still, they would shoot us for Germans. They shot Aymo. The hay smelled good and lying in a barn in the hay took away all the years in between. We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air-rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. You could not go back. If you did not go forward what happened? You never got back to Milan. And if you got back to Milan what happened? I listened to the firing to the north toward Udine. I could hear machine-gun firing. There was no shelling. That was something. They must have gotten some troops along the road. I looked down in the half-light of the hay-barn and saw Piani standing on the hauling floor. He had a long sausage, a jar of something and two bottles of wine under his arm.

“Come up,” I said. “There is the ladder.” Then I realized that I should help him with the things and went down. I was vague in the head from lying in the hay. I had been nearly asleep.

“Where’s Bonello?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” Piani said. We went up the ladder. Up on the hay we set the things down. Piani took out his knife with the corkscrew and drew the cork on a wine bottle.

“They have sealing-wax on it,” he said. “It must be good.” He smiled.

“Where’s Bonello?” I asked.

Piani looked at me.

“He went away, Tenente,” he said. “He wanted to be a prisoner.”

I did not say anything.

“He was afraid we would get killed.”

I held the bottle of wine and did not say anything.

“You see we don’t believe in the war anyway, Tenente.”

“Why didn’t you go?” I asked.

“I did not want to leave you.”

“Where did he go?”