Across the River and Into the Trees Read Free Page A

would be out of place there.”
    “See that next campanile down there across the plain?” the Colonel said. “I’ll show you a place down there where we used to fight when I was a kid.”
    “Did you fight here, too, sir?”
    “Yeah,” the Colonel said.
    “Who had Trieste in that war?”
    “The Krauts. The Austrians, I mean.”
    “Did we ever get it?”
    “Not till the end when it was over.”
    “Who had Florence and Rome?”
    “We did.”
    “Well, I guess you weren’t so damned bad off then.”
    “Sir,” the Colonel said gently.
    “I’m sorry, sir,” the driver said quickly. “I was in the Thirty-Sixth Division, sir.”
    “I’ve seen the patch.”
    “I was thinking about the Rapido, sir, I didn’t mean to be insolent or lacking in respect.”
    “You weren’t,” the Colonel said. “You were just thinking about the Rapido. Listen, Jackson, everybody who’s soldiered a long time has had their Rapidos and more than one.”
    “I couldn’t take more than one, sir.”
    The car went through the cheerful town of San Dona di Piave. It was built up and new, but no more ugly than a middle western town, and it was as prosperous and as cheery as Fossalta, just up the river, is miserable and gloomy, the Colonel thought. Did Fossalta never get over the first war? I never saw it before it was smacked, he thought. They shelled it badly before the big fifteenth of June offensive in eighteen. Then we shelled it really badly before we retook it. He remembered how the attack had taken off from Monastier, gone through Fornace, and on this winter day he remembered how it had been that summer.
    A few weeks ago he had gone through Fossalta and had gone out along the sunken road to find the place where he had been hit, out on the river bank. It was easy to find because of the bend of the river, and where the heavy machine gun post had been, the crater was smoothly grassed. It had been cropped, by sheep or goats, until it looked like a designed depression in a golf course. The river was slow and a muddy blue here, with reeds along the edges, and the Colonel, no one being in sight, squatted low, and looking across the river from the bank where you could never show your head in daylight, relieved himself in the exact place where he had determined, by triangulation, that he had been badly wounded thirty years before.
    “A poor effort,” he said aloud to the river and the river bank that were heavy with autumn quiet and wet from the fall rains. “But my own.”
    He stood up and looked around. There was no one in sight and he had left the car down the sunken road in front of the last and saddest rebuilt house in Fossalta.
    “Now I’ll complete the monument,” he said to no one but the dead, and he took an old Sollingen clasp knife such as German poachers carry, from his pocket. It locked on opening and, twirling it, he dug a neat hole in the moist earth. He cleaned the knife on his right combat boot and then inserted a brown ten thousand lira note in the hole and tamped it down and put the grass that he had cored out, over it.
    “That is twenty years at 500 lira a year for the Medaglia d’Argento al Valore Militare. The V.C. carries ten guineas, I believe. The D.S.C. is non-productive. The Silver Star is free. I’ll keep the change,” he said.
    It’s fine now, he thought. It has merde, money, blood; look how that grass grows; and the iron’s in the earth along with Gino’s leg, both of Randolfo’s legs, and my right kneecap. It’s a wonderful monument. It has everything. Fertility, money, blood and iron. Sounds like a nation. Where fertility, money, blood and iron is, there is the fatherland. We need coal though. We ought to get some coal.
    Then he looked across the river to the rebuilt white house that had once been rubble, and he spat in the river. It was a long spit and he just made it.
    “I couldn’t spit that night nor afterwards for a long time,” he said. “But I spit good now for a man who doesn’t