Across the River and Into the Trees Read Free Page B

chew.”
    He walked slowly back to where the car was parked. The driver was asleep.
    “Wake up, son,” he had said. “Turn her around and take that road toward Treviso. We don’t need a map on this part. I’ll give you the turns.”

CHAPTER IV
    NOW, on his way into Venice, keeping strictly controlled and unthinking his great need to be there, the big Buick cleared the last of San Dona and came up onto the bridge over the Piave.
    They crossed the bridge and were on the Italian side of the river and he saw the old sunken road again. It was as smooth and undistinguished now, as it was all along the river. But he could see the old positions. And now, along each side of the straight, flat, canal-bordered road they were making time on, were the willows of the two canals that had contained the dead. There had been a great killing at the last of the offensive and someone, to clear the river bank positions and the road in the hot weather, had ordered the dead thrown into the canals. Unfortunately, the canal gates were still in the Austrians’ hands down the river, and they were closed.
    So there was little movement to the water, and the dead had stayed there a long time, floating and bloating face up and face down regardless of nationality until they had attained colossal proportions. Finally, after organization had been established, labor troops hauled them out at night and buried them close to the road. The Colonel looked for added greenness close to the road but could not note any. However, there were many ducks and geese in the canals, and men were fishing in them all along the road.
    They dug them all up anyway, the Colonel thought, and buried them in that big ossario up by Nervesa.
    “We fought along here when I was a kid,” the Colonel told the driver.
    “It’s a God-damn flat country to fight in,” the driver said. “Did you hold that river?”
    “Yes,” the Colonel said. “We held it and lost it and took it back again.”
    “There isn’t a contour here as far as you can see.”
    “That was the trouble,” the Colonel said. “You had to use contours you couldn’t see, they were so small, and ditches and houses and canal banks and hedgerows. It was like Normandy only flatter. I think it must have been something like fighting in Holland.”
    “That river sure doesn’t look anything like the Rapido.”
    “It was a pretty good old river,” the Colonel said. “Up above, it had plenty of water then, before all these hydroelectric projects. And it had very deep and tricky channels in the pebbles and shingle when it was shallow. There was a place called the Grave de Papadopoli where it was plenty tricky.”
    He knew how boring any man’s war is to any other man, and he stopped talking about it. They always take it personally, he thought No one is interested in it, abstractly, except soldiers and there are not many soldiers. You make them and the good ones are killed, and above they are always bucking for something so hard they never look or listen. They are always thinking of what they have seen and while you are talking they are thinking of what they will say and what it may lead to in their advancement or their privilege. There was no sense boring this boy, who, for all his combat infantryman badge, his Purple Heart and the other things he wore, was in no sense a soldier but only a man placed, against his will, in uniform, who had elected to remain in the army for his own ends.
    “What did you do in civil life, Jackson?” he asked.
    “I was partners with my brother in a garage in Rawlins, Wyoming, sir.”
    “Are you going back there?”
    “My brother got killed in the Pacific and the guy who was running the garage was no good,” the driver said. “We lost what we had put in it.”
    “That’s bad,” the Colonel said.
    “You’re God-damned right it’s bad,” the driver said and added, “sir.”
    The Colonel looked up the road.
    He knew that if they kept on this road they would come, shortly, to