I
WHEN I met the signora at the tram station that May morning she was evidently troubled about something which was only partly explained by her murmured excuse, “a sleepless night.” We were to cross the Campagna to one of the little towns in the Albanian hills, where young Maironi was temporarily stationed with his regiment. If we had good luck and happened upon an indulgent officer, the mother might get sight of her boy for a few minutes. All the way over [Pg 2]the flowering Campagna, with the blue hills swimming on the horizon before us, the signora was unusually taciturn, seemingly indifferent to the beauty of the day, and the wonderful charm of the Italian spring, to which she was always so lyrically responsive on our excursions. When a great dirigible rose into the blue air above our heads, like a huge silver fish, my companion gave a slight start, and I divined what was in her mind—the imminence of war, which had been threatening to engulf Italy for many months. It was that fear which had destroyed her customary gayety, the indomitable cheerfulness of the true Latin mother that she was.
“It is coming,” she sighed, glancing up at the dirigible. “It will not be long now before we shall know—only a few days.”
And to the ignorant optimism of my protest she smiled sadly, with the fatalism that women acquire in countries of conscription. It was futile to combat with mere theory and logic this conviction of a mother’s heart. Probably the signora had overheard some significant word which to her sensitive intelligence was more real, more positive than all the subtle reasonings at the Consulta. The sphinx-like silence of ministers and diplomats had not been broken: there was nothing new in the “situation.” The newspapers were as wordily empty of fact as ever. And yet this morning for the first time Signora Maironi seemed convinced against her will that war was inevitable.
These last days there had been a similar change in the mood of the Italian public, not to be fully explained by any of the rumors flying about Rome, by the sudden exodus of Germans and Austrians, by anything other than that mysterious sixth sense which enables humanity, like wild animals, to apprehend unknown dangers. Those whose lives and happiness are at stake seem to divine before the blow falls what is about to happen.... For the first time I began to believe that Italy might really plunge into the deep gulf at which her people had so long gazed in fascinated suspense. There are secret signs in a country like Italy, where much is hidden from the stranger. Signora Maironi knew. She pointed to some soldiers waiting at a station and observed: “They have their marching-kit, and they are going north!”
We talked of other things while the tram crept far up above the Campagna and slowly circled the green hillsides, until we got down at the dirty little gray town of Genzano, where Enrico Maironi’s regiment had been sent. There were no barracks. The soldiers were quartered here and there in old stone buildings. We could see their boyish faces at the windows and the gray uniform of the granatieri in the courtyards. It seemed a hopeless task to find the signora’s boy, until a young lieutenant to whom the mother appealed offered to accompany us in our search. He explained that the soldiers had to be kept shut up in their quarters because they were stoned by the inhabitants when they appeared on the streets. They were a tough lot up here in the hills, he said, and they were against the war. That was why, I gathered, the grenadiers had been sent thither from Rome, to suppress all “demonstrations” that might embarrass the government at this moment.
The citizens of Genzano certainly looked ugly. They were dirty and poor, and scowled at the young officer. The little town, for all its heavenly situation, seemed dreary and sad. The word “socialismo” scrawled on the stone walls had been half erased by the hand of authority. War meant to these people more taxes and fewer men to work the fields.... The young lieutenant liked to air his French; smoking one of the few good cigars I had left, he talked freely while we waited for Enrico to emerge from the monastery where we finally located him. It would be war, of course, he said. There was no other way. Before it might have been doubtful, but now that the Germans had been found over in Tripoli and German guns, too, what could one do? Evidently the lieutenant welcomed almost anything that would take the grenadiers from Genzano!
Then Enrico came running out of the great gate, as nice a looking lad of nineteen as one could find anywhere, even in his soiled and mussed uniform, and Enrico had no false shame about embracing his mother in the presence of his officer and of the comrades who were looking down on us enviously from the windows of the old monastery. The lieutenant gave the boy three hours’ liberty to spend with us and, saluting politely, went back to the post.
With Enrico between us we wandered up the hill toward the green lake in the bowl of the ancient crater. Signora Maironi kept tight hold of her lad, purring over him in French and Italian—the more intimate things in Italian—turning as mothers will from endearment to gentle scolding. Why did he not keep himself tidier? Surely he had the needles and thread his sister Bianca had given him the last time he was at home. And how was the ear? Had he carried out the doctor’s directions? Which it is needless to say Enrico had not. The signora explained to me that the boy was in danger of losing the hearing of one ear because of the careless treatment the regimental doctor had given him when he had a cold. She did not like to complain of the military authorities: of course they could not bother with every little trouble a soldier had in a time like this, but the loss of his hearing would be a serious handicap to the boy in earning his living....
It seemed that Enrico had not yet breakfasted, and, although it was only eleven, I insisted on putting forward the movable feast of continental breakfast, and we ordered our colazione served in the empty garden of the little inn above the lake. While Enrico ate and discussed with me the prospects of war, the signora looked the boy all over again, feeling his shoulders beneath the loose uniform to see whether he had lost flesh after the thirty-mile march from Rome under a hot sun. It was much as an American mother might examine her offspring after his first week at boarding-school, only more intense. And Enrico was very much like a clean, hearty, lovable schoolboy, delighted to be let out from authority and to talk like a man with another man. He was confident Italy would be in the war—oh, very sure! And he nodded his head at me importantly. His captain was a capital fellow, really like a father to the men, and the captain had told them—but he pulled himself up suddenly. After all, I was a foreigner, and must not hear what the captain had said. But he let me know proudly that his regiment the granatieri of Sardinia, had received the promise that they would be among the first to go to the front. The mother’s fond eyes contracted slightly with pain.
After our breakfast Enrico took me into the garden of the old monastery where other youthful grenadiers were loafing on the grass under the trees or writing letters on the rough table among the remains of food. Some of the squad had gone to the lake for a swim; I could hear their shouts and laughter far below. Presently the signora, who had been barred at the gate by the old Franciscan, hurried down the shady path.
“I told him,” she explained, “that he could just look the other way and avoid sin. Then I slipped through the door!”
So with her hand on her recaptured boy we strolled through the old gardens as far as the stable where the soldiers slept. The floor was littered with straw, which, with an overcoat, Enrico assured me, made a capital bed. The food was good enough. They got four cents a day, which did not go far to buy cigarettes and postage-stamps, but they would be paid ten cents a day when they were at war!...
At last we turned into the highroad arched with old trees that led down to the tramway. Enrico’s leave was nearly over. All the glory of the spring day poured forth from the flowering hedges, where bees hummed and birds sang. Enrico gathered a great bunch of yellow heather, which his mother wanted to take home. “Little Bianca will like it so much when she hears her brother picked it,” she explained. “Bianca thinks he is a hero already, the dear!”
When we reached the car-tracks we sat on a mossy wall and chatted. In a field across the road an old gray mare stood looking steadfastly at her small foal, which was asleep in the high grass at her feet. The old mare stood patiently for many minutes without once cropping a bit of grass, lowering her head occasionally to sniff at the little colt. Her attitude of absorbed contemplation, of perfect satisfaction in her ungainly offspring made me laugh—it was so exactly like the signora’s. At last the little fellow woke, got somehow on his long legs, and shaking a scrubby tail went gambolling off down the pasture, enjoying his coltish world. The old mare followed close behind with eyes only for him.
“Look at him!” the signora exclaimed pointing to the ridiculous foal. “How nice he is! Oh, how beautiful youth always is!”
She looked up admiringly at her tall, handsome Enrico, who had just brought her another bunch of heather. The birds were singing like mad in the fields; some peasants passed with their laden donkeys; I smoked contemplatively, while mother and son talked family gossip and the signora went all over her boy again for the fourth time.... Yes, youth is beautiful, surely, but there seemed something horribly pathetic about it all in spite of the loveliness of the May morning.
The three hours came to an end. Enrico rose and saluted me formally. He was so glad to have seen me; I was very good to bring his mother all the way from Rome; and he and the comrades would much enjoy my excellent cigarettes. “A riverderci!” Then he turned to his mother and without any self-consciousness bent to her open arms....
When the signora joined me farther down the road she was clear-eyed but sombre.
“Can you understand,” she said softly, “how when I have him in my arms and think of all I have done for him, his education, his long sickness, all, all—and what he means to me and his father and little Bianca—and then I think how in one moment it may all be over for always, all that precious life—O God what are women made for!... We shall have to hurry, my friend, to get to the station.”
I glanced back once more at the slim figure just going around the bend of the road at a run, so as not to exceed his leave—a mere boy and such a nice boy, with his brilliant, eager eyes, so healthy and clean and joyous, so affectionate, so completely what any mother would adore. And he might be going “up north” any day now to fight the Austrians.
“Signora,” I asked, “do you believe in war?”
“They all say this war has to be,” she said dully. “Oh, I don’t know!... It is a hard world to understand!... I try to remember that I am only one of hundreds of thousands of Italian women.... I hope I shall see him once more before they take him away. My God!”
That afternoon the expert who had been sent to Rome by a foreign newspaper to watch the critical situation carefully put down his empty teacup and pronounced his verdict:
“Yes, this time it looks to me really like war. They have gone too far to draw back. Some of them think they are likely to get a good deal out of the war with a small sacrifice—everybody likes a bargain, you know!... Then General Cadorna, they say, is a very ambitious man, and this is his chance. A successful campaign would make him.... But I don’t know. It would be quite a risk, quite a risk.”
Yes, I thought, quite a risk for the conscript mothers!