Bell for Adano, A - John Hersey [1]
All through the town of Adano, Americans were like this. They were not getting much resistance, but it was their first day of invasion, and they were tight in their muscles.
But at one of the sulphur loading jetties at the port a Major with a brief case under his arm stepped from the sliding gangway of LCI No. 9488, and he seemed to be wholly calm.
“Borth,” he said to the sergeant who followed him onto the jetty, “this is like coming home, how often I have dreamed this.” And he bent over and touched the palm of his hand to the jetty, then dusted his palm off on his woolen pants.
This man was Major Victor Joppolo, who had been named senior civil affairs officer of the town of Adano, representing Amgot. He was a man of medium height, with the dark skin of his parents, who were Italians from near Florence. He had a mustache. His face was round and his cheeks seemed cheerful but his eyes were intense and serious. He was about thirty-five.
The sergeant with him was Leonard Borth, an M.P., who was to be in charge of matters of security in Adano: he was to help weed out the bad Italians and make use of the good ones. Borth had volunteered to be the first to go into the town with the Major. Borth had no fear; he cared about nothing. He was of Hungarian parentage, and he had lived many places - in Budapest, where he had taken pre-medical studies, in Rome, where he had been a correspondent for Pester Lloyd, in Vienna, where he had worked in a travel agency, in Marseille, where he had been secretary to a rich exporter, in Boston, where he had been a reporter for the Herald, and in San Francisco, where he sold radios. Still he was less than thirty. He was an American citizen and an enlisted man by choice. To him the whole war was a cynical joke, and he considered his job in the war to make people take themselves less seriously.
When the Major touched Italian soil, Borth said: “You are too sentimental.”
The Major said: “Maybe, but you will be the same when you get to Hungary.”
“Never, not me.”
The Major looked toward the town and said; “Do you think it’s safe now?”
Borth said: “Why not?” “Then how do we go?”
Borth unfolded a map case deliberately. He put a freckled finger on the celluloid cover and said: “Here, by the Via Barrino as far as the Via of October Twenty-eight, and the Piazza is at the top of the Via of October Twenty-eight.”
“October Twenty-eight,” the Major said, “what is that, October Twenty-eight?”
“That’s the date of Mussolini’s march on Rome, in 1922,” Borth said. “It is the day when Mussolini thinks he began to be a big shot.” Borth was very good at memory.
They started walking. The Major said: “I have lost all count, so what is today?”
“July tenth.”
“We will call it the Via of July Ten.”
“So you’re renaming the streets already. Next you’ll be raising monuments, Major Joppolo, first to an unknown soldier, then to yourself. I don’t trust you men who are so sentimental and have too damn much conscience.”
“Cut the kidding,” the Major said. There was an echo in the way he said it, as if he were a boy having been called wop by others in school. In spite of the gold maple leaf of rank on the collar, there was an echo.
The two men walked up the Via Barrino. There was nobody in the street. All the people had either fled to the hills or were hiding in bomb shelters and cellars. The houses of this street were poor grey affairs, two-storey houses of grey brick, with grey shutters, all dusted over with grey dust which had been thrown up from bomb craters and shell holes. Here and there, where a house had been hit, grey bricks had cascaded into the grey street.
At the corner of the third alley running off the Via of October Twenty-eight, the two men came on a dead Italian woman. She had been