Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [104]
The first engagement, shocking in its suddenness, lay far behind them. They lived with the knowledge that the closeness of bullets whining and whistling past was not fortuitous, they themselves were the targets.
Earlier on, Nancy had written him letters about Italy. Her friend the Englishman had told her stories about Florence and Pompeii, about the past, about art and music and – bafflingly – wool. Joey had read the letters in what he now saw as the idyll of Tule Lake. None of those pages that spoke of Renaissance frescoes and the Medici, of beauty and elegant intrigue, seemed to play any part in the Italy he saw: a place of shattered trees and bomb craters, ruined villages and dead men; the swollen corpses of horses and cattle sweeping past on a raging, flooded river that rose eighteen feet in ten hours. A river to be crossed, under German fire.
At night, collapsing, they leaned against one another, sharing shelter, a waterproof sheet only partially deflecting the endless rain. Individual foxholes resembled graves: they buried themselves beneath camouflage, a fragile roofing of branches and uprooted undergrowth. Occasionally they enjoyed the luxury of a base in an abandoned farmhouse, huddled round a rough table, candle-ends sending wavering shadows on to the walls as they boiled up powdered coffee with powdered milk. ‘Real luxury,’ Otishi muttered into his tin mug. ‘At least it’s not powdered water. Yet.’
The men soon lost their fear of shadowy figures moving around them, not enemy scouts but locals: Italian partisans stealthily passing, or women and children scavenging the military garbage for food.
Scraping cold K-rations from a tin plate one night, Joe saw a small, barefoot girl on the edge of the clearing, watching the scraps of food drop to the ground. He slipped a chocolate Hershey bar into her outstretched, grubby hand. He did not feel generous.
By day, jittery, wrenched from uneasy sleep, they plodded on, surrounded by the percussion of bombs, the whine and screech of artillery barrage. The orchestra of war in action. Their thoughts went no further than the next assault, the bullet, the shell, the mortar that could make it their last. There was no context to this, no ‘bigger picture’. Survival shrank to the size of a man, the soldier ahead of Joe, crawling ant-like, prodding the ground with his bayonet, checking for mines. So far, they were surviving.
The convoy of armoured trucks and jeeps juddered along rural roads turned to mud and marshland. Bogged down in the slurry, the men found ingenious ways to corduroy the mud-swamped roadway, packing logs and roof tiles, crushed containers and debris crossways to create a solid base for churning wheels. Reaching a crossroads they saw what had been a fine villa behind high gates that were now hanging loose. Ahead lay an impassable bog, surface water shivering in the vibration of the tracks and wheels. From the once-graceful mansion they hauled out a broken bathtub, the remains of some Louis XV chairs, their upholstery shredded; a carved table, fragments of marble statues – all useful for creating a firm surface for military wheels to grip.
Bumping, bouncing, they trundled on. At one village, whose houses were strung out along the route like a broken wall, they slowed down, paused for a few minutes. The place was deserted, but by the roadside, at the village trough, a group of women stood washing clothes. With impassive, peasant endurance, stooped over the trough, grimly dunking and scrubbing, they ignored the looming vehicles and the soldiers. One, straightening up to ease her back, caught Joe’s eye and he sketched a salute, attempted a gesture of generalised goodwill.
Up front the first truck coughed into life. As the convoy moved on, liquid mud flung up by the churning wheels splashed the women and their clothes and they cursed, quietly.
Joe wanted to call out, apologise. But he was learning that soldiers were