Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [107]
Spilled from ripped knapsacks, strewn around the dead like sacrificial offerings, are snapshots, odd socks, bibles, razors, letters from home, all beaten into the ground by the remorseless rain.
How much ground did they cover? A mile? A few yards? Inches? How long would it take to cross the next river, advancing, retreating, aiming and ducking fire as they waded through the swollen water? Nobody knew or cared how far the next hill was – only how long it cost to take it.
In this often perpendicular landscape, wheels were useless. Mules were brought in to carry food, water, guns, ammunition, the wounded. The dead. While the generals gave orders, the officers took their chances with the men, and there came a day when every commander but one of the regiment was dead or injured.
At sunset, following a day of doomed sorties, Joe saw, far off, a line of mules plodding back to mountain base with what appeared to be sacks of grain strung across the saddles. As they came nearer, he saw the mules were laden with bodies. The mules waited, rain dripping off lowered heads, while dead officers were hauled off the saddles and laid out side by side, a human raft floating on the waterlogged earth. Tired men stood silently by the bodies as though waiting for a service to begin. In due course there would be official recognition; pomp and ceremony. This was the real thing.
One GI crouched awkwardly to pat a sodden shoulder, another touched a dead officer’s sleeve. There were muttered obscenities: inarticulate farewells. Joe bent to straighten the torn jacket of a young lieutenant, a Bostonian who had told him yesterday that he planned to come back one day, to see this country properly.
*
It was August when they crossed the Arno, not far from Florence, and coming up over a rise Otishi slapped Joe’s sleeve and pointed out a distant shaft of pale stone, slender arches catching the sun: the leaning tower of Pisa. Nobody slackened pace: Pisa, like Florence, was just another dot on the map.
On the outskirts of town villas sheltered, secluded behind walls and iron gates, some set in stone-flagged courtyards. The path of war had swerved here and the street was undamaged. The houses stood shabby and neglected, stucco flaking, shutters hanging crooked from broken hinges. A terracotta urn on a gatepost was cracked, spilling dried earth, dead roots. Evidence of diminished splendour and privilege.
As the convoy penetrated further into the narrow streets, the urban terracing, the damage was all around them: entire houses crushed to rubble, women in dusty black silently picking over the debris, lining up at a wrecked shopfront for bread. Massive walls that had resisted destruction for centuries lay crumbled into chunks of stone. A landscape of defeat.
Occasionally they paused at a town where sunshine and Italian girls in summer frocks offered a brief reunion with what seemed like ordinary life. Starving, selling anything that might buy food, survivors welcomed the uniforms, high-born matrons grimly moonlighting as tarts, with a pre-penetration aperitivo for officers. GIs got young girls who smiled, offering rounded bodies, a momentary forgetting, a quick fuck in a back room or the park in return for nylons, spare rations, cigarettes and gratitude. Sometimes they got dollars.
There were promises: ‘When this is over, Rosina, I’m coming back to find you.’
The definition of comfort can change with circumstances: a flimsy metal seat on the pavement, a rusty café table and a glass of sour wine could feel like luxury.
Joe closed his eyes and felt the warmth of the sun sink into his bones. His ribs ached, his feet hurt and there was an unspecific soreness in his guts. He flexed unwilling muscles and stretched out his legs across