PALMANOVA
During my first month in Italy I lived a nomadic life. I was only
"attached" to a Battery, and really nobody's child. July 17th to 22nd I
spent at Palmanova in charge of an Artillery fatigue party which was
helping the Ordnance to load and unload ammunition, and from August 2nd
to 10th I was in charge of another working party of gunners at Versa, a
fly-bitten, dusty little village, which our medical authorities had
stupidly selected as a site for a Hospital, though there were many
suitable villas in more accessible and agreeable places not far away.
But in this first month I was lucky in being able to multiply and vary
my impressions of the Eastern Veneto.
* * * * *
I rode down to Palmanova from Gradisca on a motor lorry. What a country!
The white houses, the white roads, the masses of fresh green foliage,
chiefly acacias, the tall dark cypresses, the cool blue water of the
Isonzo, the blue-grey mountains in the distance, and on their summits
the sunshine on the snow, which is hardly distinguishable from the
low-lying cloud banks in an otherwise cloudless sky.
Italian troops, dusty columns marching along the road, throw up at me an
occasional greeting as the lorry goes by. Long lines of transport pass
continually. "Sempre Avanti Savoia!" "Sempre Avanti Italia!" I find my
eyes wet with tears, for the beauty and the glory and the insidious
danger of that intoxicating war-cry; for the blindness and the
wickedness and the selfish greed that lurk behind it, exploiting the
generous emotions of the young and brave; for the irony and bitter
fatuity of _any_ war-cry in a world that should be purged of war.
* * * * *
And so I came to Palmanova to supervise the loading of shell, in the
company of Captain Shield and another Ordnance officer. Shield had
travelled much and mixed with Italians on the borders of Abyssinia. He
told me that with no other European race were our relations in remote
frontier lands more harmonious. They and we have, he said, a perfect
code of written and unwritten rules to prevent all friction. He told me,
too, of a young Englishman out there, quite an unimportant person, who
had a bad attack of sun-stroke and whose life was in great danger. The
only hope was to get him through quickly to the coast, and the shortest
road lay through Italian territory. So application was made to the
Italian authorities for a right of passage, which they not only granted,
but mapped out his route for him, for it was difficult country and
unfamiliar to our people, and sent a guide, and had a mule with a load
of ice waiting for him at every halting-place along the road, and so
saved his life, treating him with as much consideration and tenderness
as they could have been expected to show to a member of their own Royal
Family.
* * * * *
Palmanova lies just within the old Italian frontier, a little white town
surrounded by a moat, which in summer is quite dry, and by grassy
ramparts shaped like a star. It was first fortified by the Venetian
Republic four hundred years ago, and again by Napoleon. It can be
entered only through one of three gates, approached by bridges across
the moat, from the north, south-east and south,--the Udine Gate, the
Gradisca Gate and the Maritime Gate. Each gate is double, so that you
pass through a small square court, almost like a well, and at each gate
you can see the remains of an old portcullis and drawbridge. Each is
topped by two slender towers, and is wide enough to allow only one
vehicle to pass at a time, and at each there is a guard of Carabinieri
in their grey lantern-hats, to stop and examine all questionable
traffic.
From the ramparts you can see the Carnic and the Julian Alps, sweeping
round the Venetian plain in a great half circle. To the north the
mountains seem to rise sheer out of green orchards and maize fields, but
to the east there is a gradual slope of less fertile uplands, where the
Austrians in the first days of war on this Front would not face the
onrush of the Italians in the open, but fell back hurriedly to the more
difficult country behind. At night all the inhabitants sit out on the
ramparts, talking of the hot weather and the war, and watching the
searchlights winking on the hills.
In the centre of the town is a large Piazza, planted round with myrtles
which smell strong and sweet in the sun, and at midday an old woman sets
up a stall here and sells the newspapers of Rome and Milan, Bologna and
Venetia. In one corner of this Piazza is a restaurant, where one can
play billiards and dine well and cheaply. A youth serves here who has
been rejected for the Army because of defective eyesight. He speaks a
little French and a little German and a very little English, and in
moments of excitement words from all these languages come tumbling out
together, mixed up with Italian. He has, I am sure, an Italian-English
phrase book, which he consults hurriedly in the kitchen, for, whenever
he sets a new course before one, he shoots out some carefully prepared
and usually quite irrelevant sentence, and watches eagerly to see if one
understands. In another corner of the Piazza stands a campanile with a
peal of those absurd little jangling bells, which are among the most
characteristic charms of Italy. Down a side street is the Albergo Rosa
d'Oro, where for a week I was billeted. The padrone, a little round man,
is always smiling. He thinks the war will last three years more and
seems pleased at the prospect, for the town and the district round are
full of soldiers, and he must be making great profits. But his wife,
when one speaks of the war, says "it _must_ end soon; we must go on
hoping that it will end soon."
The station, where my fatigue party worked, lies outside the town. When
the Austrians provoked war in 1914, they had special trains waiting here
to carry away the Italian troops who, they hoped, would go and fight for
them against the Russians,--a poor fool's dream! In normal times it must
be a quiet place with little traffic. But now there is continual
movement, Infantry going up to the front line and often waiting for
hours at the station, and other Infantry coming back to rest, goods
trains of enormous length passing through, motor lorries loading and
discharging, driven very skilfully though sometimes very recklessly,
horse and mule transport in great variety, both military and civilian,
some of the horses wearing straw hats with two holes for the ears, and
carts drawn by stolid, slow-moving oxen. With all this coming and going,
and with a temperature of over a hundred degrees in the shade, the
Albergo della Stazione does a great trade in iced drinks!
I made the acquaintance of two families in this town. At Signor
Lazzari's any British officer was always welcome after dinner for music
and talk and light refreshments. An Italian General was billeted there
and two or three Italian officers of junior rank. A Corporal with a
magnificent voice, an operatic singer before the war, came in to sing
one night, and a Private from his Battalion played his accompaniment. In
Italy, as in France, the art of conversation and a keen joy in it, are
still alive, perhaps because Bridge is still almost unknown. Signor
Lazzari's handsome and charming daughter was an admirable hostess.
At Signor Burini's I was also most hospitably received and drank some
very excellent champagne. I used to talk to his three little girls in
the evenings on the ramparts. Signor Burini's mother remembered
Garibaldi's visit to Palmanova in 1867, the year after Venetia was
liberated from the Austrian yoke and added to United Italy. She was
speaking of this one evening to Shield and he said, "It rained very
heavily that day, didn't it?" Whereat the old lady, much astonished and
evidently suspecting him of some uncanny gift of second sight, replied
that indeed it did. But the truth was that he had been reading an
account of this historic occasion in a local guide book, which related
that, just as Garibaldi came out on a balcony to address the crowd, a
heavy thunderstorm broke and the Hero of the Two Worlds only said, "You
had all better go home out of the rain."
* * * * *
It can still rain at Palmanova.
One day while I was there the temperature rose to 105 degrees in the
shade, but in the evening a cool breeze stirred the dust and I sat
outside the Albergo Rosa d'Oro, talking with various passers-by. About
nine o'clock bright lightning began to fill the sky, but, as yet, no
rain. And then about eleven, just after I had gone to bed, came a
tremendous drenching thunderstorm and a great whirlwind. And then, very
suddenly, all became quiet again, save for the rain-water pouring off
the roofs into the street below.