UDINE
I first saw Udine on the 5th of August. I was still on duty at Versa,
but the conversation in the R.A.M.C. Mess bored me, particularly at
meals; it was all sputum and latrines, gas gangrene and the relative
seniority of the doctors one to another. There was nothing to keep me at
Versa, for my gunner fatigue party did not in truth need any
supervision. So I determined to go to Udine. I started, walking, about
10 a.m. It was not too hot. I walked about three miles and then picked
up a lorry. One can generally get a ride on an Italian lorry if there is
any room, by waving one's stick at the driver, shouting out one's
destination, and looking agreeable. This one took me to Mogaredo and
then stopped. I then walked another three miles to a point near
Trevignano. Here I was within ten miles of Udine and picked up another
lorry which took me the rest of the way. It was driven by a Triestino
who, seeing what was coming, had left the Unredeemed City just before
Italy declared war. His face was very sad, and he made a gesture of
weeping, drawing his fingers downwards from his eyes across his cheeks,
though his eyes were dry. "How long?" he asked. "How long before Trieste
will be free?"
We approached Udine through a long avenue of plane trees, planted under
Napoleon. It is a gay little town, with arcaded streets, clustering
round a hill on the top of which stands a Castello, with a memorial
tower to the martyrs of 1848, and on the hill slopes public gardens full
of cypresses. Udine was at this time a nest of British newspaper
correspondents. I began to make their acquaintance in the afternoon.
First an Anglo-Italian lady from Rome, whom I met sitting out behind the
Hotel Grande d'Italia under the shade of trees. She was evidently
something of a figure here and received several callers, all ladies of
Udine, as we sat drinking coffee. One of these, on learning that I was a
gunner, took out a locket and handed it to me. It contained a picture of
a marvellously handsome boy. It was her eldest son, killed three months
before in Cadore, a Lieutenant in a Mountain Battery. He was only
nineteen. His mother began to weep as she handed me the locket, and it
was the lady from Rome who told me these things. Then the mother cried,
between her sobs, "E troppo crudele, la guerra!" And as I handed the
locket back, I thought of the unmarried childless parson in khaki who
considered that "three or four years of war may be tremendously worth
while."
* * * * *
Later I met and dined with two of the male correspondents of the London
Press. Conversation, in the sense of a mere flow of talk, is never
difficult with newspaper men. They are among the most articulate of the
British, although much that they articulate is only patter. These two
had plenty of miscellaneous information, much of which I received in a
sceptical spirit, but I learned some interesting facts, which I verified
from other sources later on. Chief of these was the effect produced
upon Young Italy by the personal gallantry of the poet D'Annunzio, who,
when he is not flying at the head of the Italian bombing planes against
Pola, is making fiery orations to the Infantry in the front line and
distributing among them little tricolor flags bearing his own autograph.
Having talked till midnight, I found a bedroom at the Croce Malta, where
I slept for four hours. Then I got up and dressed and walked to the
railway station, where I drank coffee and ate biscuits. A train was due
to leave for Palmanova, the nearest station to Versa, at 5.30 a.m. As I
waited for it on the platform, I looked out at the station lights, a
dull orange under their dark shades, and at the red signals beyond, four
in a vertical line, and beyond again at the dim outlines of houses and
dark trees against a sky, at first a very deep dark blue, but slowly
lighting up with the beginning of the dawn. The train did not start till
nearly seven. By this time it was quite light, and the sun had turned
the distant Cadore into a ridge of pink grey marble, very sharply
outlined against the morning sky, and in the middle distance, just
across the maize fields which run beside the railway track, rose the
_campanile_ of some little village of Friuli, like a stick of shining
alabaster.