Captain Corelli's mandolin (13 page)

There, I have told you what happened. I hope you're satisfied.

We did not report back to Colonel Rivolta because we had not been instructed to. We were expected to be dead. But the dispatches were full of accounts of `border incidents' perpetrated by the Greek `lackeys of the British'. The Army was gripped by a grim sense of outrage, and everyone except Francesco and me was straining at the leash. We kept quiet. We thought it miraculous that we had not been given a machine-gun that would jam after the first shot.

But we often talked to each other, and our complicity deepened our sense of mutual isolation. We felt a terrible sense of betrayal long before it became the foremost emotion in the breast of every one of our soldiers in the mountains of Epirus. We received medals for what we had done and were ordered not to wear them. We were ordered not to tell anyone that we had won them. We had been tricked into becoming accomplices to murder, and we would not have worn them anyway. Francesco and I made a pact that one day one of us would put a bullet through the brain of Colonel Rivolta.

I wanted to desert, but I did not want to leave my beautiful beloved. In any case it was a physical impossibility, since I would have had to have trekked across mountain ranges, through uninhabitable wastes. I would have had to find my way across the sea to Italy. And then what? Be arrested? The only path I considered seriously was crossing the border into Greece. I would have become the first of the many Italian soldiers who joined the anti-Fascist alliance.

My plans were pre-empted by events. Our unanticipated success had obviously impressed somebody, because Francesco and I were temporarily withdrawn from our unit and sent to a top-secret training camp near Tirana. We arrived there after a journey much of which was again on foot, in the expectation of being trained for commando operations. I will admit that both of us were excited by this prospect, as any young man would have been in our situation.

Imagine our consternation and disbelief when we turned up and found that we were instructors. Imagine the immensity of our misgivings when we were told to train one hundred and fifty Albanians in the art of sabotage. Imagine our incredulous hilarity when we got drunk and talked the situation over. How could it happen to us? We had done one operation and were supposed to be experts. These Albanians were outrageous and hyperbolical Balkan brigands, and not one of them spoke a word of Italian. We did not speak Albanian. We had about a week in which to train them.

The project was under the control of Jacomoni himself, and we were now fully party to an official conspiracy to create `Greek' incidents which would give the Duce reasonable excuse to declare war. It was as cynical as that. No doubt the Duce thought that Greece would be an easy conquest that would supply him with something to set against the Blitzkrieg of Adolf Hitler.

The Albanian would-be commandos were all overweight, they all seemed to have enormous moustachios, they were all inebriates, they were all murderous, lecherous, rapacious, and incapable of work or honesty. They were nominally Muslims, which meant having to stop for prayer at inconvenient moments, but Francesco and I rapidly came to the conclusion that they had succeeded in remaining entirely untouched by religious or humane sentiments of any kind.

We took them on route marches, and Francesco and I were the only ones to arrive at the end. We taught them only to fire brief bursts from machine-guns, but they emptied entire belts at a time and buckled the barrels from over-heating. We taught them unarmed combat, only to have knives drawn on us if we appeared to be winning. We taught them how to live off the land, only to find them sloping away to visit taverns in the middle of the night. We taught them how to destroy telegraph poles and telephone installations; one of them electrocuted himself in the penis by urinating on a transformer. We taught them how to eliminate watchtowers; we made them build one, and then they refused to practise destroying it because it had taken so much trouble to erect it in the first place. We taught them how to encourage a local population to rebel; the local populations rebelled only against our Albanians. The only things we successfully taught were how to assassinate generals, and how to create confusion by opening fire behind the lines; they proved this by shooting one of the camp guards and then shooting up a brothel with the intention of robbing the pimps. At the end of the training these commandos were paid very large sums of cash and released into Greek territory in order to begin the process of destabilising it. Without exception they disappeared with the money and were never heard of again. Francesco and I received more medals for our `outstanding contribution', and were posted back to our unit.

A few more things happened. One of our own aircraft dropped `Greek' pamphlets on us, encouraging the Albanians to revolt against us and join the British. We identified the aircraft as one of ours almost immediately, and some of our more stupid soldiers could not understand why we were encouraging our own people to defect. More of our frontier posts were attacked by our own people dressed as Greeks, and some Albanians had pot-shots taken at them to make them think that they needed us to protect them. Some Albanians actually shot at us as well, and we announced that they had been Greeks. The Governor-General arranged to have his own offices blown up so that the Duce could finally and definitively declare war. He duly did so, shortly after he had ordered a demobilisation that left us with too few troops and no reasonable expectation of reinforcements.

I have related these things as though they were amusing, but really they were acts of lunacy. We had been told that the Greeks were demoralised and corrupt, that they would desert to fight on our side, that the war would be a Blitzkrieg that would be over in seconds, that northern Greece was full of disaffected irredentists who wanted union with Albania; but we only wanted to go home.

I only wanted to be in love with Francesco. We were sent off to die, with no transport, no equipment, no tanks worthy of the name, an air force that was mainly in Belgium, insufficient troops, and no officers above the rank of colonel who knew anything about tactics. Our commander refused reinforcements because he would get more credit for a victory with a small army. Another idiot. I did not desert. Perhaps we were all idiots.

It fills me with incalculable bitterness and weariness to describe that campaign. Here in this sunny, secluded island of Cephallonia, with its genial inhabitants and its pots of basil, it seems inconceivable that much of it ever happened. Here in Cephallonia I lounge in the sun and watch dancing competitions between the inhabitants of Lixouri and those of Argostoli. Here in Cephallonia I fill my dreams with reveries of Captain Antonio Corelli, a man who, full of mirth, his mind whirling with mandolins, could not be more different from the vanished and beloved Francesco, but whom I love as much.

How wonderful it was to be at war. How we whistled and sang as frantically we prepared to move, as motorcycle coursers sped back and forth like bees, how exhilarating it was to cross a foreign border unopposed, how flattering it was to conceive of ourselves as the new legionaries of the new empire that would last ten thousand years. How gratifying it was to think that soon our German allies would hear of victories to equal theirs. What strength was gathered inside us as we boasted of our part in the famous Pact of Steel. I marched at Francesco's side, watching his limbs swing and the clear droplets of sweat run down the side of his face. From time to time he looked at me and smiled. `Athens in two weeks,' he said.

The night of October 28th. With five days' worth of ammunition and carrying our own supplies for lack of mules, we were sent eastward to take the Metsovon pass. How indescribably light we felt when we took those packs from our backs at night! How we slept like babies, and how grindingly stiff were our limbs in the early light of morning! We heard that there would be no reinforcements because the sea was too rough and the British were sinking our ships. We sang songs about winning against all possible odds. We were reassured by the idea that we were under Prasca's direct command.

How wonderful it was to be at war, until the weather turned against us. We slogged through mud. Our aeroplanes were grounded by cloud. We were ten thousand men soaked to the bone. Our twenty heavy guns subsided into the morass, and our poor abused and beaten mules struggled unavailingly to extract them. We were assured that the Duce had decided on a winter campaign in order to avert the risk of malaria; we were not assured of winter clothing. The Albanian troops sent with us began to vanish into thin air. It became clear that the Bulgarians were not to fight on our side, and the Greeks brought in reinforcements from the Bulgarian border. Our lines of communication and supply became inoperable before a shot had even been fired. The Greek soldiers did not desert. My rifle began to rust. I was supplied with the wrong ammunition. We heard that we would get no air defence, and that a bureaucrat had ordered our Fiat 666 trucks back to Turin by mistake. It didn't matter. The trucks bogged down the same as the guns. Heels that once had clicked smartly in salute now came together with a sticky thud, and we began to yearn for the stinging yellow dust of October 25th. We trudged on, convinced of easy victory, still singing about being in Athens in two weeks. We had not yet fired a round.

We thought that the Greeks were not opposing us because their forces were weak and cowardly, and it elated us, in spite of everything. It occurred to none of us that they had foreseen our strategy and had gone into an elastic defence in order to concentrate their force. We clambered through the inexorable rain and the clinging mud whilst above us the mist swirled about the titanic Mt Smolikas and the Greeks patiently waited.

How I hate puttees. I have never understood the purpose of them. I hated having to wrap them precisely in the regulation manner. Now I hated them for the way that they accumulated glutinous clods of yellow earth and filtered the freezing water down into my boots. The skin of my feet turned white and began to peel away. The hooves of the mules softened and flaked, but still they kicked up the slush that beslimed us from head to foot. Francesco and I entered a house with a photograph of King George and General Metaxas on the wall. We looted a raincoat and dry pairs of socks. There was a half-finished meal, still warm, and we ate it. Afterwards we spent hours worrying over whether or not it might have been poisoned and left deliberately. There were no Greeks, we were winning without fighting. We forgot about how some of us had used to shout anti-war slogans at the Fascist militiamen and beat them up whenever we encountered them in the dark.

We reached the river Sarandaporos and found that we had no bridge-building equipment and no engineers. It was a swollen torrent laden with a flotsam of blown-up bridges and the carcasses of mountain sheep. Francesco saved my life by coming after me when I was swept away during an attempt to get a gun across. It was the first time that he held me in his arms. We heard that someone had spotted some Greek troops vanishing into the forest. `Cowards,' we laughed. We repeated the hell of the River Sarandaporos at the River Vojussa. Francesco said, `God is against us.'

I hate puttees. At one thousand metres of altitude the water in them froze solid. When water freezes, it expands. This is an unremarkable commonplace, no doubt, but in the case of puttees the effect is twofold. The ice weighs pounds. The ice constricts the legs and the flow of blood to the feet is cut off. All sensation is lost. We longed for the squalid hovels that we had left behind us in Albania. We realised that our heavy guns had fallen miles behind and would probably never catch up. `Athens in two months,' said Francesco, twisting the corners of his mouth in the spirit of irony.

War is wonderful, until someone is killed. On November 1st the weather improved and a sniper shot our corporal. There was a crackling sound from the trees, and the corporal stepped back and flung up his arms. He pivoted towards me on one heel and fell back into the snow with a bright glistening spot in the centre of his forehead. The men threw themselves into prone positions and returned fire whilst a platoon circled up into the pines to find an enemy which had already disappeared. A mortar snapped, there was a whoosh as the bomb fell amongst us, a scream as the shrapnel tore through the legs of a poor conscript from Piedmont, and a terrible silence. I realised that I was covered with gory scraps of human flesh that were already freezing fast to my uniform. We gathered about the wounded and realised that we had no way to get them back behind the lines. Francesco put his hand on my shoulder and said, `Shoot me through the head if I am wounded.'

The misprised Greens had manoeuvred us into positions where we could be surrounded and cut off, and yet we very rarely saw them. We were trapped in the roads and tracks at the valley floors, and the Greeks flitted like spectres amongst the upper slopes. We never knew when we would be attacked, or from where. The mortar shells seemed at one moment to come from behind, at another to come from the flank or in front. We whirled like dervishes. We fired at ghosts and at mountain goats.

We were confounded by the heroism of the invisible Greeks. They rose out of dead ground and fell on us as though we were the rapists of their mothers. It shocked us. On Hill 1289 they terrified our Albanians so greatly that the latter fled, firing on the Carabinieri who attempted to stop them. Ninety percent of that Tomor Battalion deserted. Our whole line was swivelled anti-clockwise with us as the pivot, cut off from both arms of our front. No air support. Greek soldiers in their British uniforms and Tommy helmets machine-gunned us, mortared us, and made themselves invisible. `Athens in two years,' said Francesco. We were completely alone.

The Greeks took Samarini and were behind us. We ate nothing but dry biscuits that flaked like scrofula. Our horses began to die, and we began to eat them. The little Greek horses carried their cavalry above us, and were too tough to die. We were ordered to retreat to Konitsa and had to fight our way backwards through the soldiers that had encircled us.

We had become anonymous. We grew immense beards, we were buried in storms of sleet, our bloodshot eyes sank deep into our heads, our uniforms disappeared beneath an encrustation of icy clag, our hands were torn as though by cats, and our fingers curled up into leaden clubs. Francesco looked the same as me, and I looked like everyone else; our life was neolithic. Within the space of a few days we had become skeletons, rooting for food like pigs.