Chapter 1

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that
looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of
the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and
the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops
went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered
the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the
leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the
road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and
the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for
the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees
and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was
fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the
artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were
cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and
guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at
night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side
of their pack-saddles and gray motor-trucks that carried men, and other
trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic.
There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the
long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy
branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look
across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another
mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain
too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the
leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and
the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched
too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There
were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks
splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their
capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather
cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with
the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward
under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though
they were six months gone with child.

There were small gray motor-cars that passed going very fast; usually
there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in
the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one
of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two
generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only
the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially
fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this
way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very
badly.

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain
came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand
died of it in the army.