Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
Читать онлайн книгу.
be seen little flags with the green, white and red of the Italian tricolour. It must have been something like this in May 1915, Amedeo felt, when his father and uncles had gone to war.
The column was mid-way through the throng when the sound seemed to change to a loud and delighted cheer. They were the Alpini, Amedeo could see, mountain troops from the north, whose beards and peaked felt caps made them look a little like William Tell. Children edged to the front, encouraged by smiling mothers who stooped and pointed, for behind the officers and regimental flags at the head of the column were half a dozen German shepherd dogs, leather satchels strapped to their backs. Trained to carry dispatches over frozen Alpine passes, the regiment’s canine messengers were being mobilised for service on the Ethiopian ambas.
Then it was the turn of the Bersaglieri (literally ‘marksmen’) who emerged into the piazza with a fanfare of trumpets and at their customary jog, the cascades of cockerel feathers on their hats rippling through the crowd like merrymakers at carnival. It was the first time, though, that Amedeo had seen their distinctive headdress attached to tropical pith helmets. As they came through the gateway to the port, the foreground to countless paintings of the Neapolitan waterfront, a military band struck up the Hymn of the Piave. For the first time Amedeo, who had been watching unmoved by the scene, felt his emotions stir. No other song of the Great War had such resonance as this melancholic, but defiant morale-raiser, which had been sung to rally the Italian troops after the rout at Caporetto in 1917. Her allies had urged Italy to abandon the whole of the Veneto, as the Austrians, backed by German divisions, broke the front. But the king himself, Vittorio Emanuele III, had brought the shattered army to heal at the river: ‘And the Piave murmured, ‘‘The foreigner will not pass’’.’
The tune changed once more and Amedeo’s attention was drawn again to the piazza, cast in lengthening shadows as the sun gently expired over the Bay of Naples. A legion of Black Shirts had arrived, young volunteers determined to give victory in Africa a distinctively Fascist stamp. And they were singing as they came on. It was that idiotic, jaunty song that had been unavoidable for weeks, and it grew louder as the marching men approached the port:
Faccetta nera, bell’Abissina,
Aspetta e spera: la vittoria s’avvicina …
Little Black Face, beautiful Abyssinian girl,
Await and hope: victory is approaching …
Amedeo looked down to those gathered on the quay and caught Bice Gandolfo’s eye. They smiled as the men strode past in a swaggering march, swinging their bare forearms, for a black shirt, it seemed, was always worn with the sleeves rolled up. Ethiopia’s days of serfdom, they sang, would be replaced by the slavery of love. Then came the rousing finale:
Little Black Face, you will be Roman
And for a flag, you will have the Italian.
We will march past, arm-in-arm,
And parade in front of the Duce
And in front of the King!
In the cheering that followed, Bice made a dismissive little gesture with one white-gloved hand. Her father beside her, Amedeo’s Uncle Rodolfo, shouted up: ‘I am sure the king would be delighted to meet her!’ And the three of them laughed as the column headed down the quay.
From the far end of the docks, a foghorn blasted. One of the troop ships, festooned in bunting and paper streamers, was casting off. Every available space on deck was filled with cheering men, waving their hats, hurling flowers and last minute protestations of love at their women below. On the ship’s two funnels were giant, stylised, portraits of the Duce, wearing a helmet, jaw clenched in martial resolution, his head thrown back to iron out the chins. Other ships joined in the cacophony, sounding their horns, and then fireworks exploded over the city, jarring its crumbling palazzi down to their tufa foundations as they had so many times before.
It seemed more like a wedding than war, and the small cluster of friends and relatives gathered at the quay beside Amedeo’s ship were the guests whom nobody knew. With half the Italian army being shipped to Eritrea and Somaliland, little fuss was being made of the old steamer that plied between Naples and Tripoli, the capital of Italian Libya. Amedeo had urged his uncle not to see him off. It would take the chauffeur at least an hour to pick his way back through the crowds to the Gandolfos’ palazzo on the Via dei Mille. But the older man had insisted and Bice, to his surprise, had wanted to come too. Amedeo felt grateful now that they had done so. For although he was bound for Libya, his final destination was the same as that of the cheering men. He, too, would be going to war in Abyssinia if, as seemed inevitable, war it turned out to be.
Some acquaintances approached Uncle Rodolfo, and Amedeo watched him indulgently as he performed the courteous rituals. He was dressed in an outfit that he took to be the quintessence of an English gentleman at leisure, in yachting shoes, a white linen suit and a sailor’s cap, which he doffed at absolutely the correct degree of sociable nonchalance. Nu vero milordo, Neapolitans called Signor Gandolfo, mixing genuine admiration with crafty flattery. Amedeo had always felt drawn to this charming relative, whose frank enjoyment of the pleasures of the Bay of Naples was mildly disapproved by the more duty-bound Guillets. And Amedeo’s feelings of affection were reciprocated by the older man. Uncle Rodolfo looked forward to his visits whenever he was competing at riding events in Naples, and he was sensitive, too, to the family bond between them. Before they had left for the port, Uncle Rodolfo had been moved to re-tell the stories of how the kinship between Gandolfos and Guillets had come about. His father and Amedeo’s grandfather, both officers in the army of Piedmont, had fought side-by-side in the 1860s against the Austrians in the great battles of the Risorgimento, Italy’s national resurgence. After the moribund Bourbon kingdom of Naples had been swept away, and the nation finally made, the two friends had ridden like victorious conquerors into the town of Capua, where they married the daughters of its leading citizen, one of the ‘new’ Italians of the south.
But whereas the Guillets had remained Piedmontese and northern in outlook, Rodolfo Gandolfo had long since been seduced by the ways of the Mezzogiorno. Wealthy and untroubled by the need to work, he nonetheless exercised his talents as an engineer to direct the great project to drain the malarial Serra Mazzoni marshes, and once built a theatre in Capua, which he then gave to the town. But his chief passion was to sail his yacht around the Bay of Naples, assisted by his crew of three daughters, of whom Bice, aged sixteen, was the youngest.
His little cousin was becoming sophisticated, Amedeo could not help thinking, as he watched Bice exchange pleasantries with the newcomers. He had been ten when he had held her in his arms as a baby, and he still thought of her as a child, calling her Bice or Bicetta, her name in endearing diminuendo, and seldom Beatrice, still less Signorina Gandolfo. For a moment he had felt self-conscious taking leave of her on the quay, kissing her cheek chastely for the first time, rather than joshing her fondly as he had always done before.
The steamer emitted a baleful sound from its horn, which interrupted his thoughts but still failed to arouse any interest in the piazza, and the sailors began slipping the moorings. Uncle Rodolfo called out a final good luck, waving his cap, and Bice raised a white hand as the steamer eased its way past the bigger ships into the harbour.
Naples had never seemed lovelier to Amedeo than on that evening, the dying sun catching the maiolica cupolas of the churches and casting the Certosa di San Martino, high above the least salubrious quarters of the city, in a warm orange glow. Sprawling and raucous, the southern metropolis grated against his northern sense of decorum, but from the safe distance of the sea, away from the chaos, the filth and the crime, it appeared magnificent. A true capital, Amedeo conceded, and the only Italian city worthy of the term. Apart from Turin, of course. It was not his Italy, which he preferred to think of as a land of neat, modest towns in the Alpine foothills, but it was undeniably the Patria. Whatever the Italians were only two generations after the nation itself had come into being – and the current view, incessantly repeated, was that they were the heirs to Imperial Rome – they would be much less, Amedeo believed, without the humanity of this ancient, suffering city of which all Italians seemed so embarrassed, and yet proud.
His