I have started the waistcoat for you, but I have had to unpick the bedcover again because it was coming out even worse than before. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Nothing but good news from the front, everyone is so pleased that Mussolini is being cut down to size by our boys, he has learned ‘me kinei Kamarinan’ the hard way, has he not? We have heard that our boys are digging Italian tanks out of the snow and mud, and using them against their former owners. Bravo for us. And we hear that we have taken Argyrokastro, Korytsa and Aghioi Saranda, but we keep hearing sad rumours that Metaxas is not well.
Have you seen the new poster that is going up everywhere? In case you haven’t, it shows one of our men striding forward with the hand of the Virgin guiding him by the elbow. She has exactly the same expression as the soldier, and the writing says: ‘Victory. Freedom. The Virgin is with him.’ We all think it’s terribly good.
Father is making his moustache more patriotic by allowing it to get bushy. I am glad that he is not waxing it anymore, as it used to feel hard and spiky when I kissed his cheek. Now it tickles. I expect that you have grown a beard by now, just to keep your face warm.
Mandras, you really must write to your mother, she is so anxious. It is as much a question of philotimo as fighting for your country. Honour has many faces, and being good to your mother is one of them, I think. But I’m not criticising, I just think that perhaps you need reminding.
Your loving betrothed, Pelagia.
(3)
In the week of Apokrea
Agapeton,
This is is my hundredth letter to you, and still we have heard nothing. Papakis says that no news is neither good nor bad news, and so I don’t know whether to feel sad or reassured. I thank God that your name has never appeared in the list of the dead that is posted in Argostoli. You will be sorry to know that Kokolios has lost two of his sons (Gerasimos and Yanaros) and he has taken it very badly. His lip trembles when he talks, there are tears in his eyes, and he has taken to working so much that he even works after dark. He say that he doesn’t blame the Italians but the Russians, who have not done their duty in opposing the Fascists. He says that Stalin cannot be a true Communist, and ever since the British Empire threw the Italians out of Somaliland and captured 200,000 in Libya, he has been walking around kissing a picture of Winston Churchill that he cut from a newspaper. The other day, when Papas heard about Hitler’s ultimatum to us to stop fighting the Italians, he cut off his moustache altogether because even a big bushy patriotic moustache is too much like Hitler’s. Ever since Metaxas died, Papas has worn a black armband, and he swears that he will not remove it until the war is over. We are all still very grieved by the old man’s death, but we are resolved not to let it weaken us. We have the utmost faith that Papagos will lead us to victory.
Well, there isn’t much of a carnival this year, with all the young men gone, and it is as if we were in Lent already. We are all fasting whether we like it or not, and I can’t see that Easter will be much of a feast either. It just won’t be the same without dyed eggs and tsoureki and kokoretsi and mayeritsa and a lamb roasting on the spit. I expect we’ll have the eggs, but apart from that we’ll probably have to eat shoe-leather with avgolemono sauce. It makes my mouth water just thinking about all the things that we can’t have, and I can’t wait for everything to be normal again.
We have been having some awful tempests ever since December, and it has been very cold and windy. I have nearly finished your waistcoat, and although it is not as beautiful as I had hoped, it will be handsome enough. The foul weather gives me plenty of time to work at it, though it is not easy when one’s hands are blue with cold. I got half way through the bedcover, but then Psipsina was sick on it, and I had to wash it. It didn’t shrink, thanks be to God, but when I laid it out to dry the goat ate three mouthfuls from the middle. I was so angry that I actually beat it with a broomstick, and then Papas came out and found me in a storm of tears. I hit him too. You should have seen the look on his face. Anyway, I unpicked it yet again, and saved as much wool as I could, but I’m beginning to think that fate wants me to make something else.
I hope that you are well and cheerful, and I’m still looking forward to having you back, as are we all.
All my love, your Pelagia, who still misses you.
17 L’Omosessuale (5)
The Bari Division took over from us in order to allow us to rest and regroup, but the Greeks came in with a curtain of flame and caught them before they had had time to bring up their artillery. We in the Julia Division were called back into the line to save them. It was as though a portion of my mind had disappeared, or as though my soul had diminished to a tiny point of grey light. I could think of nothing at all. I fought doggedly, I was an automaton without emotion or hope, and if I had any worry at all, it was that Francisco was becoming stranger. He had become convinced that he would one day be shot through the heart, and had therefore moved the mouse Mario from his breast pocket to a pocket on the sleeve of his shirt. He was concerned that the mouse would be shot when he was, and he made me promise to look after it when he was killed.
Our units became muddled up. Portions of other divisions were sent to ours. No one knew the exact hierarchy of local command. A novice battalion of partially trained boys from the country arrived at the wrong map reference and was annihilated by the Greeks. On November 14th the Greeks commenced an offensive whose ruthless fury we could not possibly have imagined in advance.
We were dug in with the Mrava Massif behind us. This means nothing unless you know that it was uninhabited, a savage place of ravines and chasms, crude and monstrous crags, roadless, a place through which our supplies could not be brought. We were in a land that the Greeks had always considered theirs by right, and which they had twice ceded by treaty. Now they wanted it back. We were wrapped in mist, enveloped in snow, and an accursed Arctic wind sprang up from the north that flung itself upon us like the bunched fist of a Titan.
They cut deep notches into our lines and we lost contact with other units. We had to retreat. There was nowhere to retreat to. The Brandt mortars of the enemy cut out entire platoons at a time. We had no bandages or field hospitals. A weeping chaplain extracted shrapnel from my arm without anaesthetic on the kitchen table of a roofless and ruined cottage. I was too cold to feel the knife dividing my flesh or the needle piercing my skin. I thanked God that I had been wounded and not Francisco, and was sent straight back into the fray. I found that the men from the mule trains had abandoned their animals and were fighting alongside us. Our officer had been killed and replaced by a major from the supply service. ‘There are no supplies,’ he told us, ‘and so I have come to do my duty. I am relying on you for your good advice.’ This admirable and honourable man, accustomed to stacking blankets and making inventories, lost his entrails in a bayonet attack that he was leading heroically with an empty pistol in his hand. We were utterly defeated.
I don’t just hate puttees. I hate my entire uniform. The threads rotted and it fell apart. The cloth hardened like cardboard, and stiffened into adamantine inflexibility. It garnered the cold like a refrigerator and forced it into my flesh. It grew heavier and more abrasive by the day. I shot a goat and clothed myself in its uncured pelt. Francisco skinned a shattered mule and did the same. Koritsa was abandoned to the enemy, and we now had less territory than we had possessed when we started. We left behind our heavy equipment. It was worn out anyway. We became accustomed to the horrible ulceration and rank stench of gangrene. Whilst Koritsa was evacuated we in the Julia Division held on in Epirus. We were not so easily defeated. But then we retreated along the same roads by which we had advanced. The Centauro Division, for the sake of speed, left behind the tanks that had been sucked into the mud. The Greeks found these sad little rusty hulks, dug them out, repaired them, and used them against us. We were reinforced by a battalion of Customs Guards. For God’s sake. We held a bridgehead at Perati. Pointlessly.
A small miracle; the Greeks allowed us a co
uple of days’ rest. No doubt they thought that we must have mined the roads. Then we heard that we had lost Pogradec because the enemy had infiltrated the line by following the path of a mountain stream whilst our defences had been organised to defend the tracks. ‘What’s the use?’ asked Francisco. ‘We do our best, and everyone else fucks it up.’ Then someone else’s manoeuvre exposed our right flank and we were cut off from the Modena Division. Our General Soddu, who had replaced Prasca, was now replaced by Cavallero. It looked as though our glorious conquest of Greece was going to finish ignominiously with a Greek conquest of Albania. The snow fell relentlessly and we discovered that we could warm our heads by cutting out the brains of dying mules and putting them in our helmets. We realised that the only way to prevent continuous attack from above was to hold the high ground. The high ground was whipped by vicious winds that carried before them a stinging shield of crystals. My boots fell apart and I itched and squirmed with lice. I think it must have been Christmas when we finally understood that we were as broken as our boots.
Waking up in the morning, ten degrees below zero. The first question: who has frozen to death now? Who has slipped from sleep to death? The second question: how many swollen fords must we cross today, with the frost-fettering water gripping our testicles until they ache and scream? How many miles of waist-deep slush on the ‘roads’ today? The third question: how do the Greeks know to attack us when it is twenty degrees below and the slides of our rifles have jammed solid? The fourth question: why are the ‘friendly’ Albanians acting as guides to the Greeks? The fifth question: which unit has become so infinitely weary today that it has chosen to surrender to an inferior force? Not the Julia. Not us. Not yet. Francisco has stopped talking to me altogether. He talks only to his mouse. Another attack upon us by our own planes, a flight of SM79s; twenty dead. We hear that the officers of the Modena Division have received an order stating that those among them who do not show sufficient leadership will be shot. My own Colonel Gaetano Tavoni has been killed on Mali Topojanit, leading us in attack after sixty days without rest. God rest his soul and reward his care for us. The women of Italy begin to send us knitted gloves that soak up the water and freeze to our skin so that we cannot take them off. Francisco has received a panettone from his mother and is sharing it with the mouse Mario. He chips portions of it off with a bayonet. We hear that Ciano and the Fascist hierarchs have joined up and have patriotically chosen to go on bombing jaunts to Corfu, where there are no air defences.
How I hate puttees. These are the days of the white death. Undrained trenches. The ice expanding in the cloth, the blood cut off. We do not hate the Greeks, we fight them for reasons unclear and without honour, but we do hate the white death.
To be sure, there is no pain at first. Above the puttees the legs swell, and below the puttees the foot falls asleep. The legs turn lurid colours: shades of lilac, hints of purple, ebony black. Because I am a very big man I spend days carrying our afflicted boys back behind the lines. I am exhausted, bewildered by their cries of agony. I have replaced my puttees with the skin of cats rubbed on the inside with gun oil. I have impregnated my boots with candlewax. The water still penetrates and I live in fear of the white death. In the tents I hear the unearthly shrieks of amputation. I inspect my feet every few hours and massage them with goat-fat unfrozen over the heat of a match. I hear that in Africa Graziani has been defeated. We have thirteen thousand victims of the white death. Even the Greeks are petrified by cold; the attacks have abated. Francisco is undoubtedly mad. His mouth works continually, his beard has become a stalactite of ice, his eyes roll in his head and he does not recognise me. He shits himself deliberately in order to savour the momentary heat. All my love turns to pity. I make him mittens from a brace of rabbits, leaving the fat on the inside of the skin. He eats the fat. We have been reduced to one thousand men with fifteen machine-guns and five mortars. We have lost four thousand men. There is nothing in our lines but the white death, the bitter absence of our friends, the desolation of the wilderness.
In Klisura the wild and angry Greeks come against us. We who are exhausted and full of sorrow. Francisco talks to the mouse Mario: ‘Athens in two weeks, a place in history for the mouse of Albania. The mouse who deposed a king. Mario the mouse. Mousey mousey mousey.’ We can no longer stand and the Julia is beaten, our troops maddened and gangrenous, our bodies severed from our souls. The Lupi di Toscana Division come to help us and are defeated; they turn from wolves to hares and we call them the Lepri di Toscana. If the veterans of the Julia cannot win, what chance for the amateurs? They were sent without food into unknown places which did not correspond to the maps. They had no officer. They were attacked immediately. Sacrifice, sacrifice. Nothing but calvary upon calvary. They were sent to save us, and we saved them.
A counterattack. Failure. Loss of Klisura. A desperate message from Cavallero: ‘Make this last attempt, I beg you in the name of Italy. I should come and die with you.’ Fuck the name of Italy. Fuck the generals who never come and die with you. Fuck your confidence and your mendacious promises of reinforcements. Fuck your defeats which you snatch from the jaws of victory. Fuck this frivolous war we did not want and do not understand. Long live Greece if it means an end to this, this white death and this snow incarnadine, this ungrateful lethal cold, these trails of entrails, these shattered bones, these bellies void of food and torn by mortars and ripped by bayonets, these fingers paralysed, these model 91 rifles jammed, these young men broken, these innocent minds made mad.
We live in a perpetual daze. The snow has made everything unrecognisable so that we never know where we are. Is this the escarpment we were told to take? Is that a stream in that valley floor, somewhere six feet below the shimmering cloak of white? What mountain is that? Someone strip away the cloud, for the love of God, so that we can tell. Is this a road we are floundering upon, or a river? Don’t worry, we’ll know when we reach the source. Don’t worry, if we go to the wrong place we might be captured, with any luck. Radio back to HQ that we’ve taken the objective; I don’t know where this place is, but it’s as good as any other. What does it matter? ‘HQ on the radio, sir. They want a map reference.’ ‘Tell them to give me a map that corresponds to something on the ground, and I’ll give them the reference. No, just pretend the radio’s packed up.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘What are you doing now, Corporal?’ ‘Pissing on my helmet to take the shine off, sir. It’s camouflage, sir. You piss on it and rub it with mud.’
The Greeks march on Tepeleni and we in the Julia are sent to support the Eleventh Army. They give us nine thousand untrained reservists to bring us up to strength, and two hundred officers with no experience, plus some old retired officers who have forgotten their tactics and who do not understand the working of their weapons. These old warhorses huff their way up the slopes and die the same as anyone, coughing to death, face down in the mud, red bubbles frothing at their lips. The Greeks are fanatical but cool, wild yet full of purpose. They take the Golico, Monastery Hill, and Mt Scialesit, but we stop them before they invest Tepeleni. The Duce comes to visit us and receives the acclaim that has been demanded of us. I sit with Francisco and do not come out to cheer him. An offensive is begun which has the express purpose of forming a spectacle for our Duce, who stands at Komarit and preens himself whilst he watches his soldiers being sent, wave by wave, towards certain death. Vanity is the mother of perdition, Signor Duce.
Francisco writes a letter for me to give to his mother in the event of his death, believing that it would not pass the censors if sent by military mail:
Beloved Mother,
This letter comes by the hand of Carlo Guercio, who is a true friend of mine and an old comrade who has gone with me through the gates of hell. Do not be frightened by how big he is, because he is a good and gentle man. His jokes have always made me laugh when times were hard, his hand has steadied me at times when I was afraid, and his arms have carried me when I was exhausted. I would like you to think of him as your own son, so that not everythin
g will have been lost. He is loyal and true, there has never been a finer man, and he will make a better son to you than I did.
Dear Mother, I came into this war in a state of innocence, and I leave it so utterly wearied that I am contented to die. After this there could not be any life to speak of. I have come to understand that God did not make this world a garden, that the angels are not in charge of it, and that the body can be disowned. I feel that I have been dead for months, but that my soul has yet to find a time to leave. I kiss you and each of my sweet sisters, and I love you with all my strength. Tell my wife that I think of her always and carry her in my heart like a constant flame. Do not be sad. Francisco.
O, the things I do not tell Francisco’s mother on that melancholy day in April when I deliver the letter.
18 The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis
Dr Iannis sat at his desk and gazed out over the mountain. He tapped his pen on the scoured and faded surface and reflected that it was about the time when he would have to pack up his haversack and visit Alekos’ herd of goats. He cursed himself. He was supposed to be writing about the Venetian occupation of the island, and here he was, thinking about goats. There seemed to be a daemon inside him that was conspiring to prevent him from ever completing his literary tasks, and was filling his head and his life with distractions. The daemon subverted his thought with inconsequential questions: why did goats refuse to eat from a bucket on the floor, when they were quite happy to feed from plants that grew out of the ground? Why did the bucket have to be hung from a hoop? Why did the hooves of goats grow too quickly in the spring and have to be pared away? Why did nature introduce this curious defect of design? When was a goat not a sheep, and vice versa? Why were they such sensitive animals, and yet simultaneously so boundlessly stupid, like poets and artists? Anyway, the thought of ascending Mt Aenos to inspect Alekos’ goats made his legs grow tired before he had even taken a step.