_ PART II. SEEING ITALY AT MRS. O'FLANNAGAN'S EXPENSE
CHAPTER III. JOHN CORNWALL TRAVELS A BIT AND RETURNS HOME
I believe it is Victor Hugo who declares sixty the age of adventure. To the regret of many an adventurous soul past forty-five, this view was not shared by those organizing Uncle Sam's oversea fighting force, and these men, regardless of physical fitness, found their opportunities limited to camp-follower service in the capacity of Red Cross, K. C. or Y. M. C. A. worker.
So John Cornwall, Y. M. C. A. worker, in due course arrived at Bologna and was assigned for service with the Seventh Italian army, located in the head of the Val Camonica and holding the front line around Tonale Pass and Mt. Adamello, a glacier 11,700 feet high.
This was hardly a satisfactory winter assignment, as fuel was scarce and the icy winds and Austrian guns kept him burrowed in the chiseled caverns of the dolomite peaks like a prairie dog in winter quarters until the first of November, when Tonale Pass, which had been in possession of the Austrians for several years, was crossed and the advance made into the Trentino, followed by the surrender of the Austrian armies and the Italian-Austrian armistice of November 3-4th.
Then, after following the advancing army several days towards Innsbruck, he returned to Pontagna and a winter in the Alpine snow fields, where, above nine thousand feet, you find the arctic ptarmigan and perpetual snow, where the telephone lines occasionally fail to function because under snows, and the magnificent mountain roads approaching the passes are closed for several months by deep snows, despite a struggle to keep open a narrow trail with snow plows on which, if you meet another vehicle, all hands shovel snow for an hour, making room to pass.
There nothing was to be seen except snow and scenery and soldiers and guns and snow dogs.
The Mt. Adamello snow or sled dogs are a cross between the Canadian and Russian husky, big, white, woolly, impressive war veterans, snarling and snapping at one another and their keepers, barking little, knowing that silence is salvation. White and hard to see, they are sent between lines into territory where nothing living and seen can live.
These dogs are allowed half the rations of a soldier; are marked with indelible ink on the pink skin inside the ear; and a pair, with apparent ease, draw a sled load of three hundred pounds.
It would be hard to picture John's loneliness that winter. Though the officers and soldiers were most kind, he did not speak Italian and none of the officers in the mess to which he was assigned spoke English. At first he could not ask for a piece of bread; but the service was excellent and his wants were anticipated. Bearing in mind their example and kindness, he made up his mind always to be kind to any foreigner he might meet when he returned home.
He longed for someone to talk with; and when his work was done he would walk out upon the mountain side in the bright winter sunlight of those great heights and hold an imaginary conversation with his wife or little son, and come home whistling and happy.
There were no books to read. He was left alone with his thoughts which, though sometimes sad and lonely, were never unhappy ones. These six months of silence and thought changed his disposition. He grew older in spirit. He acquired a habit of silence he never outgrew; of introspective reflection, such as the old have who sit silently in the chimney corner.
In early March, he received word of the death of his mother. He was not surprised, and, though he loved her very much, was not overly grieved by it. She had led a useful, unselfish, happy life; she was old and for several years had been losing her vitality without apparent pain. Her life had been a peaceful one; she expected the peace of the righteous after death; she believed those of her family she left behind would be happy. John looked upon her going as a vanishing from sight merely. She seemed in an adjoining room or near place; a little too far away to see or hear, but near enough to feel her presence and love.
Just when it seemed that winter was the perpetual season, when his fingers were swollen and discolored by the cold and he had forgotten how it felt to be warm unless in bed or shoveling snow, the valley below took on emerald tints and the snow line crept up the mountain.
Then John thought, "the hill country will be fine this summer;" but he was told to come out of his dolomite burrow and dwell in a tent with the Arabs in Tripolitania for the summer. A place so near the equator that his shadow at noon was hid by a none too prominent stomach; where the thermometer feels comfortable and perfectly at home at 130 in the shade and where the snow dogs of his winter home were replaced by the camel, the only reliable conveyance in the summer.
The Bedouin, the Tuaregs and some of the blacks, ride the camel with ease and dignity; but an Englishman, Italian or American on a camel looks and feels wholly out of place, and at the end of a day's journey is an object of pity and a subject for soothing lotions.
The impression that John Cornwall formed of Tripoli was that it was a vastly overcrowded city, due to a host of visiting and trading natives and the more than ten thousand soldiers, at that time, quartered in the city.
The blue Mediterranean, the white beach, the brilliancy of the sun, the palm trees and the crescent city, in the main of cement or plaster buildings, with flat or beehive roofs, all white except an occasional red or green tiled one, merely emphasizing by contrast the uniformity of the building color; make an interesting picture.
The varieties of nationality, costume and color are striking in the extreme. Here are seen men and women, white, brown, yellow, black and shades and combinations of two or all. Here are youthful forms, graceful and like living bits of ebony or bronze; antiques weatherworn and wind-dried, who when asleep upon the sidewalk, which is quite the custom, look like recently disentombed mummies; old and wrinkled women with hair dyed a brilliant red; Italian soldiers in the national green uniform; native or colonial troops in khaki; some native regiments and police in vivid blue or brown with red fez topped with a huge yellow tassel; beggars and children with little more than a breech cloth; women with faces covered and breasts and limbs uncovered; women wrapped as ghosts, with just the feet showing and one eye peeping and twinkling, encircled about the middle with many folds of cloth; the medicine or dance man in his costume of rags, crane heads and feathers, with a girdle of jangling tin and bones, his little drum with curved sticks, his dance and music the convulsions and noises of a stupid beggar; and many, very many, blind;--who seem to have no home but the sidewalk, where you see them asleep at any time, day or night, waiting in darkness for alms and the judgment day.
A certain sect shave the head and grow a crown lock, Chinaman style, except it is unplatted. The blessed dead must not be denied by the hands of the living, so the lock is left to handle the corpse.
The chief business is fighting. The chief export, a desert grass used in the manufacture of a fine paper. Business is stagnant, as the war between the Italians and the Arabs shifted barter by caravan with the interior to the British colony on the east and the French on the west.
Each trade or business is segregated or localized. The jewelers, an apparently thrifty lot and mostly Turkish Jews, are bunched on a street near one of the hotels.
The meat market is quite interesting if you can stand the smell. The natives eat the whole carcass.
The milkman, morning and evening, calls at the door of his customer with his goods in the original package. The goats are more docile and better behaved than the children. They stand and deliver the quantity demanded. There is neither chance for nor great economy in adulteration--water is too scarce. It is brought to the city mule-back in porous jars. You can have your milk from the black, white or brown nanny as desired. A goat is a respected member of the family and his odor by comparison not offensive.
Never after four months in Tripolitania did John laugh at the Englishman who carried his tub with him. He is an experienced traveler and knows what he is about. A cold bath cost John $1.50. The Bedouins and Tuaregs are proud, aristocratic, heroic-looking people; but they bathe in the sand much as a mother hen dusts herself in a neighbor's flower bed.
John Cornwall was forced to go fifty miles south of Tripoli to Azizia in the desert, where he found the thermometer 130 in the shade. At another time when he went to Zavia, he found six had recently died of the bubonic plague.
In this land of heat, of blindness, of leprosy, of flies, of fleas and sandstorms, where the sun goes down red as the wounds of the slain, he was required as regional director of a district seven hundred by sixty miles to visit some thirty case del soldato, (houses of the soldier) in any manner the gods of opportunity presented.
It was necessary to get something that beat the coast line vessels, which with oriental slowness and uncertainty of schedule visited the coast hamlets. A mule would not answer; a truck was furnished by the army but almost impossible; a camel was too hard on the backbone; besides at certain seasons they are vicious as a Hun and unless muzzled will snatch your arm in their strong jaws and snap it as a clap pipe stem.
In this land of rugs, where is the magic carpet? Why an army Caproni--and the Italian army, until the Fiume question arose, refused nothing to an American. So John went to the Governo della Tripolitania Stato Maggiore and was given a general permit to make his trips from Tripoli to Homs and Zuara in the Caproni mail plane.
The mail to Homs is carried on Wednesday and that to Zuara on Saturday. The planes are more than twenty meters from tip to tip and can ascend to six thousand meters; they are 18 cylinder, 450 horsepower with three complete engines, either of which is sufficient to operate a machine in case of accident. Then, the cost of building such a machine was approximately $16,000.00. They carry two thousand pounds of mail matter or explosives or ten men. The seat John occupied was in the very bow. When occupying this seat the pressure of the wind from the speed of flying is quite a strain on the neck, chest and back. Your head will be twisted as though wrenched by strong invisible hands, your back grows tender from pressure on the back rail and must be rested by leaning forward with your head adjusted at a certain angle with the wind.
The distance from the aviation field near Tripoli to Homs is 110 kilometers and is usually made in fifty minutes. It takes seven hours by steamer. The steamer follows no schedule and may return in a few days or sail on to Genoa or Syracuse or Bengasi.
The plane route in general follows the shore line. The blue Mediterranean from two thousand meters above is not blue but black. You can see to quite a depth and where the bottom is distinct the white sand looks blue and not the water. The colors do not blend--the inky black deep water, the blue shallows, the brown desert, with rare patches of white rectangular houses and the green oases of corn, alfalfa and palm trees. The palms, almost the only trees, look like inverted green feather dusters.
And so, on to the aviation field near the magnificent ruins of ancient Lebna. The extent of these ruins, great arches, portals and columns of marble, porphyry and cut stone overlooking the sea, though half buried by sand dunes, presents conclusive evidence of a former populous and magnificent city.
In the morning, when they expected to return to Tripoli, a heavy fog drifting from the southwest rested over the sea, and though conditions were not ideal, they started home.
The fog, far below, covering the sea as far as vision reached, looked like an immense broken billowy ice field, or millions of big powder puffs jammed together in an immense plain. Following the distinguishable shore line they came within fifteen miles of Tripoli where the fog, with dangerous perverseness, extended far into the desert. Earth passed out of sight and they were in a private world of much space and no substance, as might have been before land and sea were formed. Far below on the cloud-like surface of the fog a circular rainbow preceded them and when the operators, thinking the camp near, descending, drew near the fog, in the white center of the rainbow-circle, ghost-like, appeared a perfect silhouette of their airplane.
Then through the fog, as cold as a winter mist, they came in sight of earth; much too close for comfort, where a little dip or swerve might land them in the palm tops, and the edge of the landing field a quarter of a mile to the right, then up into the fog again and to a safe landing.
On a day in July, they started for Zuara at six o'clock in the morning; and the higher up they went the hotter it grew. The operators, returning to camp, refused to make the trip as the thermometer registered 60 centigrade at five hundred meters, stating a ghibli was raging at a higher altitude. Five hours later Tripoli and the whole desert country south, suddenly and without warning, became a blast furnace of heat and a place of dust and torture.
Those familiar with the hot winds which at times devastate the crops and make life miserable southwest of the one hundredth meridian in Oklahoma and Texas would consider them the cool breeze of a summer twilight in comparison with the ghibli or Sahara sandstorm.
Some writer tells that "a geologist has estimated that a single windstorm across the Sahara once carried nearly 2,000,000 tons of dust from Africa and deposited it over Italy, Austria, France and Germany."
At the end of four months spent in Tripolitania, John Cornwall's contract for a year's service with the Y expired and he asked for transportation to America. He made the trip across the sea from Tripoli to Syracuse, from Syracuse to Bologna by rail except across the strait of Messina, and then in a day or so to Genoa, where he took passage on the Giuseppe Verdi for America.
As he journeyed second-class, which was the way the Y men were sent home, his fellow-passengers were in the main Italians on their way to labor in the vineyards and orchards of California. While he spoke Italian, it was too laborious and incomplete for general conversation. He had much time to study the ways of the sea, and the infrequent ships they passed were cause for reflection.
He thought how trite from use and yet how true, truer than any of us even dream, is the comparison that life is a great sea and we who journey through, as ships, that at distant intervals dot the surface.
A ship at sea, as life to many, appears a lonely and desolate thing. How much room there is for ships, more ships, bigger ships, for great convoys of ships, yet ships as a rule travel alone and not in convoys.
What of the ships?
Just now, there is passing a corporation-owned oil tanker, greasy and uninteresting. Yesterday we passed several scheduled freighters, carrying fixed cargoes to fixed ports; the day before a passenger liner, sailing by the clock, in Naples or New York on Friday, pouring out its never-ending tide of those going and returning.
But let us not waste time or thought on commercial or mercenary craft. Here is not interest or adventure or much real return on the investment, unless your aim in life is to die merely a sea captain or a ship owner. Let us cruise where the currents are strong, where the rocks are dangerous: in the frozen North or in sight of coral island or low beach and palm trees, where there is an uncertainty of return in gold, but a wealth of interest and adventure and experience.
The coral islands and the palm groves in this great sea are not in the South Pacific; nor the ice floes north or south of a certain degree; nor the swift currents and dangerous rocks near some inhospitable shore, but at home; and the ships that pass are our companions.
And the ships of interest are the barks that sail as fancy whispers in the chart room or the tramp trader, at Sidney today, tomorrow at Malta, or the derelict. And who would not rather hear and know the story of such a vessel and voyage than smell the oil of the tanker or hear from daybreak to midnight the victrola, the piano and the chit-chat of the passenger liner.
And, strange to tell, most of us when on a most wonderful cruise with everything within reach, though out of sight, because we jab our eyes sightless wiping the tears away, bewail our luck, saying:
"See I a dog? There's ne'er a stone to throw!
Or stone? Tere's ne'er a dog to hit I trow!
Or if at once both stone and dog I view,
It is the King's dog! Damn! What can I do?"
Home again! John finds the boy two inches taller and Mary as fair to look upon as when first he married her. The house is just the same, except Mary has taken down the framed needle-work done by his mother which hung over the living-room door. He asks that it be replaced.
When John and you were boys, back in the eighties, on the wall of the living-room of many a Kentucky home, was found mother's handwriting on the wall, done in colored worsted or silk: "God Bless Our Home"; this her work went to the attic or the ash heap. These mothers are no longer of this earth.
After many months in "a far country," John understands as never before, the sort of home that mother made and what that sentence meant to her.
We have dug out the old brass candlesticks and the old tester bed; would we might find the old, framed needle-work and see again mother's handwriting on the wall. _