A Farewell to Arms

An American ambulance officer on the Italian front in the First World War falls in love with an English nurse. What begins as a game between two damaged people deepens into the one real thing either of them has, and the war and the world conspire to take it from them. Frederic Henry tells the story in his own voice -- spare, concrete, and heartbroken.

Book One

Chapter I

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. Troops went by and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The leaves fell early that year. Beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare and there was fighting in them. At night we could see the flashes from the artillery, like summer lightning.

There was much traffic at night---mules with ammunition, gray motor-trucks, big guns drawn by tractors with their barrels covered in green branches. When the rains came in the fall the country went wet and brown and dead. The troops marched muddy in their capes, cartridge-boxes bulging so the men marched as though six months gone with child.

Small gray motor-cars passed going very fast, and if one carried a very small officer between two generals, it was probably the King. He came out nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly. At the start of winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. In the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

Chapter II

The next year there were many victories. We crossed the river in August and lived in a house in Gorizia with a fountain and thick shady trees. The town was very nice---hospitals and cafés and two bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers.

The forest of oak trees on the mountain beyond the town was gone---just stumps and broken trunks. One day at the end of fall a cloud came fast and suddenly it was snow. Later I watched the snow falling from the window of the officers' bawdy house, drinking Asti with a friend, and we knew it was all over for that year. None of the mountains beyond the river had been taken.

That night at the mess, after the spaghetti course, the captain commenced picking on the priest. The priest was young and blushed easily. "Priest to-day with girls," the captain said. "Priest every night five against one." Every one laughed. The major said all thinking men were atheists.

They told me I should go on leave---Rome, Naples, Sicily. The captain offered addresses of a certain kind. The priest said quietly, "I would like you to go to Abruzzi. There is good hunting. You could stay with my family."

"Come on," said the captain. "We go whorehouse before it shuts."

Chapter III

When I came back to the front it was spring. The fields were green and there were small shoots on the vines and a breeze came from the sea. I found we still lived in the same house. Everything was as I had left it except that now it was spring.

Rinaldi lay asleep on the other bed. He woke when he heard me. "Ciaou!" He kissed me and demanded to know everything. I listed cities. "You talk like a time-table," he said. He told me he was in love with Miss Barkley and would probably marry her. He borrowed fifty lire. "I must make on Miss Barkley the impression of a man of sufficient wealth. You are my great and good friend and financial protector."

That night at the mess the priest was hurt that I had not gone to the Abruzzi. He had written to his father that I was coming. I had wanted to go---to where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the peasants called you Lord. But I had gone instead to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day but I could not tell it. He had not had it but he understood, and we were still friends, with many tastes alike, but with the difference between us.

Chapter IV

The battery in the next garden woke me. I went to the garage. Ten ambulances were lined up under the long shed. Everything seemed in good condition. It made no difference whether I was there or not.

The offensive was going to start again. The division we worked for were to attack up the river.

That afternoon Rinaldi was dressed and shining. "You will come with me to see Miss Barkley." We drank grappa and walked through the hot town. The British hospital was a big villa built by Germans before the war. Miss Barkley was in the garden. She was quite tall, blonde, with a tawny skin and gray eyes. I thought she was very beautiful. She carried a thin rattan stick like a toy riding-crop.

"What an odd thing---to be in the Italian army."

"It's not really the army. It's only the ambulance."

"It belonged to a boy who was killed last year," she said of the stick. "I'm awfully sorry," I said about the boy.

"He was a very nice boy. He was going to marry me and he was killed in the Somme." She had been engaged eight years. They grew up together. "I was a fool not to marry him. I could have given him that anyway." She carried the stick his mother had sent back with his things.

"Have you ever loved any one?" she asked.

"No," I said.

We sat on a bench. "You have beautiful hair," I said. She told me she had wanted to cut it all off when he died. "I wanted to do something for him. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known." She said she didn't know about anything then. "Oh, yes. That's the end of it."

Walking home Rinaldi said, "Miss Barkley prefers you to me. That is very clear."

Chapter V

The next afternoon I went to call on Miss Barkley again. She was on duty. The head nurse said I could come back after seven. I had been up the river to the bridgehead at Plava where the offensive was to begin. It had been impossible to advance the year before because there was only one road down from the pass to the pontoon bridge and it was under machine-gun and shell fire for nearly a mile. But the Italians had crossed and held about a mile and a half on the Austrian side. A new wide road was being finished that would go over the mountain and zig-zag down to the bridge. When this road was finished the offensive would start.

I found a place where the cars would be sheltered and could wait for the wounded to be brought across the pontoon bridge. Driving back, two carabinieri held the car up. A shell had fallen and while we waited three others fell up the road---seventy-sevens that came with a whishing rush of air, a hard bright burst and flash.

At dinner I ate quickly and went to the villa. Miss Barkley was in the garden. Miss Ferguson excused herself. "I'll leave you two." After she left, Catherine told me she was a V.A.D., not a proper nurse. "We work very hard but no one trusts us."

"Let's drop the war," I said.

"It's very hard. There's no place to drop it."

I took her hand and leaned forward to kiss her and there was a sharp stinging flash. She had slapped my face hard. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I just couldn't stand the nurse's-evening-off aspect of it."

I felt I had a certain advantage. "You did exactly right."

Then she said she'd be glad to kiss me if I didn't mind. I put my arm around her and kissed her hard. Her lips were closed tight. Then suddenly she shivered and her lips opened and she was crying on my shoulder. "Oh, darling. You will be good to me, won't you? Because we're going to have a strange life."

Back at the villa Rinaldi said, "So you make progress with Miss Barkley?"

"We are friends."

"You have that pleasant air of a dog in heat."

Chapter VI

I was away two days at the posts. When I got back I waited in the hospital office for Catherine, sitting among marble busts on painted wooden pillars. We were supposed to wear steel helmets even in Gorizia but they were uncomfortable and too bloody theatrical. I wore an automatic pistol---an Astra 7.65 caliber with a short barrel that jumped so sharply there was no question of hitting anything.

Catherine came down the hall. She did not seem tall walking toward me but she looked very lovely. We went out into the garden. Outside on the gravel she asked where I had been. I kissed her under the trees. "And you do love me?" she asked. "Yes," I lied. "I love you." I had not said it before.

"Say, 'I've come back to Catherine in the night.'"

I said it. She loved me so and it had been awful. I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were.

We sat on a stone bench. "This is a rotten game we play, isn't it?" she said.

"What game?"

"Don't be dull." She looked at me. "You don't have to pretend you love me. That's over for the evening." Then: "Please let's not lie when we don't have to. I had a very fine little show and I'm all right now. I'm not mad and I'm not gone off. It's only a little sometimes."

I walked her to the door. It was a hot night and there was a good deal going on up in the mountains. Back at the villa Rinaldi said, "Ah, ha! It does not go so well. Baby is puzzled."

Chapter VII

I came back from our first mountain post and stopped the car at the smistimento where the wounded were sorted. A regiment went by in the road, the men hot and sweating. After the last stragglers a soldier came along walking with a limp. He sat down beside the road. He had a rupture---had thrown away his truss on purpose so it would get bad and he wouldn't have to go to the line again. He was from Pittsburg.

"How you like this goddam war?"

"Rotten."

"Jesus Christ, I say it's rotten."

I told him to get out and fall down by the road and get a bump on his head and I'd pick him up on the way back and take him to a hospital. But when we came back a horse ambulance was stopped by the road. Two men were lifting him in. They had come back for him. He shook his head at me. His forehead was bleeding. "Look at the bump, lieutenant!" he shouted. "Nothing to do. They come back for me."

Back at the villa I made out my report and thought about things. In two days the offensive was to start. I sent a couple of army post-cards to the States, crossing out everything except, I am well. I wished I were in Milan with Catherine. I thought about taking her to a hotel---the elevator going up slowly, a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket of ice, the window open and the swallows flying over the roofs, and the whole night together in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.

At the mess they talked too much and I drank wine and talked with the priest about Archbishop Ireland. The wine was bad but not dull. Rocca told a story about a priest who stole bonds. After some more wine I told stories too. The major said he had heard a report that I could drink and we should test it. Halfway through the wine I remembered where I was going.

"Bassi wins," I said. "I have to go."

Rinaldi walked me out. "You'd better chew some coffee." He came back with roasted coffee beans. "Chew those, baby, and God be with you."

At the British villa Miss Ferguson came down instead of Catherine. "Catherine asked me to tell you she was sorry she couldn't see you this evening." She was not awfully well. I went out the door and suddenly I felt lonely and empty. I had treated seeing Catherine very lightly, had gotten somewhat drunk and nearly forgotten to come, but when I could not see her I was feeling lonely and hollow.

Chapter VIII

The next afternoon we heard there was to be an attack up the river that night. I stopped at the British hospital on the way. Catherine came out. She was quite well---the heat had knocked her over. She unclasped something from her neck and put it in my hand. "It's a Saint Anthony. And come to-morrow night."

"You're not a Catholic, are you?"

"No. But they say a Saint Anthony's very useful."

"Good-by."

"No," she said, "not good-by." I looked back and saw her standing on the steps. The Saint Anthony was in a little white metal capsule. I put the gold chain around my neck and dropped him under my shirt. After I was wounded I never found him.

We drove fast over the bridge and caught the other cars. The road climbed into the hills and I watched the country---the high mountains off to the north with snow still on the tops, stone bridges over the river, stone farmhouses with pear trees against their south walls. Then the road mounted along a ridge and I saw a third range of mountains, higher snow mountains, chalky white and furrowed. Those were all the Austrians' mountains and we had nothing like them. Looking down I could see the road dropping through the trees to the river and the broken houses of the little town that was to be taken.

Chapter IX

The road was crowded and screened with corn-stalk matting like the entrance at a circus. We parked the cars beyond a brickyard where the ovens had been equipped as dressing stations. The major told me when the cars were loaded we would drive back along the screened road. It was a one-road show. They were going to put over a bridge when the bombardment started.

I found the dugout for the drivers and gave them each a package of cigarettes. We sat on the ground with our backs against the wall and smoked. The drivers were all mechanics and hated the war.

"There aren't enough troops here for a real attack," Gavuzzi said.

"It is probably to draw attention from where the real attack will be."

"Do the men know that who attack?"

"Of course they don't," Manera said. "They wouldn't attack if they did."

Passini said, "There is nothing as bad as war. We in the auto-ambulance cannot even realize how bad it is. When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy."

"War is not won by victory," Passini said. "One side must stop fighting. Why don't we stop fighting?"

"I know how you talk," I said. "But as long as you drive the cars and behave---"

I went to get food. The field kitchen hadn't come. The major gave us cold macaroni and a quarter of white cheese. Outside, shells were falling in the brickyard. Gordini and I ran across with the food. We sat in the dugout eating, holding our chins close over the basin, sucking in the ends of the macaroni.

Then I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh---then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back.

The ground was torn up. I heard somebody crying. "Mama Mia! Oh, mama Mia!" It was Passini. His legs were both smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other held by tendons. He moaned, "Oh mama mia, mama Mia---Dio te salve, Maria---oh Jesus shoot me Christ shoot me mama mia---" Then he was quiet. I tried to make a tourniquet but he was dead already.

My legs felt warm and wet. My knee wasn't there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. Manera and Gavuzzi carried me to the dressing station, dropping me twice when shells fell close. "You sons of bitches," I said.

Inside they were operating on all the tables. The medical captain dictated while he worked: "Multiple superficial wounds of the left and right thigh and left and right knee and right foot. Profound wounds of right knee and foot." He probed and cleaned and painted. "The pain hasn't started yet," he said. "How is your head?" He thought I had a fracture. "All right, good luck and Vive la France."

"He's an American," one of the other captains said.

A tall English ambulance driver arranged everything. "Come come," he said. "Don't be a bloody hero." He told the Italians I was the legitimate son of President Wilson. They put me in the English ambulance. There was another stretcher above me. As we climbed the road something started dripping on me---slowly at first, then a stream. The man above had a hemorrhage. Where it ran down under my shirt it was warm and sticky. I was cold and my leg hurt so that it made me sick.

"How is he?" the Englishman called back.

"He's dead I think," I said.

The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone.

Chapter X

In the ward at the field hospital it was hot and there were many flies. That afternoon Rinaldi came to visit. He came in very fast and kissed me and brought a bottle of cognac and good news. "You will be decorated. They want to get you the medaglia d'argento but perhaps they can get only the bronze."

"What for?"

"Because you are gravely wounded. Did you do any heroic act?"

"No. I was blown up while we were eating cheese." Rinaldi said they could get me the silver medal. "Didn't you carry anybody on your back? Gordini says you carried several people on your back but the medical major at the first post declares it is impossible." I hadn't carried anybody. I couldn't move. "That doesn't matter," he said. He told me about the girls at the bawdy house---they hadn't been changed in two weeks. "It is a disgrace that they should stay so long that they become friends." He drank cognac and teased me about Catherine. "Your lovely cool goddess. English goddess. My God what would a man do with a woman like that except worship her?"

"You are an ignorant foul-mouthed dago," I said.

We quarreled a little and made up. "Underneath we are the same," he said. "We are war brothers. Kiss me good-by."

Chapter XI

The priest came at dusk. He looked very tired. He brought mosquito netting, a bottle of vermouth, and English papers. We drank vermouth and looked at one another. Sometimes we talked and were good friends but tonight it was difficult.

"I hate the war," he said.

"I don't enjoy it."

"You do not mind it. You do not see it. You must forgive me. I know you are wounded."

We talked about the men who would not make war and the men who would. "They are not organized to stop things," he said, "and when they get organized their leaders sell them out."

"Then it's hopeless?"

"It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope."

He wanted to return to the Abruzzi when the war was over. His brown face was suddenly very happy. "There in my country it is understood that a man may love God. It is not a dirty joke."

"You understand but you do not love God," he said.

"No."

"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve."

"I don't love."

"You will. I know you will. Then you will be happy."

I said I was happy, had always been happy. "It is another thing," he said. "You cannot know about it unless you have it."

He left and I thought about the Abruzzi---the trout in the stream below Capracotta, the flute forbidden at night because it was bad for the girls to hear, the peasants who called you "Don" and took off their hats, the fall hunting through the chestnut woods. After a while I went to sleep.

Chapter XII

If any one were going to die they put a screen around the bed so you could not see them die, but only the shoes and puttees of doctors showed under the bottom of the screen. Then the priest would come out and afterward the men nurses would carry the one who was dead with a blanket over him down the corridor.

The major said they would ship me out early in the morning. The doctors were anxious to get me to Milan where there were better X-ray facilities.

The night before I left, Rinaldi came with the major from our mess. We drank brandy and talked nonsense about declaring war on Turkey and Bulgaria and Japan. Turkey, I said, was our national bird, but the joke translated badly. I said yes, we would probably declare war on Turkey. And on Bulgaria? Yes by God on Bulgaria too and on Japan. Italy will return to the splendors of Rome, said the major. I don't like Rome, I said. It is hot and full of fleas. They told me Catherine was being sent to Milan too, to the American hospital. "How do you like that, baby?" Rinaldi said. "You go to live in a big city and have your English there to cuddle you." They kissed me good-by and tiptoed out. I found I was quite drunk but went to sleep.

The next day we left for Milan and arrived forty-eight hours later. It was a bad trip. We were sidetracked a long time outside Mestre. The man beside me and I got drunk on grappa and I was very sick on the floor outside Verona. In the yards a soldier got me water and a pulpy orange and would not take the penny I offered him.

Book Two

Chapter XIII

They unloaded us in the freight yard and an ambulance took me to the American hospital. The stretcher would not go into the elevator and they had to lift me. The pain was very bad with my legs bent. "Be gentle," one man said. "Son of a bitch who isn't gentle!" said the other.

On the fourth floor an elderly nurse in glasses met us---Mrs. Walker. Her hair was loose and half-falling. "None of the rooms are ready. There isn't any patient expected." She could not understand Italian and commenced to cry when she saw my papers.

"For Christ's sweet sake take me to some room."

They carried me down a long hallway into a room with drawn blinds that smelled of new furniture. There was a bed and a big wardrobe with a mirror. I was alone in the room. It was cool and did not smell like a hospital. I lay without moving, hardly breathing, happy in feeling the pain lessen. After a while I went to sleep.

When I woke a young nurse was there---Miss Gage. She looked young and pretty. She washed me gently and smoothly. The doctor was gone to Lake Como. No one had known a patient was coming. I was the first patient.

"Where were you wounded?"

"On the Isonzo north of Plava."

None of the places meant anything to her. She put a thermometer in my mouth. "The Italians put it under the arm," I said. "Don't talk."

Miss Van Campen, the superintendent, came to see me. She was small and neatly suspicious and too good for her position. She did not like me and I did not like her. She seemed to think it was somewhat disgraceful that I was with the Italians.

"Can I have wine with the meals?"

"Only if the doctor prescribes it."

I sent the porter for a bottle of Cinzano and a fiasco of chianti. I lay in bed and read the papers---the news from the front, the list of dead officers with their decorations---and drank the Cinzano, making rings on my stomach from the cool glass, and watched it get dark outside over the roofs of the town. The swallows circled around and I watched them and the night-hawks flying above the roofs.

Chapter XIV

In the morning Miss Gage told me Catherine had come. "Your friend Miss Barkley's come. I don't like her."

"You will like her. She's awfully nice." The barber came and shaved me very solemnly. He thought I was an Austrian officer and the porter had to explain. "Ho ho ho," the porter laughed. "He was so frightened of an Austrian."

Then I heard some one coming down the hallway. It was Catherine Barkley. She came in the room and over to the bed. "Hello, darling," she said. She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.

"You sweet. Weren't you wonderful to come here?"

"It wasn't very hard. It may be hard to stay."

I was crazy about her. I could not believe she was really there. God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had.

Chapter XV

The house doctor took out some small steel splinters from my thighs with delicate distaste and said it would be better to have an X-ray. At the Ospedale Maggiore the X-ray doctor was excitable, efficient and cheerful. He declared the foreign bodies were ugly, nasty, brutal. The Austrians were sons of bitches.

Three doctors came to consult. The first captain with the beard examined the plates and said it was a question of time---six months for the projectile to encyst before the knee could be opened safely.

"I can't wait six months," I said.

"Do you want to keep your knee, young man?"

"No. I want it cut off so I can wear a hook on it."

The house doctor kissed me on the forehead. "I will send for Valentini. Be a good boy."

Two hours later Dr. Valentini came in. He was a major, his face was tanned and he laughed all the time. "How did you do it, this rotten thing? You look healthy as a goat. Who's the pretty girl? Is she your girl? I'll make you better than new. Does that hurt? You bet it hurts. How they love to hurt you, these doctors."

"When do you think it can be operated on?"

"To-morrow morning. Not before. Your stomach must be emptied." He waved from the doorway, his mustaches went straight up, his brown face smiling.

Chapter XVI

That night a bat flew into the room through the open door to the balcony. We lay and watched him hunt in the dark. After he went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the beam move across the sky. Catherine had come to my room and we lay together. Once in the night she went downstairs and listened outside Miss Van Campen's door and heard her breathing in her sleep. She brought crackers and vermouth. In the morning the sun rose while I had the thermometer in my mouth and we smelled the dew on the roofs and the coffee of the men at the anti-aircraft gun next door.

"What we'll really do," she said, "is get you ready for your friend Dr. Valentini." Catherine got me ready for the operation. "When you're going under the ether just think about something else---not us. Because people get very blabby under an anæsthetic."

"I won't talk a word."

"Now you're bragging, darling. Just start your prayers or poetry when they tell you to breathe deeply."

She cleaned me inside and out. We talked about how many people we had loved. I lied and she knew it and didn't care. "I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?" She looked at me very happily. "There isn't any me any more. Just what you want."

Chapter XVII

When I was awake after the operation I had not been away. You do not go away. They only choke you. It is not like dying it is just a chemical choking so you do not feel. I saw sandbags at the end of the bed on pipes coming out of the cast. Miss Gage said Valentini did a wonderful job on my knee. Two hours and a half. I had not said anything silly.

There were three other patients now---a thin boy from Georgia with malaria, a boy from New York with malaria and jaundice, and a boy who had tried to unscrew the fuse-cap from a shrapnel shell for a souvenir. Catherine did night duty indefinitely and the other nurses were glad to let her. Between the times of working we were together. I loved her very much and she loved me.

Ferguson said, "You'll never get married. You'll fight before you'll marry." Then: "Don't get her in trouble. You get her in trouble and I'll kill you."

"I won't get her in trouble."

"Mind you watch out. I don't want her with any of these war babies."

Catherine took three nights off and then came back on again. It was as though we met again after each of us had been away on a long journey.

Chapter XVIII

We had a lovely time that summer. When I could go out we rode in a carriage in the park. Afterward when I could get around on crutches we went to dinner at the Gran Italia and sat at the tables outside in the galleria. George, the head-waiter, saved us a table and ordered the meal while we looked at the people and the great galleria in the dusk and each other. We drank dry white capri iced in a bucket. One evening I was short and George loaned me a hundred lire. "I know how it is. If you or the lady need money I've always got money."

After dinner we walked through the galleria and stopped at the little place that sold sandwiches---ham and lettuce and anchovy sandwiches made of tiny brown glazed rolls only as long as your finger. They were to eat in the night when we were hungry. Then we got into an open carriage and rode to the hospital. Sometimes I sat on the balcony and waited for Catherine. When she came upstairs it was as though she had been away on a long trip. I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, and I would take out the pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls.

We said to each other that we were married the first day she had come to the hospital. I wanted to be really married but Catherine said they would send her away. "We're really married. I couldn't be any more married."

"There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me."

I asked about being married privately. "There's no way to be married except by church or state," she said. "You gave me the Saint Anthony."

"That was for luck. Some one gave it to me."

"Then nothing worries you?"

"Only being sent away from you. You're my religion. You're all I've got."

"But you won't ever leave me for some one else."

"No, darling. I won't ever leave you for some one else. I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful."

"I'll have to go back to the front pretty soon."

"We won't think about that until you go. Do let's please just be happy. You are happy, aren't you?"

Chapter XIX

The summer went that way. I do not remember much about the days, except that they were hot and there were many victories in the papers. My legs healed quickly and soon I was walking with a cane and going for treatments at the Ospedale Maggiore---bending the knees, baking in a box of mirrors, massage, and baths. Afternoons I stopped at the café and read the papers. All I wanted was to see Catherine.

At the front they were advancing on the Carso and taking the Bainsizza plateau. It looked as though the war were going on for a long time. Even if they took all the Bainsizza there were plenty of mountains beyond for the Austrians. I had seen them. Perhaps wars weren't won any more. Maybe they went on forever.

I met old Meyers and his wife outside the Gran Hotel. She was a big-busted woman in black satin. "You're all my boys," she said. "You certainly are my dear boys." Meyers was short and old and walked flat-footed with a cane. While he talked you had the impression he was not looking at you or that he mistook you for some one else.

At a bar I met Ettore Moretti, an Italian from San Francisco in the Italian army. He had the bronze twice and three silver medals and three wound stripes. He was twenty-three and a legitimate hero who bored every one he met. "I saw the son of a bitch throw it," he said of the hand-grenade that blew his foot apart. "I shot the son of a bitch with my rifle." He was going to be a captain for merit of war. Catherine could not stand him. "We have heroes too. But usually, darling, they're much quieter."

"Wouldn't you like me to have some more exalted rank?"

"No, darling. I only want you to have enough rank so that we're admitted to the better restaurants."

That night on the balcony it started to drizzle and then rain hard. "And you'll always love me, won't you?" Catherine asked.

"Yes."

"And the rain won't make any difference?"

"No."

"Because I'm afraid of the rain."

"Why?"

"I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it. And sometimes I see you dead in it."

"Please stop it."

"It's all nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't." She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.

Chapter XX

One day we went to the races at San Siro---Catherine, Ferguson, Crowell Rodgers the boy wounded in the eyes, and I. Crowell and I read the racing paper on his bed while the girls dressed. The racing was very crooked---men who had been ruled off the turf everywhere else were racing in Italy. Old Meyers won on nearly every race but hated to give tips because it brought down the prices.

We drove out in an open carriage through the park and out of town where the road was dusty. At the paddock they walked the horses around in a ring under the trees. One horse, a purplish black, Crowell swore was dyed that color. We all agreed we ought to back him and pooled a hundred lire. The odds were thirty-five to one.

They came past us with the black horse well in front and on the turn he was running away from the others. He won by fifteen lengths. "We'll have over three thousand lire," Catherine said. "He must be a splendid horse." But he only paid even money. "At the last minute they put a lot of money on him," Meyers said. "It's crooked and disgusting," Ferguson said. Catherine said, "If it hadn't been crooked we'd never have backed him at all. But I would have liked the three thousand lire."

We backed Meyers' next choice and it won but paid nothing. Catherine and I went down to the paddock alone. "Darling, I can't stand to see so many people." We backed a horse named Light For Me that finished fourth in a field of five. We leaned on the fence and watched the horses go by, their hoofs thudding, and saw the mountains in the distance and Milan beyond the trees.

"I feel so much cleaner," Catherine said. We sat at a round iron table by the stables and had drinks. "Don't you like it better when we're alone?" "Yes," I said. After we had been alone awhile we were glad to see the others again. We had a good time.

Chapter XXI

In September the first cool nights came and we knew the summer was gone. The fighting at the front went very badly. They could not take San Gabriele. A British major at the club said the Italians had lost a hundred and fifty thousand men on the Bainsizza and San Gabriele. He said we were all cooked. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war. He asked about Russia. They were cooked already. Then the Austrians were cooked too. "Every sort of luck!" he said cheerily. There was a great contrast between his world pessimism and personal cheeriness.

I had been up for examination. My leg was as well as it would get. I walked along the side street practising not limping. An old man was cutting silhouettes under an arcade. He cut mine with my cap on. "It will not be so beautiful," he said. "But it will be more military." He would not take money. "I did them for a pleasure. Give them to your girl."

There were some letters---I was to have three weeks' convalescent leave and then return to the front. October fourth to October twenty-fifth. There was a letter from my grandfather with a draft for two hundred dollars, a dull letter from the priest, and a note from Rinaldi asking how long I was going to skulk in Milano.

That night Catherine came to my room. I told her about the leave. "Where do you want to go?"

"Nowhere. I want to stay here."

"That's silly. You pick a place and I'll come too."

She seemed upset and taut. "What's the matter, Catherine?"

"I'm going to have a baby, darling. It's almost three months along. You're not worried, are you? Please please don't."

"I'm not worried."

"I couldn't help it, darling. I did everything. I took everything but it didn't make any difference."

"You're pretty wonderful."

"You mustn't worry. People have babies all the time. Everybody has babies."

We were quiet awhile. "You aren't angry are you, darling?"

"No."

"And you don't feel trapped?"

"Maybe a little. But not by you."

"You always feel trapped biologically," I said.

She went away a long way without stirring. "'Always' isn't a pretty word."

"I'm sorry."

"We really are the same one and we mustn't misunderstand on purpose," she said. "Because there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we're gone and then they have us."

"They won't get us. Because you're too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave."

"They die of course."

"But only once."

"The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them."

Chapter XXII

It turned cold and rained. I got the jaundice and was sick for two weeks. We had planned to go to Pallanza on Lago Maggiore for our leave but we did not go.

While I was in bed Miss Van Campen found the empty bottles in the armoire---vermouth, marsala, chianti, cognac, and a bear-shaped bottle that had held kümmel. The bear-shaped bottle enraged her particularly.

"How long has this been going on?"

"I bought them and brought them in myself. I have had Italian officers visit me frequently." Miss Van Campen said I had drunk myself into jaundice to avoid the front. "I don't believe self-inflicted jaundice entitles you to a convalescent leave."

"Miss Van Campen, did you ever know a man who tried to disable himself by kicking himself in the scrotum? Because that is the nearest sensation to jaundice." Miss Van Campen left the room.

Miss Gage packed the bottles in a rucksack but Van Campen intercepted them. "I want to show them to the doctor when I make my report." Nothing happened except that I lost my leave.

Chapter XXIII

The night I was to return to the front I sent the porter to hold a seat on the train from Turin. I said good-by at the hospital and went out. The porter's wife cried. I went to a wine shop and waited, then saw Catherine through the window and went out to meet her. She was wearing a dark blue cape and a soft felt hat. We walked along the sidewalk past the wine shops, across the market square and up to the cathedral. It was white and wet in the mist.

"Would you like to go in?"

"No," Catherine said.

We passed a soldier standing with his girl in the shadow of a stone buttress. "They're like us," I said.

"Nobody is like us," Catherine said. She did not mean it happily.

We stopped at an armorer's shop and I bought a pistol---fifty lire, used, with two extra clips. "It belonged to an officer who was an excellent shot," the woman said. "Did you sell it to him?" "Yes." "How did you get it back?" "From his orderly." She asked if I needed a sword. "I'm going to the front," I said. "Oh yes, then you won't need a sword."

We walked on in the fog. "I feel better now," Catherine said. "I felt terrible when we started."

"We always feel good when we're together."

"We always will be together."

"Yes, except that I'm going away at midnight."

We stopped and kissed in the street against a high wall. She pulled my cape around us both. "Let's go some place," I said. We took a carriage to a hotel across from the station. The room was furnished in red plush with many mirrors and a large bed with a satin coverlet. Catherine sat on the bed looking at the cut glass chandelier. She had taken her hat off and her hair shone under the light.

"I never felt like a whore before," she said.

"You're not a whore."

"I know it, darling. But it isn't nice to feel like one." Then: "Come over, please. I'm a good girl again."

After we had eaten we felt fine. We had a woodcock with soufflé potatoes and a bottle of Capri and a bottle of St. Estephe. "It's a fine room," Catherine said. "Vice is a wonderful thing. The red plush is really fine."

"I wish we could do something really sinful," she said. "Everything we do seems so innocent and simple. I can't believe we do anything wrong."

My head felt very clear and cold. "Where will you have the baby?"

"I don't know. The best place I can find. Don't worry, darling."

"How often will you write?"

"Every day. I'll make them very confusing," she said.

"But not too confusing."

"I'm afraid we have to start to go."

"All right, darling."

"I hate to leave our fine house."

"So do I. But we're never settled in our home very long."

"We will be."

"I'll have a fine home for you when you come back."

Chapter XXIV

We walked down the stairs. The carpet was worn. I had paid for the room and the waiter stood by the door to make sure. I asked him to get us a carriage and he went out with an umbrella into the rain. We rode through the wet streets to the station.

"We might as well say good-by."

"Good-by, Cat."

"Good-by, darling."

I stepped out into the rain and the carriage started. Catherine leaned out and smiled and waved. She pointed toward the archway for me to get in out of the rain. I went in and watched the carriage turn the corner, then started through the station to the train.

The porter found me and led me to where the machine-gunner sat holding my seat in a full compartment. A tall gaunt captain of artillery with a red scar along his jaw came in. "You can't have a soldier save you a place. I was here two hours before you came." I could feel the whole compartment against me. He was in the right. "Sit down, Signor Capitano," I said. I gave the porter and the machine-gunner ten lire apiece and they left. I slept on the floor of the corridor all night with my pocket-book inside my breeches.

Book Three

Chapter XXV

Now in the fall the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy. I rode to Gorizia from Udine on a camion. Many more houses had been hit. It did not feel like a homecoming.

The major sat at a table with maps. "It's all over," he said. "It's been a bad summer. Are you strong now?" The cars were all away---six up north at Caporetto, two in the mountains, four on the Bainsizza. He wanted me to take over the four on the Bainsizza and send Gino back. "We lost three cars," he said. "Next year will be worse. Perhaps they will attack now. They say they are to attack but I can't believe it. It is too late. You saw the river? It's high already."

"I'm glad to be back with you again, Signor Maggiore."

"You are very good to say so. I am very tired of this war. If I was away I do not believe I would come back."

I went upstairs. I lay on the bed and thought about Catherine. I was going to try not to think about her except at night before I went to sleep. But now I was tired and there was nothing to do. Rinaldi came in. He looked the same, perhaps a little thinner. "Well, baby," he said. He sat on the floor and bent my knee gently back and forth, ran his finger along the scar. "It's a crime to send you back. They ought to get complete articulation."

"Tell me all about everything."

"There's nothing to tell. I've led a quiet life."

"You act like a married man. What's the matter with you?"

"This war is killing me," Rinaldi said. "All summer and all fall I've operated. I do everybody's work. All the hard ones they leave to me. By God, baby, I am becoming a lovely surgeon. But now it's all over. I don't operate now and I feel like hell."

We drank Austrian cognac---seven stars, all they captured on San Gabriele. "I kept your old toothbrushing glass," he said. "To remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning."

"Are you in love?" he asked.

"Yes."

"With that English girl?"

"Yes."

"Poor baby."

"Rinin, please shut up. If you want to be my friend, shut up."

"I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend."

"I am jealous maybe," Rinaldi said. "I don't mean like that. I mean something else. Have you any married friends?"

"Yes."

"I haven't. Not if they love each other. They don't like me. I am the snake. I am the snake of reason."

At dinner the priest came. He was the same as ever, small and brown and compact. Rinaldi was a little drunk and tried to bait him but the baiting did not touch the priest now. Rinaldi grew wild. "What if I have it. Everybody has it. The whole world's got it." He was talking about syphilis. "I know something worth two of that," he said. "It's an industrial accident."

The major said quietly afterward, "He's very tired and overworked. He thinks too he has syphilis. I don't believe it but he may have."

After dinner the priest and I went upstairs. "How are you really?" he asked.

"I'm all right."

"I think the war will be over soon," he said. "Many people have realized the war this summer. Officers whom I thought could never realize it realize it now."

Chapter XXVI

The priest was surer of himself now than when I had gone away. We went upstairs and I lay on Rinaldi's bed while the priest sat on my cot.

"Who won the fighting this summer?" I asked.

"No one."

"The Austrians won," I said. "They won't stop fighting."

"It is in defeat that we become Christian," I said. "We are all gentler now because we are beaten. How would Our Lord have been if Peter had rescued him in the Garden?"

"He would have been just the same."

"I don't think so."

The priest said he believed something would happen. I said it would happen only to us. "What do you believe in?" he asked.

"In sleep," I said.

Chapter XXVII

I had not seen the Bainsizza before. There was a steep new road and many trucks. The road ended in a wrecked village. I found Gino and he told me about the positions. Food was scarce. The Austrians were supposed to attack but he did not believe it.

We talked about the mountains. I said I did not believe in a war in mountains---you pinched off one mountain and they pinched off another but when something really started every one had to get down off the mountains. Gino was a patriot. He said the soil was sacred. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

It stormed all that day. That night the Croatians came over in the rain. A counter-attack drove them back. We could hear the sound of a great bombardment far to the north. The rain on my face turned to snow.

In the night word came that we were to prepare to retreat. The Austrians had broken through the twenty-seventh army corps up toward Caporetto. "There are fifteen divisions of Germans," the medical officer said. "They have broken through and we will be cut off."

The next night the retreat started. We heard that Germans and Austrians had broken through in the north and were coming down the mountain valleys toward Cividale and Udine. The retreat was orderly, wet and sullen. We helped empty the field hospitals, taking the wounded down to Plava, and the next day hauled all day in the rain. The army of the Bainsizza moved down off the plateau in the October rain and across the river where the great victories had commenced in the spring.

We came into Gorizia in the middle of the next day. As we came up the street they were loading the girls from the soldiers' whorehouse into a truck. Two of them were crying. One smiled and put out her tongue. The villa was empty. Rinaldi was gone with the hospital. There was a note for me to fill the cars with material and proceed to Pordenone.

We loaded the cars and slept for three hours. We ate spaghetti with onions and tinned meat that Aymo had made and drank barbera. I went up to the room where I had lived with Rinaldi. It was raining outside. I saw the three cars standing in line under the dripping trees and let sleep take me.

"I like a retreat better than an advance," Bonello said at supper. "On a retreat we drink barbera."

"To-morrow we'll be in Udine. We'll drink champagne," Bonello said.

"We may drink ------ before Udine," Piani said.

"This was a fine place," Aymo said. "There won't be a place like this again."

It was half-past nine and raining hard. We started out on the road for Cormons.

Chapter XXVIII

The town was empty in the rain except for columns of troops and guns going through the main street. We moved slowly but steadily in one wide slow-moving column. Then the column stopped. I walked ahead a mile. The block might extend as far as Udine. I went back and slept. Several hours later we started again, moving a few yards, then stopping.

Bonello had picked up two sergeants of engineers who couldn't find their unit. Aymo had two girls on the seat with him. The girls were like two wild birds. Aymo tried to be friendly but the older one began to cry. He gave them cheese and they ate. "Virgin?" he asked. Both girls nodded vigorously.

I lay half-asleep in the car and thought about Catherine. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. "Good-night, Catherine," I said out loud. "I hope you sleep well."

"You talked out loud," Piani said.

"I was having a dream in English."

Before daylight I could see the road of the retreat stretched out far ahead, everything stationary except for the infantry filtering through. In the night many peasants had joined the column with carts loaded with household goods---mirrors projecting up between mattresses, chickens tied to carts, a sewing-machine. There were dogs keeping under the wagons. The road was muddy and the fields too soggy to cross. No one knew where the Austrians were nor how things were going but I was certain that if the rain should stop and planes come over and get to work on that column it would be all over. I found a small road that led off to the north and we took it. It led to a farmhouse. We stopped and filled the radiators and ate cheese and apples and drank wine from the cellar.

Chapter XXIX

At noon we were stuck about ten kilometres from Udine. Aymo's car had gotten into the soft earth and the wheels had dug in until the car rested on its differential. The two sergeants started off down the road without a word.

"Come on," I said. "Cut some brush."

"We have to go," one said. "You can't order us. You're not our officer."

"I order you to halt," I called. They went faster. I opened my holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired. I missed and they both started to run. I shot three times and dropped one. The other went through the hedge and across the field. Bonello went down and finished the sergeant with the pistol against his head.

We tried everything---brush, the dead man's coat and cape under the wheels, roping the cars together. It was no use. The wheels only dug deeper. We tried to cross the field but it was too soft and muddy. When the cars were finally and completely stalled, the wheels dug in to the hubs, we left them in the field and started on foot for Udine. I gave the two girls ten lire each and pointed them down a road toward people. They held the money tightly and started down the road, looking back as though afraid I might take it back.

"How much will you give me to go in that direction, Tenente?" Bonello asked.

We walked fast. "You certainly shot that sergeant, Tenente," Piani said.

"I killed him," Bonello said. "I never killed anybody in this war, and all my life I've wanted to kill a sergeant."

"What will you say in confession?" Aymo asked.

"I'll say, 'Bless me, father, I killed a sergeant.'" They all laughed.

They told me they were socialists from Imola. "You come, Tenente. We'll make you a socialist too."

Chapter XXX

Later we were on a road that led to a river. The bridge had been blown up in the centre. We went looking for a place to cross and found a railway bridge---a long plain iron bridge across what was usually a dry river-bed.

"We better hurry and get across before they blow it up," I said.

"It's probably mined," Bonello said. "You cross first, Tenente."

I started across, watching the ties for tripwires. Down below the river ran muddy and fast. Ahead I could see Udine in the rain. Across the bridge I looked back and saw a yellow mud-colored motor car cross another bridge just up the river. The men in it all wore German helmets. We crouched behind the railway embankment and watched German bicycle troops cross the bridge---ruddy, healthy-looking men with carbines clipped to their frames and stick bombs hanging from their belts. They rode easily, looking ahead and to both sides. There were two, then four, then almost a dozen, then another dozen, then one alone.

"Why isn't there somebody here to stop them?" I said. "Why haven't they blown the bridge up?"

"You tell us, Tenente," Bonello said.

It was none of my business. All I had to do was get to Pordenone. I had failed at that. The thing to do was to be calm and not get shot or captured.

We walked along the railway track toward Udine. We dropped down when more bicyclists passed. A shot was fired at us from a side-road and Aymo, crossing the tracks, lurched, tripped and fell face down. He was hit low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward and come out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping up the two holes.

"They weren't Germans," I said. "There can't be any Germans over there."

"Italians," Piani said, using the word as an epithet.

We found a farmhouse and hid in the barn. Piani brought a long sausage, a jar of something and two bottles of wine. "Where's Bonello?" I asked.

"He went away, Tenente. He wanted to be a prisoner. He was afraid we would get killed."

"Why didn't you go?"

"I did not want to leave you."

We ate the sausage and drank the wine. It was so old it was losing its color. When it was dark we started. We walked through two armies without incident. The whole country was moving. We walked all night toward the Tagliamento. I had not realized how gigantic the retreat was.

"Viva la Pace!" soldiers shouted. "We're going home!" They threw away their rifles as they marched. "A basso gli ufficiali! Down with the officers!"

"I better call you by your name," Piani said. "They might try and make trouble. They've shot some officers."

Before daylight we reached the Tagliamento and crossed the wooden bridge, nearly three-quarters of a mile across, the flood close under the planking. At the far end there were officers and carabinieri flashing lights, scrutinizing every one in the column. A carabiniere grabbed me by the collar.

"What's the matter with you?" I said and hit him in the face.

They took me down behind the line of officers toward a group of people in a field by the river bank. They were battle police. They were executing officers of the rank of major and above who were separated from their troops. They were also dealing with German agitators in Italian uniform. I was obviously a German in Italian uniform---I saw how their minds worked.

They questioned a fat gray-haired lieutenant-colonel. "It is you and such as you that have let the barbarians onto the sacred soil of the fatherland."

"If you are going to shoot me," the lieutenant-colonel said, "please shoot me at once without further questioning. The questioning is stupid." They shot him. They shot every one they questioned. The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

I looked at the carabinieri. They were looking at the newcomers. I ducked down, pushed between two men, and ran for the river, my head down. I tripped at the edge and went in with a splash. The water was very cold and I stayed under as long as I could. When I came up I took a breath and went down again. There were shots when I ran and shots when I came up the first time. I found a piece of timber and held on with one hand, my head behind it. The shore was out of sight now.

Chapter XXXI

I floated down the river in the icy water, my chin on the wood. I was afraid of cramps and hoped we would move toward the shore. The current moved toward the bank and I thrashed and fought through the water, swimming in a heavy-footed panic because of my boots, until I reached it. I hung to a willow branch and did not have strength to pull myself up. When the sick feeling was gone I crawled out onto the bank. It was half-daylight and I saw no one. I lay flat on the bank and heard the river and the rain.

I took off my shoes and emptied them of water. Before I put on my coat I cut the cloth stars off my sleeves and put them in my pocket with my money and papers. My money was wet but was all right. I had no need of rank any more. I crossed the Venetian plain in the rain, a low level country, working from north to south along paths beside canals. I saw a train coming on the main line from Venice to Trieste and jumped aboard a low open gondola car covered with canvas. Under the canvas were guns. They smelled cleanly of oil and grease. I lay and listened to the rain on the canvas and the clicking of the car over the rails.

Chapter XXXII

Lying on the floor of the flat-car I was wet, cold and very hungry. The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with; only to remember and not too much remember. You had lost your cars and your men as a floorwalker loses the stock of his department in a fire. There was, however, no insurance. You were out of it now. You had no more obligation. If they shot floorwalkers after a fire in the department store because they spoke with an accent they had always had, then certainly the floorwalkers would not be expected to return when the store opened again for business.

Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation. Although that ceased when the carabiniere put his hands on my collar. I was not against them. I was through. I wished them all the luck. There were the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the sensible ones, and they deserved it. But it was not my show any more.

I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine.

Book Four

Chapter XXXIII

I dropped off the train in Milan before it was light. In a wine shop a proprietor gave me coffee and grappa. "If you are in trouble," he said, "I can keep you." He noticed where the stars had been cut from my sleeves. "If you have no papers I can give you papers." I told him I was all right.

At the hospital the porter told me Catherine had gone to Stresa two days ago with the other English lady. My heart went down. I made him promise to tell no one he had seen me. His wife patted my arm and smiled.

I went to see Simmons, the singer. "I'm in a jam, Sim," I said. He gave me civilian clothes and we talked about Switzerland. "What's the procedure in going to Switzerland?" I asked. "They intern you," he said. "But you can go anywhere. You just have to report or something." He gave me clothes from his closet. "My dear fellow, it's easier for me to let you have them than go out and buy them. Have you got a passport?"

"Yes."

"Then get dressed, my dear fellow, and off to old Helvetia."

"I have to go up to Stresa first."

"Ideal. You just row a boat across."

Chapter XXXIV

In civilian clothes I felt a masquerader. I had been in uniform a long time and I missed the feeling of being held by your clothes. Some aviators in the compartment did not think much of me. They were very scornful of a civilian my age. I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace. I felt damned lonely and was glad when the train got to Stresa.

I took a good room at the Grand-Hôtel & des Isles Borromées. It was very big and looked out on the lake. I was expecting my wife, I said. I went down to the bar and sat on a high stool and ate salted almonds and drank martinis. They made me feel civilized. The barman found that Catherine and Ferguson were at a little hotel near the station. I ate sandwiches and drank more martinis and did not think at all. The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn't any war. Then I realized it was over for me.

Catherine's face lighted up when she saw me. Ferguson was furious. "You're a fine mess. I know the mess you've gotten this girl into. You're like a snake. A snake with an Italian uniform." She began to cry. "She can't make me not hate you. You dirty sneaking American Italian."

"We'll both sneak off," Catherine said.

That night at the hotel, in our room with the rain falling outside, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone---all other things were unreal. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

"Won't they arrest you if they catch you out of uniform?"

"They'll probably shoot me."

"Then we'll get out of the country."

"I feel like a criminal. I've deserted from the army."

"It's not deserting from the army. It's only the Italian army."

I laughed.

Chapter XXXV

Catherine went to see Ferguson at the little hotel and I sat in the bar reading the papers. The army had not stood at the Tagliamento. They were falling back to the Piave. I remembered the Piave---it looked like a trout stream up in the hills, flowing swiftly with shallow stretches and pools under the shadow of rocks.

The barman told me Count Greffi was asking for me---wanted to play billiards. Count Greffi was ninety-four years old, a contemporary of Metternich, with white hair and beautiful manners. His birthday parties were the great social event of Milan. I had met him once before at Stresa and he had given me fifteen points in a hundred and beaten me while we drank champagne.

The barman and I went out fishing. I rowed while he trolled for lake trout. We rowed along the shore past the deserted hotels and closed villas, across to Isola Bella where the water deepened sharply against the rock wall, then up to the fisherman's island. The water was dark and smooth and very cold. We did not have a strike. At a café on the island we drank vermouth. "Why do you go?" the barman asked about the war. "I don't know. I was a fool." He rowed back and I held the line. Once I had a strike---felt the live weight of the trout---then the line throbbed again. I had missed him.

When Catherine came back it was all right again. "You haven't anything to do," she said. "All you have is me and I go away." "My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world."

That afternoon Count Greffi sent word he wished to play billiards. I found him practising strokes under the light, looking very fragile. On a card table beyond stood a silver icing-bucket with two champagne bottles. He played a lovely smooth game and beat me a hundred to ninety-four with the handicap. We drank the champagne between shots, speaking in Italian, talking little.

"Are you Croyant?" he asked.

"At night."

"I had expected to become more devout as I grow older but somehow I haven't. It is a great pity."

"It is the body that is old," he said. "Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk. And the spirit is no older and not much wiser."

"You are wise."

"No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."

"What do you value most?"

"Some one I love."

"With me it is the same. That is not wisdom."

"What do you think of the war really?"

"I think it is stupid."

"Who will win it?"

"Italy. They are a younger nation."

"Then what happens?"

"They become older nations."

"I hope you will be very fortunate and very happy and very, very healthy," he said.

"And I hope you will live forever."

"Thank you. I have. And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I had expected to become devout myself but it has not come." I thought he smiled sadly but I could not tell. He was so old and his face was very wrinkled, so that a smile used so many lines that all gradations were lost.

Chapter XXXVI

That night the barman came to our door in his wet overcoat. "They are going to arrest you in the morning."

"Yes?"

"I was out in the town and I heard them talking in a café. After this retreat they arrest everybody."

"What do you say to do?"

"Go to Switzerland. In my boat."

"There is a storm," I said.

"The storm is over. It is rough but you will be all right."

Catherine dressed quickly. We packed and went down the stairs past the porter. "You're not going out, sir?" he said. "We're going to see the storm along the lake," I said. He gave us a big umbrella.

At the quay the barman had the bags in the boat. He gave us sandwiches, brandy and wine. "Row to Isola Bella. Then go with the wind to Pallanza. It's thirty-five kilometres. If you row all the time you ought to be there by seven in the morning."

"I don't think you'll get drowned," he said.

"What does he say?" Catherine asked.

"He says good luck."

He shoved us off. I rowed out into the dark until the hotel lights were out of sight.

Chapter XXXVII

I rowed in the dark keeping the wind in my face. The rain had stopped and only came in gusts. I could see Catherine in the stern but not the water where the blades dipped. The oars were long and there were no leathers to keep them from slipping out. I knew my hands would blister and wanted to delay it as long as I could.

We never saw Pallanza---passed the point that hides it in the dark. Sometimes I missed the water with the oars as a wave lifted the boat. Once we were nearly smashed against a point of rock that rose beside us, the waves striking against it, rushing high up, then falling back. I pulled hard on the right oar and backed water with the other and we went out into the lake again.

"We're across the lake," I said. "We've missed Pallanza."

"Poor Ferguson. In the morning she'll come to the hotel and find we're gone."

"I'm not worrying about that so much as getting into the Swiss part of the lake before daylight."

I rowed all night. Finally my hands were so sore I could hardly close them over the oars. The moon came through the clouds and looking back I could see the long dark point of Castagnola and the moon on the high snow mountains. Then the clouds came over again.

Catherine said she could hold the umbrella and we could sail with the wind. I went to the stern and opened the big umbrella the porter had given us. It opened with a clap. The wind was full in it and I felt the boat suck forward. I braced my feet and held back on both edges. Then suddenly it buckled---I felt a rib snap on my forehead---and the whole thing went inside-out. I was astride the handle of a ripped umbrella where I had been holding a wind-filled sail. Catherine was laughing. "You looked about twenty feet broad and very affectionate holding the umbrella by the edges---" She choked.

"I'll row."

"Take a rest and a drink. It's a grand night and we've come a long way."

I drank the brandy. It was smooth and hot and the heat went all through me. Catherine took a turn at the oars. She rowed very well but the oars were too long and bothered her. "Tell me when you're tired." "Watch out the oar doesn't pop you in the tummy." "If it did," Catherine said between strokes, "life might be much simpler."

Before daylight it started to drizzle. When it was beginning to be daylight we were close to the shore. A motor boat chugged past with four guardia di finanza in the stern, their alpini hats pulled down, carbines slung across their backs. They all looked sleepy. I pulled out into the lake and rowed on for three-quarters of an hour in the rain.

"I think we're in Switzerland, Cat."

"If we're in Switzerland let's have a big breakfast. They have wonderful rolls and butter and jam in Switzerland."

A soldier came out of a café on the road wearing a gray-green uniform and a helmet like the Germans. Catherine waved and he smiled embarrassedly and waved back. We pulled up to a stone quay in what I was sure was Brissago. I tied the boat and held my hand down to Catherine. She stepped up and we were in Switzerland together.

"What a lovely country," she said.

"Isn't it grand?"

We went into a café and sat at a clean wooden table, cockeyed excited. A splendid clean-looking woman brought us toast and jam and coffee and eggs. Catherine smiled at me very happily. A fat gray cat crossed the floor and curved against my leg, purring.

They arrested us after breakfast. A soldier was guarding the boat. At the custom house a thin military lieutenant questioned us. I said I was a sportsman---rowing was my great sport---and we were tourists who wanted to do the winter sport. He sent us to Locarno with a soldier. At Locarno two officials questioned us. One championed Montreux, the other Locarno. They argued about whether luge-ing constituted winter sport. "The toboggan is very different from the luge," one insisted. "The toboggan is constructed in Canada of flat laths. The luge is a common sled with runners. Accuracy means something." The champion of Montreux glared at his colleague. We had passports and money, so they gave us provisional visas.

"Where do you want to go, Cat?"

"Montreux."

We drove to a hotel in a carriage with the soldier on the front seat. Catherine said she'd had a lovely time, especially when I sailed with the umbrella. "Can you realize we're in Switzerland?" "I'm afraid I'll wake up and it won't be true." I put out my hands. They were both blistered raw. "There's no hole in my side," I said. "Don't be sacrilegious."

Book Five

Chapter XXXVIII

In the morning it was snowing and the road climbed steadily through the forest. We rented a brown wooden house above Montreux from a couple named Guttingen. In the morning Mrs. Guttingen started a fire in the tall porcelain stove and brought hot water and breakfast. Sitting up in bed we could see the lake and the mountains across the lake on the French side, snow on the tops, the lake a gray steel-blue.

We took walks up the mountain where the road climbed through the forest to meadows and barns at the edge of the woods looking across the valley. The valley was deep and there was a stream at the bottom that flowed down into the lake. Sometimes we went on a path through the pine forest, soft to walk on. We sat on the porch in the sun and saw the winding road down the mountain-side and the terraced vineyards and the houses of the town along the lake shore. There was an island with two trees on the lake and the trees looked like the double sails of a fishing-boat.

We bought books and magazines and learned card games. The small room with the stove was our living-room. We went to bed in the dark in the big bedroom and when I was undressed I opened the windows and saw the night and the cold stars and the pine trees below. It was lovely in bed with the air so cold and clear. The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else's college.

Sometimes we walked down the mountain into Montreux. Catherine went to a coiffeur's and I went to a beer place and drank dark Munich beer and read about disaster. "Oh, darling, I love you so," I said when we came out into the cold windy street.

"I suppose if we really have this child we ought to get married," Catherine said in the beer place.

"Let's get married now."

"No. It's too embarrassing now. I show too plainly. I won't go before any one and be married in this state."

The doctor said she was rather narrow in the hips. He said beer would be good for her and keep the baby small.

Snow came three days before Christmas. We stayed in bed and watched it fall. "I wish I could ski," Catherine said. We went out but it was drifted so we could not walk far. We went into the little inn by the station and had vermouths.

"Wouldn't you like to go on a trip somewhere by yourself and be with men and ski?" Catherine asked.

"No."

"I know I'm awfully stupid now and I talk too much and I think you ought to get away so you won't be tired of me."

"Oh, Cat. You don't know how crazy I am about you."

"I want us to be all mixed up," she said. "I don't want you to go away. I don't live at all when I'm not with you."

"I won't ever go away."

Chapter XXXIX

By January I had a beard and the winter had settled into bright cold days and hard cold nights. The snow was packed hard and smooth by the hay-sleds. We took long walks to the Bains de l'Alliaz where the woodcutters stopped to drink. We sat inside warmed by the stove and drank hot red wine with spices and lemon called glühwein. The inn was dark and smoky and afterward when you went out the cold air came sharply into your lungs. Going up the road toward home the road was clean-packed snow and led through the woods, and twice coming home in the evening we saw foxes. It was a fine country and every time we went out it was fun.

"You have a splendid beard now," Catherine said. "It looks just like the woodcutters'."

"We live in a country where nothing makes any difference. Isn't it grand how we never see any one?"

Chapter XL

We lived through January and February and the winter was very fine and we were very happy. There had been short thaws when the wind blew warm and the snow softened, but always the clear hard cold had come again. In March came the first break in the winter. It rained on all morning and turned the snow to slush. We decided to go down to Lausanne to be near the hospital. Mr. and Mrs. Guttingen came down to the station with us. They stood in the rain waving good-by. "They were very sweet," Catherine said.

We took a room at a medium-sized hotel. It was March, 1918, and the German offensive had started in France. I drank whiskey and soda and read the papers while Catherine unpacked. "I know what I have to get, darling. Baby clothes." Catherine bought baby things. I went to a gymnasium to box for exercise. I could not shadow-box in front of the mirror at first because it looked so strange to see a man with a beard boxing. Sometimes we went for rides in the country in a carriage. We knew the baby was very close now and it gave us both a feeling as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together.

Chapter XLI

One morning I woke about three o'clock hearing Catherine stirring. "I've been having some pains, darling." I called the doctor and a taxi and we went to the hospital. The night was clear and the stars were out.

"I'm so glad it's started," she said. "Now in a little while it will be all over."

At the hospital a woman wrote down Catherine's name, age, address, relatives and religion. She said she had no religion and the woman drew a line in the space. She gave her name as Catherine Henry. They put her in a room and then moved her to the delivery room. The doctor gave her gas for the pain. She was very brave. When the pains were bad she called them good ones. When they slackened she was disappointed and ashamed.

"I so want to be a good wife and have this child without any foolishness. Please go and get some breakfast, darling."

I walked down the empty street to a café. An old man served me white wine and a brioche. The brioche was yesterday's. I dipped it in the wine and drank a glass of coffee. "My wife is in labor at the hospital." "So. I wish you good luck." Outside, a dog was nosing at a refuse can. "There isn't anything, dog," I said.

Back at the hospital Catherine's room was empty. They had taken her to the delivery room. I went in wearing a white gown. The doctor held a rubber mask attached to a tube. "I want it now," Catherine said. She held the mask tight and breathed deeply and rapidly. Then she pushed it away. "That was a big one. Don't you worry, darling. Go have another breakfast."

At noon she was still there. The pains had slackened again. She looked very tired and worn but was still cheerful. "I'm not any good, darling. I thought I would do it very easily."

"Do you think I'll ever have this baby?" she asked.

The doctor let me give her the gas. I turned the dial to number two when she wanted it and shut it off when she put down the mask. "Did you do it, darling?" She stroked my wrist. "You're so lovely." She was a little drunk from the gas.

At two o'clock I went out for lunch---choucroute and beer at the café. The waiter remembered me from breakfast. I was very hungry. I watched the people at the tables, the card games, the smoke. I wondered about the plump woman behind the counter---how many children she had and what it had been like.

When I came back the doctor told me the baby would not come. He advised a Caesarean. "If it were my wife I would do a Caesarean."

"Operate as soon as you can," I said.

Catherine said, "Isn't that grand. Now it will be all over in an hour." But she was going to pieces. The gas wasn't working any more. "Oh, I wanted so to have this baby and not make trouble, and now I'm all done and all gone to pieces and it doesn't work. Oh, darling, please make it stop. There it comes. Oh Oh Oh!" She breathed sobbingly in the mask. "Don't mind me, darling. Please don't cry. I'm just gone all to pieces."

I turned the dial all the way and her hand relaxed on the mask. I shut off the gas and lifted it. She came back from a long way away. "That was lovely, darling. Oh, you're so good to me."

"I'm not brave any more, darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me."

"Everybody is that way."

"But it's awful. They just keep it up till they break you."

"In an hour it will be over."

"Darling, I won't die, will I?"

"No. I promise you won't."

"Because I don't want to die and leave you, but I get so tired of it and I feel I'm going to die."

They took her to the operating room. I did not go in to watch. I walked up and down the hall. A doctor came out carrying something that looked like a freshly skinned rabbit. He held him up for me to see and slapped him.

"Is he all right?"

"He's magnificent. He'll weigh five kilos."

I had no feeling for him. He did not seem to have anything to do with me. I felt no feeling of fatherhood. "No," I said. "He nearly killed his mother." I went back to Catherine's room and waited.

The nurse came out into the hall. "What's the matter with the baby?"

"He wasn't alive. They couldn't start him breathing. The cord was caught around his neck."

"So he's dead."

"It's such a shame. He was such a fine big boy. I thought you knew."

Poor, poor dear Cat. And this was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other. You never got away with anything. Get away hell! It would have been the same if we had been married fifty times. And what if she should die? She won't die. People don't die in childbirth nowadays. That was what all husbands thought. Yes, but what if she should die? She can't die. Yes, but what if she should die? She can't, I tell you. Don't be a fool. It's just a bad time. Yes, but what if she should die? She can't die. But what if she should die? Hey, what about that? What if she should die?

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Once in camp I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the centre where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.

I went to the café and ate ham and eggs and drank several glasses of beer. The waiter remembered me again. I tried not to think. Then I knew I had to get back. I called the waiter, paid, got into my coat and walked through the rain to the hospital.

The nurse met me in the hall. "I just called you at the hotel." Something dropped inside me.

"Mrs. Henry has had a hemorrhage."

"Is it dangerous?"

"It is very dangerous."

Everything was gone inside of me. I did not think. I could not think. I knew she was going to die and I prayed that she would not. Don't let her die. Oh, God, please don't let her die. I'll do anything for you if you won't let her die. Please, please, please, dear God, don't let her die. You took the baby but don't let her die.

I went into the room. Catherine looked at me and smiled. I bent down over the bed and started to cry.

"Poor darling," she said very softly. She looked gray.

"I'm going to die," she said; then waited and said, "I hate it."

I took her hand. "Don't touch me," she said. Then she smiled. "Poor darling. You touch me all you want."

"I meant to write you a letter to have if anything happened, but I didn't do it."

"Do you want me to get a priest or any one to come and see you?"

"Just you." Then: "I'm not afraid. I just hate it."

"You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?"

"Never."

"I want you to have girls, though."

"I don't want them."

"Don't worry, darling," she said. "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick."

She had one hemorrhage after another. They couldn't stop it. I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died. She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long to die.

After I got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.