The smell of war still lingers in the caves of the Ortigara

摘要

Fifty years have gone by, with thunderstorms, landslides, icy cold, sun and crumbled rocks and men collecting bodies, bombs, weapons of every kind, girders, corrugated iron and barbed wire; and centuries more will go by without the caves and deep trenches being erased, or the bones which every spring the newly shifted stones bring out into the sunlight being collected. Between these two shattered mountains where the mugho pines and larches were sawn down to the ground by machine-guns, between the two trenches facing each other, slightly to the east of the shepherds' hut and the Pozza, there is a square area where the grass is already high and where the first white and light-blue flowers are pushing up through the melting snow; and where thousands of Alpini from twenty-two battalions, gunners from twenty-one mountain batteries, infantrymen of the Regina Brigade and Bersaglieri of the Ninth were buried. It is the afternoon of 13th June 1967 and I am sitting on the slopes of the Caldiera; there is that particular silence that you can find at this time of the year at 2,000 metres; the shouts of herdsmen gathering their cattle for milking are carried by the wind from Malga Pozze and a blackbird has flown out of the rubble of a hut, cutting the air. A vaporous fog rises up from the Valsugana to the Agnella Pass and, as soon as it is caught by the sun, melts into pink vapours.