Read Online The Aeneid by Robert Fagles Virgil, Bernard Knox - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Robert Fagles Virgil, Bernard Knox
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Levi’s somber and beautiful account of his life there, published under the title Christ Stopped at Eboli (trs. 1947), he tells how the local Fascist official came to see him, and asked him why on earth he, an educated, talented man, did not support Mussolini’s regime, which aimed at restoring Italy to its old eminence as master of the Mediterranean. His reply was to say that his idea of Italy was different; it was
“Di quella umile Italia . . .
per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,
Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute.”
Carlo Levi’s reply brought Virgil through Dante into the realities of the modern world, and to compare small things to great, I too brought Virgil back to life in Italy some years later. I consulted the Virgilian lottery in April 1945. The year before, while a captain in the U.S. Army, I had worked with French partisans behind the lines against German troops in Brittany, and after a leave I was finally sent to Italy to work with partisans there. No doubt the OSS moguls in Washington figured that since I had studied Latin at Cambridge I would have no trouble picking up Italian. The partisans this time were on our side of the lines; things had got too difficult for them in the Po Valley and they had come through the mountains. The U.S. Army, very short of what the soldiers called “warm bodies,” since so many of its best units had been called in for the invasion of southern France, armed them and put them under the command of American officers to hold sections of the mountain line where no German breakthrough was expected. I had about twelve hundred of them, in various units ranging from Communist to officers of the crack corps of the Italian army, the Alpini; but they had two things in common—great courage and still greater hatred of Germans. For several months we held the sector, which contained the famous Passo dell’ Abettone, then impassable for wheeled vehicles since the German engineers had blown its sides down. We made frequent long patrols into enemy territory, sometimes bringing back prisoners for interrogation, sometimes passing civilian agents through the lines. In April we were given a small role in the final move north that brought about the German surrender of Italy. The main push was to the left and right of us, where tanks and wheeled vehicles could move—on the coast road to our left and on our right through the Futa Pass to Bologna. We were to attack German positions on the heights opposite us, take the town of Fanano, and then go on to Modena in the valley.
We killed or captured the German troops holding the heights without too many losses, liberated Fanano, and started north on the road to Modena. As we marched along I could not help thinking that the legions of Octavian and Mark Antony had marched and countermarched in these regions in 43 B.C. Like them, we had no wheeled transport; like them, we had no communications (our walkie-talkies had a very short range); like them, we hoisted our weapons onto our shoulders when we forded the Reno River with the water up to our waists.
Every now and then we met a German machine-gun crew holed up in a building that delayed our passage. Usually we too occupied a building to house our machine guns and keep the enemy under fire while we sent out a flanking party to dislodge them. On one of these occasions we occupied a villa off the road that had evidently been hit by one of our bombers; it had not much roof left and the inside was a shambles, but it would do. At one point in the sporadic exchanges of fire I handed over the gun to a sergeant and retreated into the debris of the room to smoke a cigarette. As I looked at the tangled wreckage on the floor I noticed what looked like a book, and investigation with my foot revealed part of its spine, on which I saw, in gold capitals, the letters “MARONIS.” It was a text of Virgil, published by the Roman Academy “IUSSU BENEDICTI MUSSOLINI,” “By Order of Benito Mussolini.” There
“Di quella umile Italia . . .
per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,
Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute.”
Carlo Levi’s reply brought Virgil through Dante into the realities of the modern world, and to compare small things to great, I too brought Virgil back to life in Italy some years later. I consulted the Virgilian lottery in April 1945. The year before, while a captain in the U.S. Army, I had worked with French partisans behind the lines against German troops in Brittany, and after a leave I was finally sent to Italy to work with partisans there. No doubt the OSS moguls in Washington figured that since I had studied Latin at Cambridge I would have no trouble picking up Italian. The partisans this time were on our side of the lines; things had got too difficult for them in the Po Valley and they had come through the mountains. The U.S. Army, very short of what the soldiers called “warm bodies,” since so many of its best units had been called in for the invasion of southern France, armed them and put them under the command of American officers to hold sections of the mountain line where no German breakthrough was expected. I had about twelve hundred of them, in various units ranging from Communist to officers of the crack corps of the Italian army, the Alpini; but they had two things in common—great courage and still greater hatred of Germans. For several months we held the sector, which contained the famous Passo dell’ Abettone, then impassable for wheeled vehicles since the German engineers had blown its sides down. We made frequent long patrols into enemy territory, sometimes bringing back prisoners for interrogation, sometimes passing civilian agents through the lines. In April we were given a small role in the final move north that brought about the German surrender of Italy. The main push was to the left and right of us, where tanks and wheeled vehicles could move—on the coast road to our left and on our right through the Futa Pass to Bologna. We were to attack German positions on the heights opposite us, take the town of Fanano, and then go on to Modena in the valley.
We killed or captured the German troops holding the heights without too many losses, liberated Fanano, and started north on the road to Modena. As we marched along I could not help thinking that the legions of Octavian and Mark Antony had marched and countermarched in these regions in 43 B.C. Like them, we had no wheeled transport; like them, we had no communications (our walkie-talkies had a very short range); like them, we hoisted our weapons onto our shoulders when we forded the Reno River with the water up to our waists.
Every now and then we met a German machine-gun crew holed up in a building that delayed our passage. Usually we too occupied a building to house our machine guns and keep the enemy under fire while we sent out a flanking party to dislodge them. On one of these occasions we occupied a villa off the road that had evidently been hit by one of our bombers; it had not much roof left and the inside was a shambles, but it would do. At one point in the sporadic exchanges of fire I handed over the gun to a sergeant and retreated into the debris of the room to smoke a cigarette. As I looked at the tangled wreckage on the floor I noticed what looked like a book, and investigation with my foot revealed part of its spine, on which I saw, in gold capitals, the letters “MARONIS.” It was a text of Virgil, published by the Roman Academy “IUSSU BENEDICTI MUSSOLINI,” “By Order of Benito Mussolini.” There
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