And Joe, drawing on a friendship thirty years stale at one o'clock in the morning, woke this man up, laughed through the reacquaintance, and explained our predicament. The old italian farmer cheerfully, so it seemed, dressed and drove out with his tool kit and timer and set the engine wiring straight, and then he and Joe shared the gallon of wine catching up on three decades of each others lives and other old friends, standing among the sagebrush in black, warm, desert wind for the next two hours. Joe's anger at the attempted scam was gone. We got home at five in the morning. It didn't matter. We had another adventure. Just being live was enough. Joe's comment about having not done any fishing, as we drove back from that dove trip, shook me out of my thoughts. I had been reading a book by Hemingway. The setting was World War I, the Italian army marching cheerfully off to settle old scores with the Austrians. The specific incident was what eventually and infamously became known as The Retreat at Caporetto. The Italian army then was still a feudal enterprise. Officerships were either inherited by title or bought by the landed gentry. Conscription was universal, but obligated the conscriptee only to provide one warm body, either one's own or an alternate hired to take one's place. Both the countryside with its unlanded, subsistence peasantry, and the cities with their new Industrial Revolution ghettos provided thousands upon thousands of men for whom the army and war seemed a cheerful alternative. My paternal grandfather and his brothers had fled all that a few years before the war. At the outbreak of the war, the real justification for which was lost in a polarization of interlocking treaties and neighborly ethnic, cultural, geographic and religious blood feuds, everyone marched off to attack over a border to settle some old grudge. The Italians attacked Austria through the Alps, marching up through their own mountain valleys and the Austrian Alps as though on a picnic. The world was about to learn that the real legacy of the Industrial Revolution was the unlimited capacity for killing. The machine gun and the tank had replaced the sword and the lance. Honor and bravery were now irrelevant. This new reality was all lost on the Italian generals. War in mountainous terrain favors defensive, entrenched positions. The Italians had the vast numerical advantage, but the Austrians knew they were coming, and exactly where they must come through. They set up their new machine guns. That the Italians walked into a trap that became a massacre would never have made it stand out in a long and common history of strategic disasters. It was the retreat itself that made Caporetto the code word for the insanity of war.
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