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Show ! SHELL ON HiS HOUSE; TELLS HOW IT FEELS Lieutenant Zanghieri Calmly Records Re-cords His Impressions of the Moment. BOMB IS LITERARY ASSET Most Exciting Adventure in Officer's Career Occurs While He Is Quietly Seated in His Home Engaged in Literary Pursuit. By TANCRED ZANGHIERI, Lieutenant in the Italian Army. (Speolul Correspondence to the Chicago fially News.) Gorilz, Austria. Heine tells in one of his poems how he sought happiness nil over the world without ever finding find-ing it ; returning home disconsolate, he met it seated on the hearth of his own house. It is an adventure winch mny happen even to a newspaper correspondent. corre-spondent. A city like Goritz is an Eldorado El-dorado for the sensation seeker. Yet I had the. most interesting adventure of my sojourn today, without moving from my table. Permit me to tell you about it in detail de-tail and with precision, divided into three chapters of varying length, and admit that even when one is the principal prin-cipal personage of a story one still has the right to consider oneself from more than one viewpoint. Chjpter I. The Setting. Up till September 21 the weather was bnd. It was not rain ; it was a deluge. The Italian trenches, like those of the Austrinns, are all cut Into the slopes of mountuins nnd hills; despite the shelters, the rain pours in, forms ditches and flows through them; the trenches become small noisy torrents. To fight in these conditions is not possible. pos-sible. The official bulletins express the situation in the words: "Bad weather hinders the operations." Hence a forced truce to the work of destruction. Nature takes care of the destruction by a sudden cold wave, dampness that penetrates one's bones nnd slows up the vital functions. But on the 22d the weather determines deter-mines to better itself. The clouds, confounded con-founded in a gray veil, take on forms, thin out, show bits of sky. The day becomes divinely beautiful ; the air is limpid as crystal. One can distinguish every tree, every bush of Podgora, a green mass. The Sabotino, more bare, veils its reddish scars made by hundreds hun-dreds of thousands of shells, in the violety vapor of a clout-i, vast but tenu-rms, tenu-rms, Interposed between it and the sun. Monte Santo, San Gnbriele, San Dan-iele, Dan-iele, gathered up beneath the crest of the Selva di Tnrnova, seem to smile at their unhappy brother, the Carso, which innocently stretches its low arid knolls to the sun, as though to intoxicate intoxi-cate itself with warmth and quiet. No sound of cannon is heard ; no rifle crack disturbs the silence of this spring, like florescence. The 23rd not a cloud in the spotless spot-less sky ; the solar warmth raises light mists which tint the distant mountains, palest azure. And not a concussion, not a shot; only above, the airplanes are flying and little cloudlets of white smoke follow them. But it is not "our" war ; we are down on the earth, breathing the vivifying vivi-fying air in great gulps. Like the little dog of Maeterlinck we do not deign to cast a glance at that sky which is not deemed "eatable" by our desires. The province of the air, the theater of war 3,000 feet above, does not interest us. The bursting shrapnel is so far away that one has to pay attention to hear It. This "truce of God" is strange, so strange that 't seems the armies have forgotten the war. I have never felt my soul more peaceably inclined, more bourgeois, less warlike. I forbid my orderly to wake me early tomorrow. And in truth this morning I got up at 8, full of crazy ideas, with the desire to climb up, up over the. wooded slopes of a mountain, to throw myself on the ground upon a carpet of moss, to look at the trees, hear the chirping of birds, enjoy all the beauty of this enchanted en-chanted region. And the AustrlansJ But do the Austrians still exist? Some books lying on my table tempt my fancy. I half close the curtains of the two windows, which are filling the chamber with light, raise the shutters and sit down, taking up the reading of a study of Alphonse Daudet by Doctor Doc-tor Balke. And I read, read until a curious statement strikes me: "Whereas, Daudet as a bachelor wrote only when the inspiration struck him, after his marriage he acquired the habit of daily work." This fact interests me. I go over to the table and make a note of Doctor Balke's statement. Chapter II From Another Angle. Lieutenant Puviani, an officer In the same battalion to which your correspondent corre-spondent has the honor of belonging, is attached to the local command at Goritz. Go-ritz. He is a strong man, rather heavy, getting on in years (he completed the fortieth a few days ago), a good father and a brave soldier, who has been at the front and in the immediate neighborhood neigh-borhood since the beginning of the war. At present he has a rather quiet post and takes advantage of it to make horrible photographs for which he goes about begging compliments, and copies of which he distributes to all his friends. I It Is 11 :45 a. m. and he is late for the officer's mess which is located near the open door of a courtyard, in the same street where stands the house of your correspondent. Lieutenant Puviani arrives late at the mess. This tardiness is not necessary neces-sary considering that he has nothing to do from morning till night, but it gives him a certain air of being a "slave of duty," which he cultivates. So Lieutenant Puviani walks along with firm and measured step toward the mess. Behold him in Via L , behold be-hold him in Via A , two steps from his goal. The street is quiet afi though lulled to sleep in the heat of a summer afternoon. Suddenly, at the end of the street, a hundred yards in front of him, he hears a sinister whistling, an explosion, a terrific ter-rific noise. Pieces of wall, beams, broken glass rain upon the street, while a great cloud, first reddish, then whitish, whit-ish, rises into the sky. Lieutenant Puviani looks at the stricken house nnd utters a cry. In one jump he reaches the mess, where all the officers of the battalion are lunching and talking about the shell, "which must have fallen very near," and with a sentence causes them to start to their feet. "Lieutenant Zanghieri's house has fallen in !" The officers leave the mess and run toward the spot where lies perhaps the body of their brother officer. Chapter III What Really Occurred. "After his marriage he acquired the habit of daily work." At the word "marriage" a dull, far away boom, half obliterated by distance. dis-tance. One hears thousands like it every day ; today none have been heard and this is the only reason why the ear distinguishes this. At the word "habit" the whistle of a shell. The customary noise. The whistle of a shell begins shriller and again sinks as the shell passes over. When it explodes near you it seems to stop at its shrillest shrill-est point, as if to collect Its forces in a great howl of rage, which is the explosion. ex-plosion. But the shell of which I speak differs from all the others. The low tone, the shrill tone, ever nearer, ever nearer, nearer, near here it is 1 My pen stops at the word "daily" in expectation ex-pectation of the horrible thing. The house receives a shock that makes it tremble to its foundation, there comes an Immense roar as of a hundred cannon can-non firing together. The plaster falls from the ceiling everywhere In the room, which fills with a white powder, while a hail of fragments strikes the shutters. Something caves in with a great rumble. Everything rattles, trembles, jolts and seems to fall downward down-ward into chaos, into an inferno of broken things. Then silence. The word "work" is traced hastily, almost illegibly, by the nervous hand. I write across the sheet : "11 :45, a shell on my house." Then I go to the window win-dow and throw it open. Two military policemen and four or five soldiers are looking up, showing round eyes, and pale, almost idiotic, faces. At the left I see my dear colleagues coming toward me. One of them arrives ar-rives on a bicycle, the others on foot. They too, are pale, and look at me silently, as though I were a ghost. An entire corner of the house has fallen in, but it is an uninhabited corner. cor-ner. "What are you doing up there?" shouts Lieutenant Fusco, the adjutant major of the battalion. "The upper floor is on fire." Really it is a false alarm; it is only the dust of a fallen ceiling. This does not keep me from hurrying down to my colleagues, happy in the escape from danger, and even more so from having read on their faces affectionate solidarity for their friend. This satisfaction satis-faction is worth at least a 12-inch shell, especially when it shows itself as well-bred as that wbnso untimely end I have described. |