Victory in Olive-Gray

ROME, March 3.
THE boys are coming home now, are n’t they? It brings my heart to my throat, to think of a long street flying the red, white, and blue, and marching ranks of khaki. But our men came home too, the other day, on the first day of spring, under sunshine and yellow mimosa blossoms, marching through the Gate of the People into the city of Rome.

That was a regal kindness that the sun and winds showed to Italy. They had withdrawn their kindnesses often enough when the rocks below Grappa thrust up their heads, month after month, into stinging clouds of unceasing snow. The men lived through it, those who could; and, mercifully, when other countries are still in the last cold stretches of winter, they march home on the first day of warm, real spring.

I had forgotten what it was to have spring without war; we had all forgotten. As natural as breathing had become that reaction when we at home were warm or rested or content. ‘Yes — but what must it be in the trenches! ’ Is it true there are no trenches? When we are warm, our men are warm. When we see the flowers, they see them, too. It was on the first day of spring that Italy remembered it was true.

That was a royal home-coming. That was a home-coming such as a young boy, before ever he goes to war, must dream of. A home-coming of dreams should be to a land of sunshine; to a city of stately old palaces where velvets and tapestries hang from the windows; where the violets and the hyacinths and the almond blossoms grow so thick that they shower like hail on the heads of conquerors. And it should be a city which knows how to be happy, which throws off sorrow like sleep on the first day of spring and the last of Carnival.

The placards were up for days during the last week of Carnival, signed by the Prefect of Rome and couched in stately chanting language.

‘Citizens — Romans — a day of triumph — our heroes, eternally glorious! ’

So Rome made holiday. A holiday in America means activity; in Rome it means quiet. It means that, hours before the parade, we step out on our balconies, not to secure the best places, but to enjoy the warm air. Almost everyone in Rome has a balcony — or a roof. It gives us an aerial city, diversified and beautiful, where we live during the months of summer. There are tiled roofs, like shelving brown barnacles; domes, topped with crosses; and the flat little hidden roofs that look out every which-way, over street and court and walled garden. And against the far sky, all opal blue, there is the biggest roof of all, St. Peter’s dome, like an immense new hemisphere — blue water, unroughened by land.

On the roofs we stroll and look kindly into our neighbor’s windows. He leaves open to view, on this friendly day, his floor of octagonal tiles; his portraits with the carved gold frames like wreathing tentacles; his crystal candlesticks and his leather chairs topped with gold coronets. Our neighbor’s portières are not in place to-day. They are, of course, of flowered crimson satin: no Roman house would be without them. And, like a loyal citizen, he has unhooked them from the draughty doorways and draped them every one from the housewindows, where his black-eyed children and his round-cheeked maids are leaning in a breathless row.

The mimosas are in flower in all the courts and gardens to-day, and the almond trees, branches like straight rods incrusted with pink blossoms. Our balconies are piled with them, and with tulips and myrtle and daffodils and roses. Spring without war!

‘They will not get through down there,’ tranquilly comments Clementina, the old Roman servant leaning by my side. For down there in the Corso, a street the width of a hall bedroom, the people are packed from wall to wall.

‘Oh,’ says Tonino the porter, on my other side, ‘the soldiers will not be in a hurry.’

Not to-day. It is their day of triumph.

Up at the Place of the People, just beyond our balcony, there is a great shining emptiness. The carabineers, in long capes and black cocked hats, guard it in an immense solemn ring: officers sit waiting on horseback. It is the time. Clementina digs my ribs because I shall not see Italian soldiers as well as she.

‘They come!’

Outside the Gate of the People there is a color like a rainstorm seen sheeting down over distant hills before its first drops touch us. Outside the Gate of the People there is, marking time, an endless column of men in olive-gray.

They come across the open place like the first thin gray streaks of rain, separating and gliding on. We lean over the balconies, but we do not shout. Can anyone, at the first glimpse of home-coming soldiers? Down there in the distance, with the silent breathless houses all around them, they advance like shadow men. Lean, close-clad, tight-belted, all in rain-colored gray, they walk with strides which, seen from above, look like tire hurrying sweep of shadows.

While we lean in breathless silence, they have been welcomed to the city, these men who, of all the nation, have fought longest and won most praise. It is for that that, when they leave the mountains once Austrian, it is to Rome itself that they come back. The rulers and the generals have welcomed them; now they turn their faces from the open place before the gate to the long straight street that has run for centuries through the heart of Rome. It is almost dark in here, with the high houses and the people crowded like flies; but no one would desire to enter Rome by any other street.

The Romans do not shout; I wonder if they ever did. There is a twittering in the air, and you can almost feel the smiles; there descends on the olivegray ranks the rain of flowers. The branches of yellow mimosa, heavy as fruit, light in mounds on knapsack and saddle. The men, in slow march, stretch out a hand to catch them from the air; you see a dark face turned up and a gleaming smile under a black moustache, searching for the giver. The mimosas are fastened under a knapsack strap, they are thrust into a gunbarrel, behind an ear. Soon the olive-gray ranks are radiant and glowing with color: not a man who does not blossom as if his gray battle-sheathing were only the stalk of a flower. The horses have flowers in their bridles; the motor-cycles and the stretchers are covered. It becomes a game with us to find the man who has the fewest flowers and to pelt him.

‘Here, comrade, catch! Hold up your gun!’

The baby next door aims a bunch of white hyacinths to graze a sober red ear. We cheer and clap the baby from all the balconies about. The owner of the ear cannot pause in the step — he has missed it. The man next behind is alert: with a well-planned lunge he has swept up the hyacinths and placed them in his tunic. Very well, then; but a rose for the owner of the ear! He gets it at the next balcony.

Lurching along in single file, gray boxes rattling on their flanks, comes the string of army mules. ‘The mule,’ the men have told us, ‘was one of the heroes of the Grappa.’ There were no camions on those scrambling mountainpaths; and when the mule that carried the bread was shot, there was no bread. The mule was exhausted, chronically exhausted, like more than one man. And mules were never known for speed. The mule would crawl, according to his kind, up and down about his continual task — except when he came to the corners exposed to Austrian shells. Then the mule never looked to right or left, but he trotted — and the men say that no blooded steed could trot faster. But they ask with a little sadness whether mules will ever trot like that again, now that Austrian shells have gone.

Mimosa for the mules! They must have great branches, big enough to conceal the gray boxes and to cover their waggling backs. A red rose hits the muleteer, and he turns a laughing tanned face. The red rose he kisses, but he fixes it nodding between the ears of his mule. He knows enough to honor a hero.

Violets for the banners! They are old, worn banners, like those hung in cathedrals. Somehow, one had the idea that such banners would never be produced again, any more than gothic windows. Their red is turned to orange and their green to yellow. They are banners that have received the medals of bronze and silver and gold, banners that have been concealed for years in German prison-camps by the men who would not give them up.

Roses for the cavalry! There are little purple streamers fluttering from the lances; the horses’ heads twitch under the storm of confetti; here and there are the led horse and the covered saddle that mean a comrade gone. The men on horseback have child’s play with the catching of flowers: an officer, riding alone, can make his horse leap sidewise across the road to intercept a rose that he knows is meant for him.

The horses go slowly, for ahead the crowd opens only step by step, like earth gradually cleaving to let the troops pass. ‘American parades,’ the Romans tell us, ‘are so mathematical — the platoons in the street, the watchers on the pavement. Not human.’ Here it is not mathematical. The citizens press against stirrup and gun-barrel, thrusting out nosegays. The children run to and fro, picking up blossoms that have missed their aim, and reaching them to a rough red hand. The gray-green troops pause, at times, to let the crowds press slowly past, and in the pause they, and we, let our eyes wander to the garden walls, where almond trees peep over, and toward the sky, faintly opalescent with a spring sunset.

They have passed, at last, even the motor-cycles, decked like triumphant cars. There is no pouring away of the crowds, only a tranquil leaning back to enjoy to the very last minute the orange sky behind the cypress trees; the golden light catching the tapestried houses; the streets that shine with flowers and streamers as in a fairy tale. And even when we wake to-morrow, we shall not think of war: we shall go out among the gardens to see the purple anemones.