Is Aid Enough?

by WILLIAM G. CONGDON

1

THE last snow of 1946 blew down from the Maiella across the plain of Chieti and made white again the long straight road from the Adriatic. It settled on the white crosses of the soldiers buried in the farmyards, on the tanks that had been abandoned in a field, along the cannon of a tank hidden in battle behind a farmhouse. It covered the new grain.

In the piazza of Orsogna men huddled together on the wet pavement and talked, their blue capes, fur-collared and clasped with a brass chain, tossed over their shoulders.

“When did you last get your UNRRA rations?” I asked them.

“In November,” they answered.

“Where are the others?”

The men indicated the Town Hall. “In there.” The shutters of the Town Hall office were nearly closed. The secretary of Orsogna sat at his desk, bent over, writing into registries the elaborate and bureaucratic script of Italy. He wore a suit made from American Army blankets, and glasses so thick that you could not look him in the eye.

“Let me see the receipts for monthly UNRRA rations,” I said. He handed me some. “But these are November’s and we are now in April,” I remarked.

“There was no flour. We took nothing those months. You can’t distribute rations without flour.”

“Why was there no flour?”

The secretary shrugged his shoulders.

UNRRA’s provincial secretary at Chieti verified deliveries through March to Lanciano, where Orsogna drew its rations. Lanciano said that Orsogna never called for its rations.

A day was set for Orsogna to draw its April rations, including flour. Those for the intervening months must be considered lost. The piazza was crowded. A truck was rented and Orsogna sent for its rations.

The truck returned empty. I went to Chieti and told the provincial secretary that the peace of Orsogna could not be guaranteed unless he located flour at once. He located it, eighty hundredweights of it, no further away than the neighboring town.

It was nearly dark by the time I drove into the crowded piazza of Orsogna followed by two exBritish three-tonners loaded with flour.

Now that we had the rations, no one knew to whom to distribute them. Orsogna’s ration strength was four hundred, but since November, five hundred Orsognesi had returned from war refuge. I persuaded the Mayor to meet with the priest, the schoolteacher, a returned prisoner, and a laborer to make an up-to-date list of Orsogna’s four hundred neediest.

By dawn of the day of distribution, mothers and those expectant crowded to the Town Hall. Their baskets held towels and bits of linen, washed and ironed to hold each a ration of powdered milk, flour, dried vegetables and fruit, sugar, salted codfish.

Because I had succeeded in relieving them where no one else had even tried, the Orsognesi now looked to me for the solution of all their ills. Old women called me into their houses, offered me raw eggs to drink, and told me of their malnutrition. They asked for my signature in order to protect them from police interference when they went north for grain. They brought letters from America for me to translate into Italian. They asked me to write to their husbands in America for permission to rebuild their destroyed homes, in order to receive the 60 per cent reimbursement from the government. One man asked to be taken to Chieti. He wanted to tell the prefect how hungry he was. (He went and the prefect gave him 500 lire or $2.) The barber wanted to cut my hair for nothing. Everyone offered to buy me wine in the café. They called me “Dottore” and “Don Billo.” “One half his heart is ours,” they cried.

But I had no illusions about the acclamation which greeted me on every side. I knew that the Orsognesi would have been as extravagant in their blame, if I had failed, as they were now in their praise. They expected in measure of their need plus their idea of boundless America.

One day when UNRRA food was to be distributed, I went into the Town Hall cellar with the Mayor to check on supplies. Boxes were piled up in the corner. Out of one of the boxes, I pulled a pair of boy’s knickerbockers; then more. Mice had eaten them to such shreds that they fell apart as I held them up. “Why haven’t you distributed them?” I asked the Mayor.

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled helplessly. ”You try and distribute one hundred pairs of pants to two thousand people.”

I did try. I started from house to house to find the twenty neediest cases (only twenty pairs were good). Mothers poured out of every alley, bore down on me with names and needs of children written on bits of paper. I had to retreat, give out the pants surreptitiously one by one in the next weeks.

I saw now that local officials did not dare to interest themselves too much in the distribution of partial American relief. Graft had become a habit.

2

IT WAS October when we began free transportation of building materials in the Volturno valley. Trees had turned — not with the sudden frosts of America, but worn slowly brown by a too long sun. Peet fires were spreading; flames licked up the crevasses of the Mainardo. Smoke trailed across mountains, as far as Capracotta above the Sangro valley. In another six weeks the rains would begin. The attempt to help one town rebuild itself at least partially in that short time shows what happens when one works with a town’s own officials.

Cerasuolo is a section of Filignano, a mountain town of the Volturno valley, province of Campobasso, Molise-Abruzzo, Italy. It had three hundred people once, mostly Belgians and Scotch, with some French.

As Polish troops dislodged Germans in the early spring of 1944 and closed in on Cassino, Cerasuolo was 40 per cent destroyed. When the Allies had broken through Cassino and were on the march to Rome, Indian troops of the British 8th Army returned. They ordered the evacuation of Cerasuolo and, using it for the next three months for target practice, destroyed the rest of it.

In 1947 the road still went through Cerasuolo as oblivious of it as if the town had been set on a desert. Weeds clawed at the remains of houses which had forgotten that they were ever houses. A donkey ate grass growing out of the motor of a tank. No crossing had yet been put up over the river where the bridge had been blown up. Not a house had been reconstructed. Nor the church.

As I walked into town, two men stopped bowling along the shadowed wall of the church. One of them said, “Who is it?” The other shrugged his shoulders. From the shadow of the bombed church, a group of men watched me approach.

“Is there a mayor here?” I asked.

“In Filignano,” they answered.

“An assistant mayor?”

“He is a farmer; he is working.”

“Who is building this?” I pointed to the sharp white block of a housing project. It had no roof. Instead of promising recovery, it added to the town’s sense of abandonment.

“The civil engineer gave up working on it months ago,” they answered.

“Why?”

“Who knows?”

Some of the men were talking about me. I went over to them. “Because I am dressed as a soldier, perhaps because I am an American, you will always associate me with those who did this,” I said, pointing to the destruction. “Even though I have come to help you rebuild your homes, you hate me. You say, ‘No one fights a war to help others.’ For whatever purpose we fought the war, you think I must be here to fulfill it.”

“We don’t hate you,” one of the men said. “We are not grieving because we lost the war, not even because we have lost our homes. We are grieving because things have been destroyed in such a way that they will not grow again for ten years; because we have been reduced to a human rag, with nothing left but a little good will.”

“We are like the beasts of the field,” another added. “They cannot give milk and we men can no longer give fruit to our women.”

“Whose job is the reconstruction of the bridge up at the river crossing?” I asked.

“The engineer’s,” they answered.

“Can cars cross the river bed in winter?”

“Not last winter.”

A bridge would mean that the mail bus could come from Venafro and join the two provinces of Frosinone and Campobasso. It would undo the Cerasuolesi’s feeling of being abandoned.

I told them that in a few weeks I would be back with trucks that would bring cement for 500 lire and lime for 120 lire a two-hundredweight, because the transport would be free. They had been paying 1500 lire for cement and 500 lire for lime. I told them we’d put up a passage across the river.

Eyes narrowed as if to measure my words against the promises of the Allied radio during the war.

I told the Assistant Mayor to form a reconstruction committee. There was no priest in the town, but there was a young man who was going off that winter to look for a job teaching school. He could write and could help the Assistant Mayor draw up requests for our free transport. I had to know how many bricks to order from the factory in Campobasso, how many roof tiles and iron beams.

The farmers of Cerasuolo wouldn’t sign what they could not read. Anyone could see that every house was destroyed, that they needed solid bricks and bricks with holes for dividing walls, roof tiles, cement, plaster, and iron beams. Signing papers smacked too much of the bureaucracy of Fascism. If UNRRA wanted to help them, well and good, let them bring the materials.

They had always needed so much, these peasants of Southern Italy; to be asked to analyze their needs offended them. As far back as they could remember, men from the city, with little notebooks in their hands, had promised them this and that. And nothing ever changed — except for the worse. Look at their town, Cerasuolo; it hardly existed. Was this the promised liberation from the Germans?

They knew that if UNRRA did not buy the materials as well as bring them, but tried to get funds from the civil engineer, their town would never be rebuilt.

In 1945, the government promised to anyone rebuilding his house a return of 60 per cent of the reconstruction cost. An estimate had to be made by an engineer of the province. For partial reconstruction, the engineer could authorize an advance on the 60 per cent. A man too poor to buy materials could anticipate up to one third of his estimates.

By 1947, I had not heard of a single instance of a man’s completing his house and receiving the 60 per cent, return.

“How often does the engineer come from Isernia?” I asked.

“We haven’t seen him for three months.”

“How do you expect me to get to Cerasuolo?” said engineer Capotorti when I questioned him. “I have no transport. Why don’t you get UNRRA to give me five tires for my Alfa-Romeo?”

“I will take you in my car every day until estimates are made, and the people can get started rebuilding before winter,” I said.

When I took the engineer to Cerasuolo he accepted favors from the wealthy, for whom he would recommend priority payment. When the poor reminded him of how long they had waited for promised advances of funds, he answered, “You will be paid by St. Teresa’s Day.” But after St. Teresa’s it was All Saints’ Day. After All Saints’ it was Christmas.

When the estimates were made, I drew up requests and contracted for materials at Campobasso. But when funds were available, the civil engineer put Cerasuolo in sixty-third place on the bank paying list. Sixty-two other individuals and units would have to be advised of credit by the bank and would collect before Cerasuolo could get its money.

When I protested, Cerasuolo was reassigned to first place on the payment list.

“Cerasuolo has always been the poorest town in the province,” the engineer objected. “It has contributed nothing. The Cerasuolesi are shepherds who hike to Naples at Christmas time to play their pipes and beg in the streets and in the churches. You will learn not to help people like that.”

“Towns like Cerasuolo will always be a burden on the province until we awake them to responsibilities and opportunities of being co-members of a provincial family,” I said.

“If you can afford the money and the time to awake them, go ahead,” the engineer answered, “but do it yourselves. You will find that towns like Cerasuolo have been asleep for a long time. They have forgotten to want to wake up.”

I went to bring the Mayor of Filignano to Campobasso to collect Cerasuolo’s money. “I can’t go today,” he said. “Today is a festa in Filignano. Festa per i morti — for the dead.”

“You take lots of chances with death it seems to me,” I said.

That night I went to Cerasuolo. It was raining. The town crier went from house to house calling the men to the church, where I was waiting. One by one they came, dark shapes across the rubble.

“I have been in the Cerasuolo area for three weeks,” I said to them. “I have brought no materials because you could not buy them. You could not anticipate them until estimates were made. When the estimates were made, funds were not available. Now that funds are available, Filignano refuses to collect from Campobasso. Five hundred thousand lire are yours. Go to Filignano, all of you together, and demand it.”

As I was leaving, the Assistant Mayor came out to the car. It was dark and still raining. He put his hand on my arm and said, “You must not get so excited. You must remember, we are Italians.”

3

ENGINEER Capotorti took another sweet from the tray offered by the Assistant Mayor’s wife. The engineer from Appolonia took another glass of prewar wine. Rain dripped in the narrow alley below the window into the grotto where the old woman D’Onofrio Rosina lived. For eight months she had lived in the grotto beneath the Assistant Mayor’s house. Hunger and exposure had blinded her in one eye.

She could not rebuild her own house because the contractor in charge of building the housing project was living there with his assistants. They had rebuilt the house sufficiently to live in it, yet not to the point where the owner could claim it. (The contractor was ousted, an estimate was made for the remainder of the work, and we carried materials for D’Onofrio Rosina.)

As we stood by the window looking down into the wet alley, over the grotto of the blind woman, Capotorti said to me, “You are doing a great harm to these people. Such sudden freedom as you are giving them is like giving a man dying of thirst a whole glass of water.” “I will respect your objection,” I answered, “as soon as I see evidence that you are willing to give him any water at all.”

I administered the funds myself. I paid for the materials in the name of each recipient. Receipts were signed and sent to the civil engineer, who deducted the amounts from the eventual 60 per cent reimbursements. The trucks began to move, and for a few weeks materials poured into Cerasuolo.

Then all private work and work on the housing project was suspended for lack of iron beams. There were strikes in America.

“You Americans,” one farmer said, “have built a colossus. Is it not enough that we have lost everything, that we bend the shoulder, salute you as a god? Do you want to destroy us?”

All the materials that we had carried lay unused around the ruined houses of Cerasuolo. No one would start to rebuild until he had the materials to finish.

Trucks from Naples toured the Volturno valley selling old furniture. The Cerasuolesi, knowing that the prices of their materials had been deducted from eventual 60 per cent returns, thought there was little chance of getting the iron beams, for I was soon to leave the project .

And so for the Neapolitan furniture they bartered the bricks and tiles that had been secured at transport-free prices from UNRRA.

The rains had begun and, at night, first frosts. On top of the Mainardo there was snow.

I was dining with a contractor from Rome in charge of building all the housing projects in the Isernia area in the province of Campobasso. “The poor,” Mosetti began, “are worse off than before. You have taught them to distrust us. In the powerful name of UNRRA, you have diverted government funds, forced priority for people who have neither the means nor the ambition to rebuild. You have tied up all the materials in the factory in Campobasso, depriving us who are charged with the official reconstruction of Italy. My housing projects in Castelnuovo, St. Angelo, and Cerasuolo are suspended. You have housed nobody and you have prevented me from doing so.”

“I failed because I was everywhere blocked by your bureaucracy,” I said.

“Which is our excuse for the fact that in Italy you can’t get things done in a hurry,” said Mosetti. “The civil engineer, whom you probably had to have replaced if you were going to get anything done, was less obliged, professionally, to allocate the limited funds at his disposal to your Cerasuolo project than to towns not so greatly devastated perhaps, but with sufficient initiative to rehabilitate their industries, hotels, fields, and schools sooner.”

“We started this project,” I said, “with the idea of restoring the forgotten peasant of Italy to a responsible place in Italian society. With such encouragement as our free transport, instead of lazily waiting for the government to build housing projects, each man might have the possibility of building his own home.”

“Poverty is an ancient habit of the Southern Italian,” said Mosetti. “He accepts it as he accepts the hail that ruins his crops. The enlightenment that you speak of will take longer than the few months UNRRA will be here. You can arouse the farmer to want to improve his conditions, but he knows that in the context of Italian society it will not be possible for him to do so. You can do it for him so long as you Americans are here, because you are rich and because you won the war. But he knows that when you go, things will be the same as they have always been.”

After a moment, Mosetti continued, “If you would enlighten the Southern Italians, you must improve schools, build asylums for orphans, create the surroundings in which they will see the advantage of working together for a better life. But you must take the first steps yourselves, rather than through our local officials. Everyone has lost so much in this war, our life has become so precarious, that no one thinks beyond himself.”

“Americans are afraid of interfering too much, of being accused of imperialism,” I said.

“The rich are already blamed for being rich. That blame will be canceled only by recovery. It is a question of how important that recovery is to you. There will be none unless you provide it — not by leaving your relief on the shores or the docks of Naples, but by allocating it, every bit of it, and by following it to its intended destination.”

An English-Italian writes me from Italy: “Until you in America learn to administer your relief, no matter how many billions of dollars you send, it can never be considered more than a superficial weapon against Communism. The waste of UNRRA fed the great black markets of Europe. The waste of your Marshall Plan will no less build up the Communist Party.”

How can we avoid waste of that part of the Marshall Plan aid which would give, gratis, foods and fertilizers? I suggest that the present field personnel of some half a dozen be increased to permit one American to reside in each provincial capital. (The northern industrial provinces of Milan and Turin will obviously need more than one man.) He would be responsible for the arrival of full consignments destined for his province. He would be responsible also for the efficiency of distribution in each of the thirty-odd communes in his province. Under the UNRRA program these positions were held by Italians, and also under the post-UNRRA program. These men were primarily responsible for the waste of our relief. Let us see to it ourselves that it is not wasted again.