And I saw four horseman come riding and one was death on a pale horse….
Every military history of the 1st World War devotes at least a paragraph if not a whole chapter to the Angel of Mons alongside other supernatural and psychic battle phenomena. One event of this kind, an occurrence that might seem to fit the category of “inexplicable spiritual or occult manifestations in trench warfare early twentieth Century” but has never been mentioned in any account of this conflict is that known in the small Southern Sicilian village of Donnalucatta as Il Cowboy del Apocalyps and in the rest of the world to those in the know as “The Cowboy of the Apocalypse”.
At exactly 5.30am on the morning of 13th July 1917 two Italian sentries, dozing at their posts in trench 42A, on the German side of what was then known as the Hindenburg line were woken from their early morning snooze, after a sleepless night of incessant flares and artillery barrage from the German line, to the sounds of gunfire and shouting from the other side of the piece of land that had once been a rich pasture lying between them and the British and Canadian lines.
What the Italians were doing in that trench is anybody’s guess, but here are two possible explanations.
1. They were members of a crack Italian sniper regiment from the Tyrol mountains (that particular section of Northern Italy being part of the Austro Hungarian empire). Though this is a possible solution, there is one slight problem with it. Most of the Italians in that trench were from Southern Italy and Sicily, most of them were rubbish with a rifle with the exception of a couple of Sicilians (more of them shortly) who had hours of experience potting rabbits, pigeons, partridge, deer, wild boar and hares in the mountains south west of Syracuse.
2. During the recent assault on the German lines a week before this particular group of Italian soldiers had got lost on their way back to the Allied trenches and had ended up in an abandoned German trench where they had stayed, unable to move due to the almost incessant heavy bombardments from both sides, exacerbated by the fact that they had lost all their maps and sole compass in the mud between the trenches during their disorderly retreat through the mist, smoke and total mayhem that had ended their attempt to capture a few more metres of rusty barbed wire, stagnant water filled bomb craters and rotten duckboards.
For reasons that may become clearer later in this narrative, the second explanation is in fact the correct one.
The field across which they were now blearily trying to peer through the mist and early morning light had, before the present trench lines solidified back in January 1915, belonged to a French family by the name of Rogeaux. It had been a beautiful meadow, part of their ancient family smallholding. Flooding in spring and producing in summer an abundance of flowers and sweet grass on which the family cows would graze. The milk from these cows created a cheese so delicious and appetising that it was virtually impossible to buy it anywhere else outside the village of Voila les chenes that lay a few kilometres from the byre where Julien & Simone Rogeaux kept their cows during the cold winter months.
The cheese, a variety of Emental, was all consumed locally though occasionally someone from Montauban would arrive in the village to buy a few cheeses to take home and impress their friends at Christmas or Easter.
“ Ah mais non. Je ne peux pas dire. C’est un secret vraiment éspecial. Non…. Non c’est pas possible!”
The cheese that these French bourgeoisie so prided themselves on acquiring was a rather different variety of matured milk to the piece of old hard goats cheese or frommagio di cabra that one of the sentries now held under his nose as he gazed anxiously out across the once fertile field.
On this particular morning he could see very little of it. He had however looked on it so many dozens of times over the last week that, mist or no mist, he knew with teeth grinding certainty almost every square inch. A thick mist still rolled across it. The sun beginning to rise could not disperse the cold grey swirling shroud that covered the pockmarked and massacred piece of once beautiful pasture.
No grass grew. No flowers. Birds were not singing. There were none. Out there some bloated bodies of unlucky soldiers floated in muddy flooded craters. A few rats began their morning scavenge amongst the corpses. Unexploded shells and grenades sat as lopsided sculptures in the sludge amongst the rusting coils of barbed wire.
None of this was visible to Private Giuseppe Dimartino as he nervously sniffed his piece of cheese, sent to him nearly 10 weeks ago by his mother. Made in the dairy in the village of Donnaluccata in Southern Sicily where his family had lived for centuries. It didn’t last long. Only a couple of hours once the other soldiers had found out about it. Anyway they were his friends so he had to share it with them. But he still had a small piece of it wrapped in a fragment of tightly tied cloth hung round his neck on a piece of string. So whenever he felt sad, lonely or just bored (long hours of sentry duty are apt to drive a young man mad with tedium) he would unwrap it and hold it up close to his right nostril.
Inhale deeply and home would return to him. Every detail bright and clear. He was still there. Only fifteen years old and everywhere in the village he could smell frommagio, the wild thyme, frommagio, coffee, frommagio, fresh bread, frommagio, lucia’s soft sweat covered body, frommagio, the new season’s grapes in the wine press, frommagio…..A catalyst that unlocked all his memories of home.
As with every drug, frequent use can soften the effect. So it was with Giussepe’s small lump. These days it didn’t have quite the same magic effect. The memories were fainter. He had to work harder at them. Actively painting in the details himself. That seductive sweet aroma of mature cheese no longer carried him back home.
Though for the rats it was still number one….le nombre un….numero uno….single, indivisible, one and only, the holy cheese.
Which was why Giuseppe was known to his comrades as “Il Rodente”.
This had nothing to do with his looks or the piece of cheese. Well only indirectly - the cheese not the looks.
His nickname was due to a large group of constant companions consisting of around 30 full grown battle hardened field rats who had followed him everywhere since the Italians had arrived in Trench 42A. True there had been a number of rats that paid him attention back in the allied trenches but that was a mere shadow of the raturous adulation that had grown around him here. All of them waiting for that moment when Giuseppe’s guard would be down, a momentary lapse of attention as he lifted it to his nose and then….. and then they would pounce.
Ah how they salivated when he produced it and how their red eyes shone and their yellow teeth glistened.
Back in the allied lines seven rats had been shot within minutes by the Italians the day the full cheese had arrived. A frontal assault by nearly 50 rats had been fought off brutally and with no mercy by the soldiers who had then gone on a rampage through the trench killing innocent rats on sight so that they could eat their cheese in peace. The smell of that exquisite cheese had driven soldiers and rats wild. After months of semi starvation and minimum rations for both men and rats as, contrary to malicious rumours, even rats do not enjoy an endless diet of rancid human flesh, the cheese had just been too much. But as is often the case, superior human technology and brutality in the shape of rifle butts, bayonets and pistol shots had prevailed and the rats had fled, leaving their dead to be skinned and roasted by the more enterprising and culinary minded of the young Italians.
An uneasy truce had then returned to the trench after the insanity and slaughter that the cheese had instigated. The Italians, though hardly regarding the rats as ‘friends’ or ‘compatriots’ had a grudging admiration for their long tailed co-tenants as they were the only other mammals who voluntarily occupied this insane nightmare landscape of mud, rain, death and disease.
True the rats could be a nuisance, particularly at the infrequent and scanty meal times but there was a kind of solidarity between rat and man. A bond of hunger and survival. So the rats had kept their distance and the soldiers had tolerated them. Things had clarified even further here in Trench 42A because the only thing the rats were now interested in, and some of the Italians had wondered whether his arrival had been communicated via some secret rat telegraph, was Giuseppe and the remaining piece of cheese. He was never alone. Even when pissing behind a trench buttress of sandbags and timbers there were always one or two watching him and creeping as close as they dared to come before Giuseppe would lose his temper to turn on them screaming.
“For the love of the Holy Virgin can you not leave me alone for one instant!”
In Italian of course.
Not that it made much difference what language he shrieked at them in, though French might have got more meaning through, the rats certainly got that he was not happy, but they weren’t Roman Catholics so such oaths and pleas left them fairly cold. Occasionally they would slink away for a few minutes giving Giuseppe some moments of solitude as he stood and peed into the mud, reflecting on the misery of his situation. But as soon as he began to unwrap the cheese to sniff it, to conjure up the heat of a late summer evening on the edge of the sea with his arms wrapped around Lucia, as if by some semaphore he would be surrounded by every rat in the trench. Waiting for that moment of inattention.
The most dangerous time for the fromaggio’s continued existence was during the few hours when Giuseppe tried to snatch some troubled sleep. Occasionally one of the bolder rats would creep stealthily towards his sleeping form, wedged between a couple of sandbags or leaning against the timber frame round the trench that held the mud at bay, but at the last moment as the rat was preparing to pounce he would awake and lunge at it with his bayonet shouting.
“Bastardo! I cosi tutti frutti il …..”
Italian for “Leave my fucking cheese alone you slimy little bastard!”
The irony was that Giuseppe had always loved animals. Goats, sheep, dogs, horses, chickens, ducks, pigs. He had grown up surrounded by them, his childhood had been full of them but it was another matter altogether to be the focus of attention for a bunch of starving french rodents. There were days when he cursed his mother by all the saints and devils for sending him the cheese and other times when he puzzled over how it had ever reached him whole. All 5 kilograms of it.
In the initial rush of pleasure, hunger and surprise he had not given it any thought. But really the chances of a whole aromatic cheese travelling from Southern Sicily to this god forsaken mud slide in Northern France were…well quite frankly it was impossible. It should never has got as far as Italy. The smell alone gave it away immediately. Any sailor or railway porter worth his mozarella would have had his share. Una Pocca slice. But there it was or rather had been and here was the tiny remaining proof. He would never part with this tiny fragment, this connection with a lost life. Threats, inducements, offers of outrageous sexual pleasures payed for at the next whore house fell on deaf ears. In the event of his sudden death, a not unlikely occurrence given the increasing possibility of a German or allied offensive sometime in the immediate future, he had promised the fromaggio to Salvatore, the other sentry who now stood beside him peering out across No Mans land, wondering what by the wounds of the blessed saviour was going on out there.
There was, in what was laughingly known as ‘the quiet and safe room’ (a slightly deeper and better fortified hole in the ground at the point in the trench furthest from the likelihood of attacks from the German lines, always assuming that they would not have to defend themselves from an attack from the rear by their own troops), a long list in Giuseppe’s best handwriting with the precious stub of pencil he used for writing letters each day, always unposted, to Lucia. On a sheet of his ever decreasing supply of plain white quality writing paper that he had spent his last francs on during his leave in Montauban details were laid out, in strict order of preference arrived at by a complicated process of drawing lots involving an empty corned beef can and 16 different lengths of bootlace, the names of all the other 16 soldiers in the trench. A list of Italian names and their place in the line of inheritance of the cheese in the event of those higher up the list being killed and a backup plan if they were all to die so that relatives in Sicily would have rights in the line of final inheritance.
That was of course if the rats didn’t get it first.
However at this moment in time, in spite of its presence close to his right nostril, neither Giuseppe nor Salvatore were giving much thought to the fromaggio, Sicily or the rats. They were listening to the wild sounds coming towards them.
Gunshots.
Singing.
A high pitched buzzing sound.
The drumming of horses hooves.
“It’s the offensive. It’s begun”
Salvatore shouted to his friend.
“Wake them up. Wake up everyone else!”
“It’s not possible. There’s been no bombardment from the allies, only the Germans last night. The allied artillery hasn’t started yet”
Shouted Giuseppe
“Maybe there is no shelling this time”
“Of course there’ll be shelling. There’s always shelling before an attack”
Then Salvatore pointed into the mist in front of the trench.
“Look. Something out there. Coming this way”
A sudden gust of wind had cleared the first 50 yard strands of mist. Something was definitely coming out of the mist towards them.
Until he drew his last breath nearly 70 years later Giuseppe Dimartino would never forget that strange apparition riding out of the limbo of dead men, mud and massacred meadow towards him.
Unfortunately he did forget about the rats and the fromaggio. His attention had dropped for a microsecond too long. In a mass of claws, teeth and flashing eyes the rats went for the cheese. 30 of them at least. He went down under the weight of their attack.
The rats saved his life.
The awful figure that appeared through the mist caused Salvatore to scream and wet himself while trying to raise his rifle to his shoulder.
Slinger shot him through the neck before he could line up the sights. If Giuseppe had not been buried under a writhing mass of crazed rats he could have met a similar end. If they hadn’t rushed him and knocked him off the trench’s parapet into the mud 10 feet below, sheltering his body with their frenzied attack he would certainly have been killed in the bombardment that began a few moments after Slinger and the Horse vaulted over Trench 42A and rode through the next 2 lines in a Northerly direction.
“Shit Horse. What happened to the Germans?”
14 Italian Privates, 2 Italian non-commissioned officers, a junior German Officer-Lieutenant Holger Biberbach who had been captured by the Italians late that night, and 2 Turkish artillery officers/deserters in the adjoining trench, saw the cowboy on his white horse as he came over the top of the trench with colt 45s blazing, singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Or at least a version of it.
“John Brown’s Body.... John Brown’s Body.... John Brown’s Body... But his soul.... But his soul.... But his soul..... Goes marchin on....”
He had never learnt all the words but at least he had the tune.The Horse was frothing at the mouth. Her lips drawn back to show huge white teeth, her eyes bloodshot red, a bull roarer tied to her tail which sang its throbbing roar as she galloped. It was this sound that had struck fear into the hearts of Guiseppe & Salvatore.
Her appearance owed much to the state of absolute terror she was in. At no time in her life had she made any claim to being a heroine. It was one thing to be stuck in a trench quietly waiting to die but quite another to be riding at full gallop towards unknown enemy lines with a crazed cowboy on your back not knowing whether the barbed wire, unexploded bombs, other maintenance, or enemy machine guns would get you first.
Back in the trench she had felt philosophical. Able to deal with the extreme emotional states Slinger was running through with a certain amount of equanimity. But this……this was madness with, she had to admit, a certain unhinged logic to it.
Of course she had encouraged Slinger from his saying it would be a “good idea” to telling her his dream before he had filled her in on the exact details of its conclusion.
“OK. It’s like this. We ride out of here just before daybreak. If you’re right about the attack (and judging by the ferocity of the bombardment they were to ride through, he was). I reckon the long guns will open up just before dawn. In the dream I’m dressed in full Lone Ranger gear, singing and shooting these till they’re red hot. And you, you’re galloping towards…..”
“One moment” The Horse interrupted. “I take it that this gun shooting wild west event doesn’t happen with you running along beside me?”
Another flare lit the sky accompanied by the sounds of big German artillery pieces letting rip. Every detail in the trench clear in a brilliant snapshot of grey, black & brown. The shadows negativised to white. Slinger standing in front of her. His revolvers held high above him. His face only a few feet from hers with a huge grin stretched across its weather beaten lines. So boyish and so dangerous. The wild excitement shining from his eyes.
“Shit Horse. Don’t be crazy. We ride out of here together. Trigger and Roy Rogers. Alexander and Bucephelus. Genghis Kahn and…”
“OK Slinger. I get the idea. You on my back dressed up like a vision of peace in the West and I ride like I’m possessed. We go clear through the enemy lines and are home in time for tea. I think you should go and lie down. You’ve clearly completely taken leave of your senses and if you don’t…”
“It was in the dream Horse. In the dream. That was what happened. We rode out of here and didn’t come back. Look we have no choice. It’s the dream speaking to us. I’m not staying here to get blown to pieces by Nobel’s idea of a smart mix of cordite and shrapnel. This is the only way out. The dream was sent to guide us. If you’re not interested then I’ll go on my own but if you want to give it a go then we’ll need to get cleaned up a bit. We need to look……”
He stopped talking for moment as if he’d remembered something. Looked round the trench and up at the night sky still lit by flares of white, yellow, orange and red.
“Impressive. We need to scare the pants off them. You and me. Death on a pale horse”
It had been impossible to dissuade him and she knew that when he was like this there was nothing would stop him. She had seen him before in Mexico City when Zapata’s victorious army was entering the main plaza, Saigon as the last Americans scrambled into the helicopters before the Viet Cong arrived, Paris as the armies of the 3rd Reich rolled down the Champs Elysee, Berlin when the Russians arrived.
She had sighed, rolled her eyes and allowed him to begin grooming her.
He had somehow found some pieces of candle, lit them and stuck them in rusty tins. By their flickering light he had spent the rest of the night and the early morning hours preparing them for their projected stroll into the jaws of death. Both of them silently watching each other as the morning approached. Often more flares would burst and artillery rounds fly overhead, sometimes near, sometimes over allied trenches where men huddled in the mud to catch a few hours sleep until dawn began the countdown to another hopeless assault.
The light of that sizzling magic lantern show projected their huge shadows down the length of the trench. A man in a stetson grooming a white horse. Silhouettes on the gates of hell.
Total fear and terror, she later recalled, had only gripped her the moment she leapt onto the top of the trench, Slinger resplendent on her back. His stetson pushed back off his forehead. A red dirty bandana round his neck. The dead soldier from Frankfurt’s greatcoat flapping against her side. His boots shining with spit and elbow grease.
She had paused for a moment. Her nostrils quivering at the smell of death, smoke and, somewhere in the far distance, fresh running water. A long way off but there was no mistaking the scent of it carried on the dawn breeze. Her ears twitched. For an instant she was frozen. Horse and rider a statue outlined against the lightening sky, lost in the morning mist. Then Slinger had begun to sing slowly and mournfully at the top of his voice
“John Brown’s Body.....John Brown’s Body....John Brown’s Body...But his soul....But his soul.....But his soul....Goes marching on”
Then he had stroked her mane and said in a calm clear voice.
“Come on Horse. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The rush of pure adrenalin had pushed her forward. Steaming breath. Her legs pounding across the murdered field. Slinger on her back a demon possessed. Wild singing in a trance of danger.
“But his soul....But his soul...But his soul....Goes marchin on and on and on and on…”
Firing his pearl handled Colt 45s and reloading as he fired one then the other.
The bull roarer had been the result of a sarcastic remark she had made as he brushed her tail with one hand while shaving himself with the other.
“So I suppose you’ll want me to have a bull roarer on my tail just to add to the excitement”
“Right. Good thinking. It’ll add to the noise. Confuse the Germans more. I’ll get something together. Don’t worry my friend we’ll be in Chartres by teatime!” and he had laughed so loud that the razor had slipped and cut a long line across his right cheek.
The last remnants of the blood was still running down his cheek, blowing into his eyes as they galloped headlong over the trench in which Giuseppe’s rat covered body lay and into which the lifeless and luckless Salvatore’s body tumbled.
In spite of her state of panic, fear and downright terror, the Horse had one question running through her mind as Slinger, regretfully, shot Salvatore and saw, as in a nightmare, the huge rat covered figure of Giuseppe writhing below them.
The question was this
“Why on the evening of a major offensive planned, as each side knew, by both Chiefs of staff to coincide with the Kaiser’s Birthday and Lloyd George’s wedding anniversary (which fell coincidentally on the same day) were she and Slinger the only attacking occupants of a good half mile of trench works, bunkers and fortifications?”
Over the first trench. Men running down the next trench. Shouting to each other in what sounded to her like a Sicilian dialect of Italian. Only another few yards to the next trench.
“John Brown’s body. That’s it Horse. Keep running and jumping. Running and jumping.”
Pulling on their helmets. Stumbling. Half awake. Mamma Mia. In the name of the Holy Spirit. What is it? Death. Death comes for us. Over the second trench. Slinger reloading. Firing. No more trenches.
What? There must be more.
“Don’t stop now Horse. Keep going. …….What the hell happened to the Germans?”
The Germans, quite simply, had moved half a mile down the road or to describe it more accurately down the collection of bomb holes, barbed wire, mutilated trees and mud that had once been the main thoroughfare between Oviliérs and Montauban.
The local German commander, General Karl Spittsdorfer had decided that the Turks, Tyrollean Italians and Austrians would probably be overrun by the first wave of attacking Allied troops, thus leaving his own Bavarian and Alsatian regiments to hold the second line of trenches. He had taken a risky tactical decision to reinforce the other battalions of his own Fatherland troops hoping that the Turks, Italians & Austrians would perform some sort of tactical miracle to hold off the British and Canadian troops or that the attacking soldiers would be so pleased that an enemy trench had finally fallen to them that they wouldn’t bother going any further.
So this is how the second explanation as to why Giuseppe and his companions had ended up in an empty trench a good quarter of a mile into enemy territory was the right one. For, as were most patriotic Italians in this particular world conflict, they were on the side of the French & English against the might of the oppressive Austro Hungarian Empire and its German allies.
The General’s decision was to lead to his sensational court martial, trial, escape and disappearance. The one detail he had unfortunately overlooked was that the battalions of Tyrollean Italians, Austrians and Anatolian Turks would be wiped out (along with the unfortunate Salvatore and his friends) by shells from artillery batteries behind the German lines. A slight error in calculation and timing on the part of a very hung over Corporal Gunner Frederick Jaspers. But more of Corporal Jaspers and his peyote flavoured schnapps party later.
By the time this unfortunate sequence of events unfolded or rather exploded on the battlefield Slinger and the Horse were across the second line of trenches with a superb leap over the last of the barbed wire and wooden defence posts. The Grand National would have been hers by at least 10 furlongs. In the growing daylight she could see before them a muddy field planted with turnips bounded by a battered piece of woodland stretching up a gentle slope towards the horizon.
“Hell Horse I didn’t want to kill that kid but I swear he would have shot me first if I hadn’t got him between the eyes.”
“Don’t worry about it” she panted.
Her lungs were on fire. Steam rushed out of her nostrils into the cold morning air from some infernal combustion machine in her ribcage. She had never run like that before. Full gallop times two at least. How had she managed it? Such speed mixed with terror and exhilaration.
So long since she had done any real running, it was no wonder she was exhausted.
“We’ll…..stop for a bit….I need……. to rest….in those trees…..”
“We did it. You know there were moments back there when I wasn’t sure we would, but we did it. It worked Horse. It fuckin’ worked.”
The woods were now only a few yards ahead of them. Trees leaning against each other at crazy angles. Victims of stray shells wide of their targets.
“Why didn’t anyone try to stop us. Nobody really tried”
His voice was hoarse and puzzled, almost regretful.
“Nobody tried to stop us”
The sound and light of the two opposing armies hammering at each other with all the artillery they had was a dragon’s breath behind them as the Horse stumbled over the front line of fallen trees.
Nearly fell there. Just a few more steps. Get over some more and then….
And then a strange sight.
Two lines of trees had fallen towards each other at the same moment of violent explosion. They formed a roof, a long nave of some ancient cathedral, their dead top branches entangled together to form a mass of wooden candelabra, gargoyles and arches.
The sun broke through the mist at that moment. Long fingers of light entering the trees to reveal that this arched avenue lead from one end of the wood to the other. The ground had nothing growing on it except a few giant stink cap fungi that clustered round the dead trunks of what was once a beautiful stand of poplars, chestnuts and hornbeams.
This piece of land had been part of the Rogeaux property, one of a number of small parcels of land scattered across the surrounding countryside owned by them and other local farming families. Often on warm summer evenings before the war the whole extended family of over 20 adults and children with a collection of hunting dogs would put tables, chairs, food and drink in the back of a large horse drawn cart to travel the kilometre or so to the edge of the wood to eat supper in the coppice watching the sun go down behind the hills at the top of the wood while the larks, wood pigeons, thrushes & sky larks sang above them.
Today nobody was picnicking in the woods, no birds sang, the only sound was the thunder of the distant guns.
The Horse stopped suddenly.
“You’ll have to get off. …….I need to……..lie down……… before I fall down.”
Slinger felt his friend trembling beneath him. She was already bending her back legs and soon would be lying on her side on the black earth. If he didn’t get off now there was a strong possibility that his leg would end up between her and the ground and one or two bones would crack. He fell off her back as she rolled, almost in slow motion, coming to rest on her right flank, her eyes looking up at Slinger. Foam and blood flecking her nostrils and beautiful cream and brown face. Here mane matted with sweat, mud and spittle.
She spoke faintly to him.
“That was some ride eh? You were right Slinger…..always follow your dreams…..but you couldn’t have done it without…..”
She coughed once. Violently. Blood and froth between her perfect teeth. Her eyes closed. Her neck relaxed and slowly her head came to rest on the forest floor. Her long face pointing up the cathedral avenue of trees that lay before them.
Slinger dropped to his knees and began to wail.
“No Horse. No. You can’t drop dead on me now! We’ve got to get to Chartres. I can’t do this on my own. No. No!”
At that moment the artillery stopped its bombardment. The last shell exploding behind them somewhere in no mans land.
Silence.
And then high in the sky above a solitary skylark began to sing.
Close up of the Horse’s face.
Slow zoom out and up to long shot from above of Horse and Slinger on the floor of the wood through tangled branches pan up to blue sky and fade to white….