Henri to Yvette.

650 Gen Tpt Coy
Italy

May 31

(Letters received on both sides) Happy. Second reason why

For the last week I have been somewhere in the Italian mountains working with the R.E.(Royal engineers) building a bridge. The peace which reigns here, the beauty and richness of surrounding nature, the distance from all the monkey tricks of the barracks, all this has almost made me forget that there is a war on and that men wear uniforms which give them the right to restrict their activity to a stupid children’s game and to murder. But here I am in a little isolated corner (unhappily it wont be for much longer), planted here high in the mountain between sky and earth, and I see what peace means. It is beautiful, you know, peace.

Army life, which in peace-time is an unfailing source of absolute cretinism and in war time a monstrous machine for producing licensed loafers, has at least this good about it, that it teaches uninitiated people like me, to know and love nature….

My village is high on a mountain. And all around are mountains. Green. The village is small. It is a Fontamara (Silone). A village of 2000 souls. There are also pigs, cows, sheep, goats, chooks, ducks, horses and donkeys. But I don’t know yet whether the pigs live with the men or the men with the pigs, in any case, I find them always together, in the same room. There is one street where cars can pass. Then there are lots of streets and stairways, like in Jerusalem. The houses are very very small and pretty dirty. One door, one window. With the best of good will I cannot always work out whether they are made of stone, brick or quite simply of a hard and generous layer of filth. There is however, in my village, a large clean building. The most imposing edifice in the village: the church. And besides its architectural difference, this place possesses still another trait that distinguishes it from the norm. Which is that this is really the only place where the pigs have no right of access… On the church door, you notice just under the majestic cross, a poster not less majestic, denouncing the communist danger and warning the good citizens against falling into the trap of communists, godless and sworn enemies of the family.  Oh darling, but how I love my little family: Yvette, Ouri and the other!

As it is for the houses, so it is for the men: the most important person in the village is the cure. And the Christian Democratic Party has had painted in the streets and on the filthy walls that separate and define the hole where live the man, his wife, four children, two pigs, four chooks and a donkey, the order of the day, so popular here, “Long live God”.

Long Live god, oh little one, imagine that my friend and tell me that you realise the philosophical depth of that Long Live God!

With six other drivers I inhabit a house which was the village school. Very near the castle. (This castle belongs to a little squire of noble blood, a grandee. And this grandee, here, owns 10 square kilometres of ground. The peasants work this land and as a result they have some macaroni.) So I am living in the high part of the village. And my room has a balcony. And on that balcony both of us are standing, entwined and loving, looking at each other, saying nothing, sometimes chatting and often embracing each other…. And the two of us contemplate all that, all that purity and we feel the purity of our love in our hearts. I have an arm leaning on the grill of the balcony (the left arm) and my right arm is resting on your shoulder…. And I hear you say:” You see, darling, that one is a cherry tree and that is an apple tree. And down below, on the right, see Henri is an oak. And look darling, you should know that they are carrots and there, below on the left, they are potatoes…  Oh darling, your mouth!… I eat cherries but it is your kiss that I desire.”