Unimaginable horrors taught my grandfather the power of Christmas.  Vincenzo Scarantino was 18 years old in 1915 when police swept through his remote Sicilian village rounding up conscripts to throw against Austrian fortifications. He spent the rest of his youth in muddy or frozen trenches in a war waged so Italy could seize the port city of Trieste.

A million men were killed or wounded where my grandfather fought. The fighting along the Austrian front was almost continuous for three years. The Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo alone cost 280,000 dead, wounded or missing.  My grandfather was there.

That photo above was taken during the war on the Carso Plateau, another place where my grandfather fought. My wife and I hiked the area and saw an exposed slope, ten stories high, where my grandfather’s battalion tried for years to take heights defended by machine guns and flame throwers. Trenches cut by hand into solid rock over a century ago are still up there. Rusted barbed wire will trip you. You can find air vents for bunkers under your feet. There’s a trail through the old battlefield marked with blood red paint splashed on limestone.

Mussolini built a memorial to the Isonzo’s war dead. He called it La Redipuglia. It cascades in massive concrete and marble steps down that ten-story slope. It holds the bones of over 100,000 soldiers, more than 60,000 of them unidentified.

Vincenzo told us once–my father translating to English from mountain Sicilian–of charging through smoke and artillery fire and noticing that the waves of men to his left and right had disappeared.  Thinking he had fallen behind, he ran faster to catch up to the soldiers ahead. He discovered they were the remnants of another company. All the men he had started with had been mowed down by flanking fire.

My grandfather talked about being gassed. He had just enough time to fit a mask over his face. Slower reflexes and notoriously shoddy equipment doomed his comrades. Then the Austrians came. My grandfather pulled bodies of friends over himself. He held his breath as Austrians bayoneted his protective blanket of corpses.

He spoke of a lieutenant who always had a fancy cigarette holder between his teeth and was always eager to spend his men’s lives. This officer recklessly exposed himself above the earthworks. Waving his pistol, he demanded another headlong rush into machine gun fire. A sniper’s bullet knocked the cigarette holder–and the lieutenant’s teeth–out of his mouth. My grandfather smiled when he told that story. A single shot saved hundreds of lives that day.

My grandfather said the world had gone crazy. He used the Sicilian word, “matto,” which translates roughly to “deranged” or “criminally insane.”

What some may view as the craziest incident in this meaningless war was the only thing that made any sense to my grandfather.

One Christmas day the guns fell silent.

Unlike the 1914 Christmas truce in France, no formal cease-fire had been negotiated on the Italian-Austrian front. Men just stopped killing each other. My grandfather and his buddies nervously crawled out of their trenches, then stood up and walked unarmed in No Man’s Land.

The soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire also took the risk that Christmas morning. Adversaries met in the open. The Sicilians didn’t speak German, or Magyar, Czech, Serbian, Croat, Albanian, Slovenian or Polish. Many didn’t even speak Italian. But both sides knew the melodies of Christmas carols. Words in the languages of a polyglot empire matched lyrics that sounded more Arabic than Latin. Men raised their voices to celebrate an equally crazy idea, that God stepped into our deranged, broken world as a helpless baby and that His incarnation through human birth could mean the world’s peace and salvation.

The soldiers shared cigarettes. They embraced and wished each other well. As dusk fell they returned to their slits in the ground. The next day generals ordered them to get back to killing each other. The men had to fight. Italian officers enforced discipline with the Roman practice of decimation: They shot every tenth man in reluctant units.

That order to resume the killing may have done more damage to my grandfather than anything else he experienced in the war. Miraculously, he was never seriously physically injured. But I remember him in the middle of the night screaming, sweating, and shaking. My father saw the same things when he was a boy. He says my grandfather never got over being forced to kill men he had hours before embraced as his Christian brothers.

Vincenzo later worked in Pennsylvania’s coal mines. Men again died around him. He had survived bullets and bombs and phosgene gas, followed by cave-ins and fires, to be killed by tiny particles of coal dust in his lungs.

In helping me research my grandfather’s story, my father dug out Vincenzo’s Bible (in Italian, not a word of English). Between the pages of the Gospels telling us about Christ’s birth he found prescriptions for laudanum, a potent opiate once used to numb “shell shock,” what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’ve been wondering why my grandfather filed unused prescriptions in his Bible. I imagine him studying slips of paper promising temporary relief from the horrors in his head. Then I see him opening his Bible and tucking prescriptions he knew offered no real cure among pages telling an eternal story of hope arriving in a most unexpected form.

I like to think that my grandfather found peace among those worn pages, and in the memory of one sane moment in a world gone mad.

Merry Christmas. Peace on Earth. Or, as Vincenzo Scarantino would say, “Buon Natale!”

 

[Another version of this story, “Haunted by a Battlefield Christmas,” was published by The Albuquerque Journal, December 25, 2008.]