Part 3 (2/2)
”Stop it!” Another box on the ear. ”You are all right. You wanted to be a volunteer; now you see how much fun it is.”
”I?”
”Yes, you.... You were the cause of the fine talking-to my general gave me, and you made me lose my place as an orderly where I had a chance to make extra soldi. If you hadn't gone and told him that you had helped me to carry his things and if you hadn't slipped under the seat of that same officer to listen to what he said, I shouldn't have been punished by being sent to the front.”
”Are you afraid, then, Mollica?”
”I afraid? But don't you know that if I catch sight of an Austrian I'll eat him?”
”Like the food you took from the general,” that rascal of a Pinocchio dared to remark.
There was a chorus of laughs that stopped as if by magic at the sound of a certain roar in the distance and of something whistling through the air and very near.
”There they are!”
”We're in it.”
”Where?”
”Where are they?”
Who paid any attention now to Pinocchio? All of them had drawn close to one another and had rushed to the edge of the road, their guns pointed, to examine the distant landscape. The mountain was very steep there and covered with thick vegetation. Down at the bottom, toward the plain, there seemed to be an unexpected rise ... after the steep descent a green stretch through which a river ran like a silver ribbon. Still farther, was a chain of low mountains, almost like a cloud on the edge of the peaceful horizon.
There was the roar of some more shots and the whistling of the sh.e.l.ls, and a branch of a tree was splintered and fell.
Pinocchio, alone in the middle of the road, felt a creeping up and down his spine and experienced a trembling in his legs that shook like a palsied man's. The second time he heard a sh.e.l.l whistle he felt that he must find a hole in which to hide himself. He looked about him and caught sight near by of an enormous larch-tree which pointed directly toward the heavens. I don't know how to explain it, but the sight of it took away from Pinocchio the desire to hide himself under the ground and made him wish to climb toward the stars. He gave a spring and s.h.i.+nned up the big trunk in a flash. I bet you a plugged soldo against a lira that you would have done the same....
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”I SEE THE SUET-EATERS”]
”I see them! I see them!”
”Who?”
”Whom do you see?”
”Where are they? Where are you that we can't see you?”
”I am up here.”
”Bravo! And whom do you see?” Bersaglierino asked.
”I see the suet-eaters.”
”Where are they?”
”Down there where there is a kind of slope there is a town hidden among the trees ... up here you can see a roof and the spire of a bell-tower ... you can see people on the roof ... you can see something glisten ... now they are firing.”
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