The sunset fades in its intense red shades. After hours driving, I am finally here in this forgotten place in Slovenia, just a few hundred meters from the Italian border. Borders of two countries both under the European flag. This small village called Nova Vas has just few roads that become dirt just few meters after the last houses (that are here and there). Trieste is not that far away as much as Gorizia. In the quietness of the advancing evening from this rise I can see the hills ending into the sunset.
I walk to the bushes and I star wondering how that incredibly small village should have been one hundred years ago. Today, exactly 98 years after, my grandmother, still a clear minded and lively old lady, can recall the precise moment when her father left home to go to war and her eyes still become bright while she tells the story. At that time she was three years old when she hugged her father’s military boot imploring him to stay. This is the only still alive memory about her father. A scar that never healed in a century.
My gran-grandfather was a lieutenant of the 90° Infantry. He was sent directly to the front as a punishment because he was a bit late coming back to the barrack after he participated to a relative’s funeral. The punishment took the name of Carso, that harsh land between these two countries. While the silence is interrupted only by few animals grazing and by few popular music played somewhere in the distance, I think. I imagine that trip, that troop-train, from Genoa until there, the Carso. The steam locomotive and its load of men doomed to the front. The notes of a touching mountain song give the feeling of those times: “the steam locomotive that leaves from Turin… is not stopping any more in Milan… but it goes direct to the Piave river”.
Here we are a bit more beyond the River Piave, we are around the area of the River Isonzo. Between the bushes you can see the silent remaining of the trenches. Is not hard to find them. They are everywhere around, they cover the soil as they were roots. Scars that the hearth has not yet healed. Scars within the musk that covers the brushwood’s rocks where so much blood was shed.
Yes, I’m there. After having visited the Adamello, Ortigara, Pasubio now I’m there. Nova Vas, precisely where my gran-grandfather passed away. I can imagine those dramatic moments enclosed in those few words written as motivation of the silver medal of honour: “Captain of a Company, was giving with great serenity the orders to conquer an enemy post and, under the submachine guns and rifles crossfire, in a land soil completely uncovered, he was able to reach the line of the enemy barbed wire fences. Deadly injured he incited his soldiers to keep on in order to succeed the operation”.
He was only a bit older than me, around his thirties. In that moment of 98 years ago he left three kids and a wife. Despite a century has past the memory is still vivid in my grandmother. Who knows who where its soldiers, who knows how many got home and how many remained there. A stone in the centre of this small village facing the hills remembers the Hungarian soldiers that were defending those positions. It says that in four days remained only 200 soldiers of the 3000 that were there. The Italians died in the area called “Medio Isonzo” where more than 50000 in few days. Horrifying numbers. Few kilometres from here in this cursed “Medio Isonzo” passed away my other gran-grandfather. Could you believe it? I cannot even imagine these numbers. In this silence I keep thinking at all the people that even nowadays try to build up walls between populations. At those who are making incitation in order to divide.
Still in that silence and that sun that is now at dusk I imagine that border 98 years ago. A land without trees, while a man, leading other men against other men, was forced to reach a post under enemy fire losing his life with other thousands of people.
I already feel see the feeling when I’ll show to my grand grandmother the pictures of this place and I’ll tell her I visited Nova Vas. In that moment, I’ll create a bridge between that alive memory, the military boot, that hug of 98 years ago and that name carved in the memorial stone. While light is giving way to the starry sky, I silently walk back to the car. A coffee with a Slovenian friend of mine is waiting in the centre of Gorizia. Gorizia, another tale that deserve to be remembered and that will be the next post on this blog.
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