Seeing that I chose to sit mute, my halting brain wracked with insecurities, She began to fill me in on all that had happened to our small town in the years while I had been away. She told me of family ties cut, of newcomers infiltrating our space, of the emptiness so thick you could feel it loitering in the streets. She told of unhappy days when you hoped they would simply drop the bomb and be done with us, She told of the gangs of ruffians, only ten and twelve, who escaped their houses at night to wreak havoc in the streets.

In those days, family was everything in southern Piedmont. You would have your son next door, your brother in the next house, your parents in the next. Your grandparents lived on the next street, and you knew every single person in between. when a person passed away, it was a time of mourning for the whole town, and when a marriage took place, or a child was brought into our midst, the groves came alive with the celebrations of the community. But no longer. Now the elderly and enfeebled were terrified to leave the safety of their homes at night, and the strong weren't too keen on it either. The town was corrupted by the stinking war, the terrible odor of thousands dead, the hatred rolling in like waves from distant points. Little eyes like glass peered out from behind curtains, wishing there was more milk for the young, more meat for the old. The ever present confusion of men wondering whether they should bother beginning the harvest this year, since no one was buying, and there was little to sell. These are thing things she told me about, these same things I had seen in every town on the way here. It was inescapable, it seemed, this havoc of the multitudes.

Though she told me all this, and in hearing it, it was made personal to me, I could not bring myself to even look at her. I heard the soft despair in her voice, the tone of lost hope. I could not help but compare it to the woman gunned down between us and the guerrieri verdi. We were perched on opposite sides of a shallow valley, our platoon on collina 328, minore 4; theirs on 7. The sound of battle filled the air like a black cloud of locusts, ravaging the plains all around. We had been patrolling the area, trying to keep the fascist bastards out. We felt the doom of an impending clash, but it was no stronger a premonition than on any other day. (That was perhaps the most disturbing part of the war. We never heard the voices any less. We saw the face of every man we killed, every night. We never grew accustomed to the idea of killing, though it was for il paese della madre.) However, on this particular day, a group of soldiers from the guerrieri verdi had been ordered to make themselves known in this reason. They had set up a small camp protected on one side by a valley, and on the other by a particularly messy part of the forest none of us cared to go into. They had been posted there specifically to wait for us as we made our rounds about the highlands outside the city. The moment they saw us march over the hill, they open fire. We scattered quickly; each to his own form of cover, be it a tree, or a boulder, or a ramp of earth. We returned fire, and that is how the volley began. It was fast enough, that a woman who had come to make use of the well, directly between the two opposing groups, did not have time to remove herself from the situation. At the first sound of gunfight, she dropped like a sack of potatos, hoping the fight would be over soon. Both sides, in an attempt to be moderately chivalrous towards mother life, attempted to keep fire from damaging the poor woman. It looked for a while, like she would indeed live to see another day. But then, just as the fascists began a hasty retreat, we chcked her again, and found that she was clutching her arm. Her blouse, once pristine white, had been transmogrified into a sticky deep red emanating from the wound. We moved as quickly as we could, applied a tourniquet, but she was on her way to the maker. She had breath enough for but a few plaintive words: "I want to see my son... I am not ready to die.." And then, as the impulses in her brain died down, and her heart slowed, She took one last bit of putrified air, and passed on.