Part 13

“‘Celtic,’ next day: Chanler blew back from Naples at seven o’clock this morning, and went back to Reggio about an hour later. He is looking awfully well and is full of business. I am sending a film to the photographer to be developed of the first portable house, and another of the work-shop and houses in course of construction at the end of the first week. It has rained a great deal and Hooper’s rubber coat has been of immense use to me--tell him when you see him, and do show him the photos.

“March 6th: Mr. Bicknell, of the Red Cross, came today with his secretary, an _avvocato_, Donati by name. A Roman, of the real old Roman type, he looks like that bust in the Vatican, the one you always say is so modern--just like the sort of man who takes you in to dinner.

“Wednesday, March 9th: I don’t know how much longer I stay--if I see it through, it will be the first of May before I get away. I am terribly rushed as I have to get out a set of drawings for Queen Elena, of the houses we are to put up at her village. That is to say, I am arranging where they are to go. I took the Duca d’Ascoli, the Queen’s gentleman-in-waiting, over the land at the Villaggio Regina Elena yesterday. I am trying to get the drawings done for the Queen, and translating employment forms, and things happen every minute as well. I am well and happy and working like anything. The hotel is accepted. The Queen wants me to make designs for a schoolhouse for her; and I am trying to do it, but there are usually anywhere from two to four people in the chart-house, and I get my elbow poked just as I am almost successfully through an ink drawing.

“U. S. S. ‘Celtic,’ March 11, 1909: It’s 8.45 A.M. Belknap went over to Reggio this morning at seven and doesn’t get back till lunch time, and I have a great stunt before me. Saturday we go out to live in our first batch of twelve houses, which are finished. The water supply comes from a mountain stream, away above where the town supply comes from. It has been analyzed by the doctor (who goes with us) and piped by the ‘Celtic’s’ plumber to the camp. The work that has been undertaken is simply immense. The houses are spotting themselves over the surface of the earth, like flies on sticky fly-paper, as thick and fast. Yesterday was a tremendous day; I had to get out the hotel plan for the engineer, to give our estimate of how much wire would be needed for electric lighting of it, and the Duca d’Ascoli took off at five o’clock a bundle of drawings for Queen Elena; and all the time I was being joggled and jostled by people coming in and out, and many of them staying in the chart-house. I cannot imagine where you got the idea of cold. I wrote a long time ago that I had never had occasion to wear my overcoat since I came down, and it’s been very much in the way in these cramped quarters. Bill o’ the Bilge’s rubber coat has been my greatest boon; though I have sweltered in it, it has kept me dry. Twice we have had dinner on the quarter-deck; we did last night. Captain Huse gave a dinner for the Duca d’Ascoli, the

Captain of the Port and the Comandante of the Italian man-of-war. Ascoli sat on the captain’s right; we had a very jolly evening. About my getting away from here; it’s a question. I am just about to tackle the arrangement of the houses we are to build for the Queen’s village. I have worked out the hotel, special houses for Queen Elena, work-rooms, schools, a church for our own village here in Messina, on a modest plan that will fit the lumber we have at our disposition. The hotel will have seventy-six rooms apart from offices.

“March 14th: Our warship, the ‘Celtic,’ leaves here on Monday some time, but we go to the houses tomorrow. The ship only waits to give us a chance to find out if we need anything more. I have sent two rolls of photographs to be developed, the Villaggio Regina Elena and the U. S. village at the end of the second week’s work. There is a wall along the river bed, the Torrente Zaera, showing a water-pipe that brings the water to the cottages. It was turned on yesterday. I tried to get a photograph of the kitchen sink with the water running and the first jet of water. The others are of the American building work--I hope they will give you some idea of it. The most precious of all the snap-shots is the one of a church belfry with a clock, the hands pointing to the exact hour of the catastrophe. I call it the Tell Tale Tower. This is God’s own country in charge of the Devil. Do you know of any one like Flint or Thompson you could send down to help out, a good boss with some idea of method and system and accounts, who can speak Italian? I am so sorry Thompson can’t come. A divine day! I wish I had brought my light summer suit. I think we are going to be comfortable in the camp. Belknap thinks of everything; I never knew such a man!

“Monday, March 15th: We are just off for the camp on the Piano della Mosella. It is a glorious day but hot, though it is early, not yet ten. Last night we dined on board the Italian man-of-war, ‘Dandolo,’ and I send you one of the menus. They are all done by the sailor men and I thought would interest you. Did I tell you the Queen made a request that we build for her three hospitals--one in her own village, one at Messina and one at Reggio? I am expecting to get to work on the designs as soon as we get instructions from Mr. Griscom. You must not go away from Italy without coming here. Things move very rapidly and many of them at once!”

* * * * *

They move so rapidly that it’s breathless business trying to follow them. The work planned was roughly this: To build at Messina a village of a thousand houses with the necessary public buildings, hospitals, schools, church and hotel. The hotel was of vital importance. One of the worst features of the disaster was the fact that the brains of Messina had been practically wiped out. The people saved were largely of the working class, who are up early in the morning and who live in small houses. The great palaces of the rich proved fatal death-traps to most of them. The few business men of sense and energy left to cope with that unheard-of chaos had no place to sleep or eat at Messina. They were forced to live at Catania or Taormina, thus losing many precious hours on the long railroad journeys back and forth. Reggio, from the first the more fortunate of the two stricken cities, soon had a decent hotel lighted with electric light--a thing never before known in the ancient city the Romans called Rhegium, and Hugh, the Yeoman, spoke of as Riggio--but Reggio had Captain Cagni! Besides the village at Messina, the Americans had agreed to build a hospital and about one hundred houses at the Villaggio Regina Elena, a charming suburb on the other side of Messina, built by Queen Elena. At Reggio, another American village of one thousand houses was to be put up; on the Calabrian coast, in what is called the Palmi district, between Reggio and Scylla, five hundred houses were to be erected; and in the country between Taormina and Messina three hundred more, these last to be placed according to the advice of Messrs. Bowdoin and Wood, who ought to be classed with San Pancrazio, the patron saint thereabouts. These gentlemen had, and richly deserved to have, the forty-nine portable houses for their protégés. There is an impression at home that a far larger number of these admirable portable houses were sent than was the case. There were only forty-nine in all, sent by Massachusetts, who also contributed material for three hundred houses and much else besides.

The village in the Valley of the Mosella was

to be laid out in regular street blocks like any modern suburban district in America, each block to contain twelve houses. Belknap’s plan was to finish the first twelve houses, a kitchen and an ice-house, and as soon as possible take possession of them and establish the party in camp. In the corner of the central square the ice-house was dug and roofed over, and here they stored thirty tons of ice and provisions from the “Celtic,” enough to last three weeks. There was great rejoicing the day the water was put in. There was a shower bath in Buchanan’s house, running water in the kitchen sink and men’s washroom, and an outside faucet for general use. The waste water was led by a wooden pipe to the Torrente Zaera.

The fifteenth of March, three weeks after our builders arrived at Messina, they took possession of the camp. It was a glorious day; they were astir early on the “Celtic” packing their kits. J. watched the men put his drawing-board and portfolio safely on the ox-cart under Hugh’s care, and started to walk to the Mosella.

“In the street are a few miserable shops for foodstuffs,” J. writes. “I say street, but it is really only a passageway where the street used to be. On either side are mounds of debris with little groups of diggers, hunting for their relatives, with a soldier leaning on his gun with fixed bayonet beside some coffins. It was nearly midday; one party was using a coffin for a table and others as chairs--truly, familiarity breeds contempt. Not only this, but I saw little toddling babies put to play in them, to keep them out of harm’s way. One thing shows a wicked lack of forethought. Shelters have been built across the tram tracks, that have only been slightly damaged in one or two places. They make the entire route of the villages that have suffered, and ought to be put in operation immediately.”

Though he stopped to notice these things, J. reached the camp in time to see the pretty inaugural ceremony. At twelve o’clock the bugler from the “Celtic” sounded “attention.” Officers and men all assembled in line. The two civilians, Mr. Bicknell and J., hurried to the end of the workshop and adjusted their cameras. Belknap then read aloud a letter from the Prefect of Messina, the Commendatore Trinchieri, beginning:--

“MOST ILLUSTRIOUS SIR:--My Government entrusts me with the honor of according you the right to occupy a camp in the Valley of the Mosella, and to acknowledge the justice of your desires that the National Flag of the United States of America should fly above the place during the daylight.” Etc., etc., etc.

Tara, tara, tara! The bugler sounded the salute to the colors. The flag crept up the tall flagstaff and unfolded in the light breeze.

“Three cheers, men!” cried Buchanan. They were given with a will. “Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!”

There was a little speechmaking after this. J., busy with his kodak, only heard the rousing cheers as the Stars and Stripes, emblem of the world’s hope, floated over the new settlement on the old, old shore of Trinacria.

VIII

THE CAMP BY TORRENTE ZAERA

“ZONA CASE AMERICANE, March 16, 1909.

“We left the ‘Celtic’ yesterday and came out here to our camp at the Mosella, where everything is running like clockwork. I have a pleasant room but no view, while the house where the nails are stored has a divine one. There’s no window in Belknap’s room; he chose the worst one of all so that no grumbler should have the right to kick,” writes J. in his first letter after they left the ship and the hospitable Captain Huse, of whose kindness frequent mention is made both in letters and diary.

The camp stood in a lemon grove fronting the Straits of Messina, where the whirlpool, Charybdis, darkens the sapphire water with streaks of violet. Across the narrow strip of sea to the left lay Scylla, directly opposite Reggio, the dark Calabrian mountains tipped with snow towering above. A more sublime view it would be hard to find, but our men did not stop

to look much at views, or to look back in fancy at the historical vista, the long line of heroes and conquerors who had landed in Sicily before them, and set up their camps with the same care to be within reach of a good spring of water. Of course they must have had some dim sense that they were living on classic ground, familiar to them in their school days. They knew, or had known then, that Ulysses and his men and the wandering Aeneas had been here; that Greeks and Phoenicians met and fought here; that Carthage had her first battle with Rome not far away; that Goths, Saracens, Normans, Germans, French and Spaniards had passed over this ground before them. Perhaps they gave a thought to the last comer, Garibaldi, who landed here with his Thousand in 1860 and won the jewel, Sicily, for King Victor’s crown; but it is more likely they thought very little about what happened before their day--it’s so much more fun to make history than to read it! All these other adventurers and heroes landed, sword in hand, to fight for the possession of this fair Sicily, this Helen among earth’s islands. For what, in the name of history, had these last invaders come? What booty did Belknap and his men hope to find in that abomination of desolation, Messina? They planted their flag where the standards of kings and conquerors have waved, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, and set to work at their task of teaching the inhabitants how to build and how to live in wooden houses. Sicily has never had a Wooden Age till now; here primitive man left his cave to build a cavelike house of the soft, easily worked, tufa stone of the island. The Northmen who helped the Sicilians build their new homes--Danes, Swiss, Americans, English--were at great pains to teach them how to live safely and with comfort in their wooden dwellings, where the two chief dangers to be reckoned with are fire and vermin. For the race of Northmen, these problems had already been solved by the time Attila, the Scourge of God, built his vast wooden palace on the Danube, only to die there on his wedding night (still mourned by all true lovers) in the arms of his bride, the gracious Hilda. The Northmen’s inherited knowledge was now to help the men of the South solve the riddle: how to live safely in civilized dwellings in a quaking land?

If the Japanese can rise to be a world power, living in houses of paper and bamboo, there is no reason why the Calabrians and Sicilians should not learn to live in wooden houses, should not develop the caution and the cleanliness imperative for those who would live safely and decently within wooden walls.

“Naturally,” writes Belknap, “we took interest in the houses other people were building, some of which lay on either hand of ours. From a visit to the Lombardy houses Mr. Elliott got the suggestion of a semi-brick kitchen, which we saw we must adopt if we would make our cottages equally suitable to their future occupants’ habits of living, and as safe from fire as the houses other people were putting up. A fire built on a wooden floor or dangerously near a wooden wall is a common sight.”

The camp was astir early. The first sounds came from the kitchen, where the American who cooked for the men and the Sicilian who cooked for the officers made a great to-do with their pots and pans. Next came the music of the goat bells--where did they come from? (“Belknap thinks of everything.”) A great herd of shaggy goats came rambling into the camp, driven by their dark wild-looking herders. Jugs and bowls were brought out, and the morning supply of milk was drawn from the streaming udders of the patient goats, who browsed and nibbled at whatever they could find. Breakfast was served at six, a Gargantuan feast. There is a legend that the first morning a hungry carpenter made away with nine eggs and the larger part of a ham. After breakfast the workmen began to arrive, for the greater part of the actual manual work was done by Italians; the American officers, carpenters and sailors acted as overseers, directing the work. The first day after the “Celtic” arrived they started with five Italian workmen; the next day they had thirty; by the end of the fourth week Belknap employed five hundred Sicilian and Calabrian workmen at Messina alone.

As they arrive, each man is given his tools and his number is recorded. The boys come eating crusts of bread, sleepy-eyed and inclined to take time to finish their scanty meal. The men saunter leisurely to their work, smoking their pipes. The voice of the great “boss carpenter” is heard here, there, everywhere:

“Get to work, darn ye! It’s past seven

o’clock. _Al lavoro, al lavoro!_ Don’t you talk your Eyetalian to me!”

So the gangs are hectored and herded to their work. Soon both admonition and expostulation are drowned in the song of the saw and plane, in the good chorus of the hammer. The Anvil Chorus seems tame when one has listened to this glorious music after the dreadful silence of Messina, where the dead still lie in tens of thousands, buried only in the debris of their houses.

Brofferio had hunted up Zenobia, his washerwoman (she lived in the country), and found her alive and well, having escaped all damage to house or property from the earthquake. She was overjoyed to see him, and early that first morning she arrived at the camp for his linen. Like the good fellow he is, Brofferio shared his good fortune with the rest, and Zenobia agreed to do the washing for his friends. She took away all she could carry on her head and came back for more, making several trips in the course of the morning. She brought the clothes back in the same piecemeal fashion, a few at a time.

“The clothes are washed in a mountain stream, beaten between two stones, and dried on the grass. They come back the sweetest smelling things in Messina,” writes J., “only we have to wait an endless time for them.”

One morning J., whose house was next Brofferio’s, heard Zenobia making a great outcry:

“Signor Comandante!” she exclaimed. “Have mercy on me; I am not strong. I live five kilometres distant--the walk is long, the path is a scandal, the sun is hot. I have brought an immense load. Madonna Santa! larger no woman could carry!”

“Thou art avaricious,” said Brofferio sternly, “which is shameful, considering thou art making more money than any woman in Messina. Dost thou grudge the _soldi_ to hire an _asino_? _Basta!_ Either take the linen properly all at once and return it in the same manner, or come no more. There is always the grandmother of Gasperone--“

“It is enough; the Signor Comandante shall be obeyed--ten donkeys, if it will appease him!”

Zenobia departed and returned later with the balance of the linen, nicely packed on the back of a tiny donkey. This plan worked admirably until the day of reckoning came, and Zenobia’s neighbor, Sor Pietro, a poor old half-crazed peasant, who had not recovered his wits since the earthquake, presented a bill for the use of the donkey. Zenobia, a queenly creature,--she looked her name,--had commandeered the beast and refused to pay for the use of it.

“She assured us, illustrious Comandante,” said Sor Pietro, weeping pitifully, “that the Government required the animal--I myself dug him out of the ruin a week after the earthquake--for the use of the Americans. I said I will go myself and hear the truth!”

Meanwhile Zenobia and the donkey arrived on the field of battle.

“Would the Sor Comandante know the truth?” Zenobia shot a basilisk glance at Pietro. “The animal was not being used. Sor Pietro himself said it was too miserably weak to draw the plough. He had no use for him, nor will have till it is time to gather his lemons and take them to the Marina. Should he deny this poor miserable brute when my officers, the magnanimous, the Heaven-sent, demand such an animal? He deserves to die of an apoplexy!”

At this moment an orderly brought a letter to Brofferio. As he turned to read it, Zenobia sprang like a panther at Pietro, caught him by the shoulder, shook him like a sack, and hissed in his deaf ear:

“Ingrate, cabbage head, hangman!”

“You have received a very large sum of money this morning,” said Brofferio, folding up his letter, “fully fifteen francs. Do me the favor to pay this man five sous. How many times hath she borrowed the _asino_? Five sous for each trip. Now then!”

Zenobia produced a soiled and knotted handkerchief from her stocking and counted the money unwillingly into Pietro’s seamy brown palm.

“Now I wonder,” said Brofferio, as the pair walked amicably away together, “if that comedy was all arranged beforehand?”

* * * * *

The early days at Mosella recall the description of the building of Carthage. The busy master-carpenters, each with his foot-rule in his pocket, his blue pencil behind his ear, move about among the gangs of Sicilian laborers. One measures out on the bare ground the place where the timbers that form the sills of the next house shall be laid; another directs the driver of a heavy ox-team, drawn by a pair of sturdy red steers, where to discharge a load of fragrant new cut pine boards.

At noon work comes to a halt. Francesco taps at the office door and announces:

“Dinny ready, Mister!” Francesco is a Sicilian of the Greek type, straight as a lance, with a fine head, thick curling hair and eyes of gray sapphire. He escaped unhurt from his house the morning after the earthquake, after lying for hours under the ruins.

At dinner Belknap sits at the head of the long table; on his right is Brofferio. Then seated in the order of their rank come the officers, the “architect,” as they call J., and the master-carpenters. The table is laid with neatness--for a camp, with elegance. There is a white table-cloth with napkins, borrowed from the “Celtic;” at either end stands a bowl filled with pale quince blossoms, wreathed with ivy--winding ivy besprent with purple berries, the kind that twined the bacchantes’ thyrsus. This is Gasperone’s idea, the touch of the æsthetic, the legacy of Hellas, that every day and every hour you see in Sicily, that makes this land and its people rich in grace beyond all others.

“Them flowers looks kinder pretty,” said Timothy, the carpenter. He made a mental note to write his wife about Gasperone’s decoration of the “mess” table.

Francesco and Gasperone, the Sicilian servants, have a third helper, Mr. Buchanan’s “boy,” a magnificent negro. This full-blooded African giant stands six-feet-two; he is broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, with teeth like new-peeled almonds and eyes like the big Sicilian oxen. He has the same pictorial “value” as the blacks Paul Veronese painted in his Venetian feasts.

Dinner begins with a loin of good roast American pork from the “Celtic’s” store. The big negro offers a dish to go with the pork, whispering in a gentle lisp:

“Apple thause, thir?”

After dinner there is a short pause; work only begins again at one o’clock. Pipes are lighted; in Flagstaff Square the sailors have a game of baseball, watched and cheered by a delighted crowd of Messinesi. Work is over for the men at halfpast five, for the masters