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But we had plenty to do to keep pathways dug between the guns and the huts; often we had to clear these afresh every hour. During this time I made the acquaintance of several interesting Italians and Frenchmen. Among these was Colonel Bucci, who had been attached the year before to the Staff of one of the British Armies in France.
Already in the Galleria, an "avviso" was prominently displayed, stating that Ferdinando Bucci, the famous maker of Sicilian ice-creams, had arrived from Palermo for the season. In the Piazza del Plebiscito, hundreds of chairs were ranged before the bandstand, and before the kiosk where the women sing on the nights of summer near the Caffe Turco. The "Margherita" was shutting up.
He used to tell an amusing story of an encounter he had in France with a British officer from one of the Dominions, who walked into his bedroom late one night, after a liberal consumption of liquor, and said he "wanted the fire" and asked if Bucci was "that Portuguese."
Some, in the last desperate moments of departure, had been thrown down a steep cliff which overhangs the lake, and lay below us, for the time being out of reach. Here I met again several officers of the Italian Field Artillery, whom I met above Val Brenta in January, including the Neapolitan Adjutant of Colonel Bucci.
"Yes," said Bucci, "and I am a Colonel, and I have some decorations too, but I don't wear them on my nighty, and I want to go to sleep." He had been in Gorizia before Caporetto, and had kept, as a melancholy souvenir, the maps showing the line of his own Regiment's retreat. "I call it the Via Crucis," he said. "I want to go back.
Bucci, having persuasively but vainly asked him to go away, got out of bed and genially taking him by the shoulders, he is a powerful man, ran him out into the passage. Whereat the British officer, surprised and protesting, said, "You have no business to treat me like that. Don't you see that I am a Major and have three decorations?" pointing to his left breast.
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