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from "Three Stalks of Wheat,"
Comrade Don Camillo

For a moment they stood still, gazing at the desolation of the scene. Then Don Camillo forced himself to take a few steps forward and with a trembling hand thrust aside the twining ivy. On the trunk of the tree there was carved a date: Dec. 27, 1942, and the single word Italia, with a cross above it.

Don Camillo let the ivy fall back, while Peppone slowly took off his cap and looked out over the field, thinking of the wooden crosses that were no longer there, of the scattered bones buried in the cold ground.

"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetuus luceat eis...."

Turning around he saw that at the foot of the oak tree, under the rude cross that Bordonny had carved upon it, Don Camillo was saying the Mass for the Dead.

"Deus, cuius miseratione animae fidelium requiescunt: famulis et famulabus tuis, et omnibus hic et ubique in Christo quiescentibus, da propitius veniam peccatorum; ut a cunctis reatibus absoluti, tecum sine fine laetentur. Per eumdem Dominum ...."

The tender stalks of wheat quivered under impact of the wind.

"My son, where are you?"

Peppone remembered the despairing outcry of the headline over a newspaper story he had seen in the last years of the war.

"Where are you, my son?"
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from "Remembering a May Day Long Ago,"
Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children

Don Camillo's sermon was short and sweet: "Brothers, much has been said about the dialogue between people who stand on opposite shores. The souls that we are here today to remember stand on the shore of Death, and they are speaking to those of us who remain on the shore of Life. Let us listen to what they are saying to us, and our hearts will find the proper answer. Amen."

The great river was brimming with limey water, and all the people coming out of the Mass went to the banks to see whether the water level was rising or going down, and they remembered Don Camillo's simple words.

Some of them straightaway saw the blood-red glow on the waters near the other shore.
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"I had no more influence [on the War] than a nutshell tossed about on the ocean, and I emerged without ribbons or medals on my chest. I emerged as a victor, however, because I came through the cataclysm without hatred in my soul..."

-- Giovannino Guareschi
(from My Secret Diary)
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