Traveling through no man’s land

HOW ARE THINGS ON THE WESTERN FRONT? THE ANSWER SHOULD BE: “QUIET”, like in the famous Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, and in the unforgettable movie directed by Lewis Milestone. In the last black-and-white scene of that old picture, a butterfly announces the fragile awakening of spring in the desolately motionless landscape of the “No Man’s Land”, in between the opposite trenches. The soldier, Paul, reaches out towards the fluttering wings.

A 1915 photo, in a trench of the Argonne front.

This crucial gesture is interpreted by the director’s hand, that hangs on for a second, a few frames of hope. Then, it falls back. An enemy bullet killed the soldier. But his death is not news-worthy. The war bulletin of the day says: "Nicht neues". No news. Nothing worth mentioning. In truth, though, there’s always something new on the Western Front. As on the fronts of all the wars of the past. We’re tempted to say, in Georges Brassens’ words, that everyone have his favorite wars: "War has had it's apologians, / Ever since history began, / From the times of the Greeks and Trojans, when they sang of arms and the man, / But if you asked me to name the best, Sir, / I'd tell you the one I mean, / Head and shoulders above the rest, Sir, was the War of 14-18”. No disrespect meant towards the other wars, of course: "Chacune a quelque chose pour plaire / chacune a son petit mérite!". Every war has its own attraction, they all have their little merits.

THAT’S THE HARSH IRONY OF A PACIFIST "CHANSONNIER", OF COURSE, BUT THERE’S TRUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF IT. War was frequently an inspiration for Brassens, and there’s heartfelt romanticism about the two uncles, (Les deux oncles) of one of his songs: one of them rooting for Uncle Sam, and the other one for the Führer. We can also find pathos and heroism in Boris Vian’s deserter, in Fabrizio De André’s Piero or in Edith Piaf’s legionnaire. Pacifists sing about love, but also about war. They are two sides of the same coin. I wouldn’t discard the chance that some of the above-mentioned songs were present in one of Sergio Bonelli’s juke-boxes. He knew those songs well, and in general loved war songs. Not a long ago, in a conversation, he was trying to remember the title of an English song from 1916, that he was sure he had in a jazz version, played by Sydney Bechet’s soprano sax in Paris, during the 1950s. Somebody, either Alfredo Castelli or I, remembered.

It was the poignant Roses of Picardy. Well, maybe Remarque contradicts himself in the title of his masterpiece. Not everything is quiet on the old war fronts, there’s always something new: emotion, tales, lessons, inspiration and storytelling ideas. It’s not by chance that at the top of the list of the travel destinations that Sergio Bonelli – our publisher and a storyteller of dreams and adventures – favored, you’d find the places that, with a trite but still evocative phrase, are called "war theaters”. The places where men, hundreds or thousands of them, played out the drama of life, facing each other in mortal combat.

A poster for the movie "Cross of Iron", directed by Sam Peckinpah in 1977.

THE GRASS ALWAYS GROWS BACK IN THE "NO MAN'S LAND", BETWEEN THE DESERTED TRENCHES. A grey landscape of death becomes green again, and alive. But it’s inhabited by ghosts. And the battlefields really become imaginary theaters, open-air museums of human emotion. So many lost lives, so many buried story that were never told, so intense feelings, fear, pain, adrenaline, energy, desperation, cruelty, heroism, could be evoked by a battlefield! Such a great noise, where now there’s only silence. But it’s a silence that needs to be heeded, of course, that needs to be interpreted and dreamt. And that, maybe, was what touched Sergio Bonelli.

After he was evacuated to Liguria during WWII, Sergio could only hear a faint and distant echo of the war, and maybe that was the reason for the special impression those places made on him. On the old battlefield, too, the war, once so intense, blinding and deafening, is nothing but an echo, a memory. Children usually play war. The grown-ups, when they’re not forced to fight in one, get passionate about it. Sergio has (I use the present tense, because his books are still there) hundreds of volumes about everything military in his library, with all the illustrated books by Osprey. They’re locked up, obviously. He sometimes lent those books, as reference material. But he was vigilant, having the suspicion that some rascals (Castelli and I, above all), would extend, so to speak, the borrowing time at their discretion, keeping the books indefinitely. Here’s the reason why I sometimes found Sergio in my office, his hands clamped behind his back, his face staring at the shelves beside my desk, looking for some book that had disappeared...

WE FOUND OUT ABOUT OUR COMMON PASSION FOR THE "WAR THEATERS" WHEN I ‘FESSED UP, MANY YEARS AGO, that during my summer excursions on the mountains, I sometimes went to Pasubio or Dolomiti di Sesto or Monte Cristallo, following the old route of the WWI trenches; they were often refurbished and easy to walk, but sometimes they were ruined and crumbling. I told him that, when I was a teenager, some thoughtless friends of mine had sent me inside the closed bunkers and the galleries from WWII, on Monte Chaberton in the Susa Valley, to look for helmets and dynamite. I recall also Decio Canzio, when he told us about one of his juvenile adventures with a stubborn mule, during the national service, on the track that goes from Ulzio up to Fort Chaberton... Sergio, then, showed my his small, but variated, collection of helmets and military hats. Well, being an Alpine excursionist, I had at least a tiny advantage on him about the battles on the mountains.

A poster for "Zulu", one of Sergio Bonelli’s favorite movies.

There was no comparison with him, in everything else. He had seen the Crusaders’ forts and those of the Foreign Legion, had been to Little Bighorn in the Black Hills and to the Plains of Abraham in Québec, and to Isandlwana in South Africa... the place where, in 1879, a British army with around a thousand soldiers was annihilated by the troops of King Cetshwayo. Sergio Bonelli loved this episode so much, that it became the subject of a Speciale Mister No, Zulu! His, though, was a surreal and strange version, with a sort of a lunatic General Custer at the head of the British troops, combining two of his favorite war legends in a little adventurous and pacifist masterpiece.

ANYONE HERE REMEMBERS THE EARLY-1960s MOVIE “ZULU”, STARRING STANLEY BAKER AND MICHAEL CAINE? IT WAS ONE OF BONELLI’S FAVORITES. Zulu is the story of the heroical stand of a small band of British, after the battle of Isandlwana. In a small trading post in the middle of the savannah, Rorke's Drift, around a hundred of soldiers and civilians withstood the siege by 4000 belligerent Zulu warriors for almost two days, and finally drove them away. Rorke's Drift, just like the Foreign Legion’s stand in Camerone, Mexico, the defeat of the U.S. 7th Cavalry at Little BigHorn and Fort Alamo, is a classic example of a "last stand": one of those war episodes where a few brave men withstand the siege and the attacks of a preponderant enemy force. Whether the unfortunate heroes are forced to capitulate or, infrequently, prevail, makes all the difference for them, of course, but changes very little for the War History lovers; they rightly see in those "last stands", the ne plus ultra, the aesthetic and ethical perfection of the war action, not for its (though important) tactical or military-technical aspects, but above all for its human value. Sergio Bonelli, like all the Adventure writes, had a passion for sieges and resistances to the last breath. And, of course, he went there, as well—to Rorke's Drift...

DURING THE JOURNEYS THROUGH HIS BELOVED SAHARA, SERGIO USED TO VISIT THE FOREIGN LEGION’S LEGENDARY PLACES, the areas that were an inspiration for Dino Battaglia and his L'Uomo della Legione, one of the volumes Bonelli was more proud of, in his career as a publisher. Sleeping out in the open, in a Legion’s ruined fort in the middle of the desert, Sergio dreamt of being Gary Cooper in Beau Geste.

In Montana, with the battle’s map in his hands, he reenacted on foot, one step after another, the movements of Custer, Reno, Benteen, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse: his extraordinarily intense imagination allowed him to enliven those silent and wild places with the colors, the sounds and motions of the epic clash between the U.S. Cavalry and the Sioux. Claudio Nizzi had a lot of guts in sending Tex to Little Bighorn: Sergio could have caught him out, because he had really been there and almost lived over again the battle firsthand!

From "L'uomo della Legione", written and illustrated by Dino Battaglia.

Mister No, the character of Sergio’s alter ego Guido Nolitta that best embodies Bonelli’s wandering and restless soul, is portraited as a war veteran. He was a pilot and a foot soldier in WWII, first on the Pacific front and then in Italy and Ardenne. He sometimes recalls his experience as a brave, but also anarchic and undisciplined soldier, in some of the best stories of the series like the unforgettable Mister No va alla guerra, created by Sergio with his friend Roberto Diso, and set in the Philippines. Mister No also remembered Guadalcanal, Montecassino, etc... Wars and battlefields as an inspiration source? That’s for sure. And it was true also for his collaborators, when they dared having a try at one of Sergio’s pet subjects. Tito Faraci’s hands were trembling, for sure, when Sergio asked him to set a "Romanzo a fumetti" at the time of the Montecassino battle (Linea di sangue). The same happened to me, when he gave me the idea for my Texone, Patagonia, and furnished me with a full array of maps and routes of the military expeditions to Gran Chaco Austral!

IN THE LAST YEARS, SERGIO REDUCED HIS DEMANDING AFRICAN AND SOUTH AMERICAN ADVENTURES, AND WENT BACK TO TRAVELLING EUROPE, the richest continent when it comes to bloody deeds, raiding armies, wins, defeats and war cemeteries. He went to Waterloo and to the bunkers of Normandy; but I have a well-founded suspicion that Sergio, just like the narrator in that old Brassens’ song, had a fondness for WWI, the trenches dug on the Western Front, the Arras’ caves, the Ypres Salient and the Battle of the Somme. Places that he went to time and again, every summer, always collecting new picturesque corners, small Allies’ cemeteries and war museums. His eyes would sparkle if, in early September, I told him that I went to Arras or Bastogne, too, that year. After the lunch when that old song, Roses of Picardy, was mentioned, I finally decided to write a comic story about the Great War. The plot for it had lied in my drawer for a while but, as you can easily argue from what I told you above, it’s never been too easy to write a war story, at Sergio Bonelli Editore, with Sergio’s knowledge about this subject, as he almost had been an “eyewitness” of past events.

Dampyr N. 153, "Terra di Nessuno". Cover by Enea Riboldi.

On top of it, I was tackling the Great War, the endless material for his summer peregrinations... talk about a hard task! Naturally, it’d be a story for Dampyr, a series that allows the writer the chance to take a trip in the past...

WELL, IT TOOK A LITTLE BIT OF TIME, BUT THE STORY FINALLY WAS WRITTEN. AND ILLUSTRATED, BY ALESSANDRO BOCCI. It was published in December 2012, with the title Terra di Nessuno (No Man’s Land). Sergio, though, wasn’t able to read it and now the two creators of the album won’t be able to see if the atmosphere and emotion of that tragic saga had been reenacted in the proper way, according to somebody who really had been in the No Man’s Land. The song, Roses of Picardy, whose poignant and meandering tune unfortunately cannot be heard in the Dampyr album, is an essential part of the story; it becomes almost a pivotal narrative element, with its melancholic and romantic lyrics from an almost-forgotten but simpler time: "And the years fly on for ever... / And the roses will die with the summertime... / But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy! / 'tis the rose that I keep in my heart". It’s an English song but, as it’s often the case in wartime, it was sung also by the French and German soldiers, from a trench to another. It was something that made them feel like brothers, something they had in common, besides lice and fear, before they started shooting at each other.

Well, that song entered my story thanks to Sergio and for Sergio, to honor his passion for the Great War and for the battlefields, where he roamed with his tireless curiosity, always looking for new emotion and stories, looking for life just where death happened, and in a huge scale.