“Yes, I can vouch for this. I believe that now they are all loyal Italians. Would that my children had succeeded in escaping to the other side! Would they were not here with me! I’d rather have them in the trenches with our soldiers than here with me, subject to the violence of the gendarmes and the drunken soldiers. For every day it seems as if they will take them away and put them at work in the interior of Austria where they will certainly die of hunger.” A young lean boy with large blue eyes expressive of calm and goodness entered the kitchen at this point. His emaciated, thin face showed his past sufferings and the hunger endured. “Here is Rino, the oldest of my boys. He too, will try to help you to the best of his ability.” Giovannino’s intentions were far from wrong; he was searching for a way in which to get something to eat. “Listen, Cietta, if you can’t find a way in which to get flour, send for my sister at San Martino. You told me she was still grinding the flour for the Austrian command, and who knows but she may be able to take a little away. Anyway we must tell her I am here because I must see her, for she can be of great use to us in our undertaking.” “We’ll do anything you want, but for mercy’s sake, for mercy’s sake, don’t let yourselves be caught. You do not know these savages yet, you do not know what they are capable of doing. After having taken you away they would come back here to our house and would set fire to it, the way they did at Mezza Villa in an isolated house where they found some prisoners. And now it is late and you are tired.” Cietta had entrusted several blankets to Rino who was to guide us to the little hut where we were to spend the night. I still wished to ask many questions and to continue talking with them and express all my appreciation for what they were doing for us, but perhaps they would not have understood me, for I realized that my way of speaking was not always the best way in which to make my thoughts understood to peasants. I feared that they might perhaps consider as haughtiness that which was merely reserve, and I experienced a vague feeling of being an outsider, of not being one of them.