The Diary of Sub-Lieutenant Carlo Casolari, Part Two

Every now and then I manage to disengage from the routine and I go to Sciacca with the excuse of going to the battery, in the hamlet of Carbone, and I catch a break. The spa town is the only sign that civilized world is still there, waiting for you. Radio, coffee, merry companies, students. When I compare my life with the others’ I become terribly clouded. And it’s the same old theme: at least those who are at the frontline, in Africa or in Russia, are suffering for something. But what about me? Days pass while waiting for the weather to clear up so that I can go to the battery; then unimportant things happen, and I can’t find the concentration I need to study. Sometimes I find myself drawing airplanes, or waiting and hoping for letters that won’t come. I subscribed to Le Vie dell’Aria and Ala d’Italia [two aeronautics magazines]. 

On the other hand, from home, they sent me the watch. It’s been four months since I came here at the Garbo [Carboj]: I think they’d be enough to straighten out the maddest mind. A quiet life like this is undoubtedly good for both body and soul. Only to a certain extent, however, beyond which I do not know what can precisely happen. But I do not wish to continue it enough to see that. On 12 January, the first bombs come. British aircraft have struck Sciacca. This does not change my condition of “involuntary shirker in the area of operations”, but this is also my luck. If I were to go to the real frontline, I would not come back, or at least I wouldn’t come back unscathed. They say that such foreboding is usually not wrong: perhaps the frontline will come here, too.

(Taken and freely translated from https://www.yumpu.com/user/grigioverde.org)