THE LAST MEDIAEVAL WAR was fought in Italy in and
Fortress towns o promontories which had been battled over sihe eighth tury had the armies of new kings flung carelessly against them. Around the outcrops of rocks were the traffic of stretchers, butchered vineyards, where, if you dug deep beh the tank ruts, you found blood-axe and spear. Monterchi, Cortona, Urbino, Arezzo, Sanse-polcro, Anghiari. And then the coast.
Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Ameris and Indians and Australians and adians advanorth, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled at Sansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at night over the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously sidered the p of hot oil from battlements.
Mediaeval scholars were pulled out of Oxford colleges and flown into Umbria. Their average age was sixty. They were billeted with the troops, and iings with strategiand they kept fetting the iion of the airplahey spoke of towns in terms of the art in them. At Monterchi there was the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, located in the chapel o the town graveyard. Whehirteenth-tury castle was finally taken during the spring rains, troops were billeted uhe high dome of the churd slept by the stone pulpit where Hercules slays the Hydra. There was only bad water. Many died of typhoid and other fevers. Looking up with service binoculars ihic church at Arezzo soldiers would e upon their porary faces in the Piero della Francesca frescoes. The Queen of Sheba versing with King Solomon. Nearby a twig from the Tree of Good and Evil ied into the mouth of the dead Adam. Years later this queen would realize that the bridge over the Siloam was made from the wood of this sacred tree.
It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, piety and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across. Food as were washed away. Men who were tied to equipment disappeared. Once across the river they tried to asd out of the water. They sank their hands and wrists into the mud wall of the cliff fad hung there. They wahe mud to harden and hold them.
The young Sikh sapper put his cheek against the mud and thought of the Queen of Sheba』s face, the texture of her skin.
There was no fort in this river except for his desire for her, whiehow kept him warm. He would pull the veil off her hair. He would put his right haween her ned olive blouse. He too was tired and sad, as the wise king and guilty queen he had seen in Arezzo two weeks earlier.
He hung over the water, his hands locked into the mud-bank. Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall. Who was sadder in that dome』s mural? He leaned forward to rest on the skin of her frail neck. He fell in love with her downcast eye. This woman who would someday know the saess es.
At night in the camp bed, his arms stretched out into distance like two armies. There was no promise of solution or victory except for the temporary pact between him and that painted fresco』s royalty who would fet him, never aowledge his existence or be aware of him, a S