Notes
1] The Italian title refers to a battalion-sized military unit. I would like to thank Angelo L. Pirocchi for help in this note, and in others at lines 5 and 16.
camion: truck.
5] Mestre: a harbour near Venice.
9] Grappa: Monte Grappa, near Bassano, its summit at 5,824 feet. This was "one of the main centres of Italian resistance during the Austrian offensive (1917-18). There is a large *cemetery with the remains of 25,000 soldiers from both the Italian and the Austrian armies" (Italy [Paris: Hachette, 1965]: 170). As Hemingway says, the road up to the summit "climbs up through a series of bends".
10] Arditi: Italian storm troops.
16] Asalone: a mount near Monte Grappa, and a theatre of bloody battles in 1917-18.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Ernest Hemingway, Three Stories & Ten Poems (Dijon: Maurice Darantiere, 1923): 55. Facsimile edition by Contact Publishing, 1977. PS 3515 E37A15 Robarts Library.
First publication date:
January
1923
Publication date note: Poetry 21.iv (January 1923): 193-95.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1999.
Recent editing: 2:2002/4/18*1:2003/2/28
Composition date:
1922
Composition date note: in Paris (Complete Poems, ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis, rev. edn. [1992]: 46)
Form note: mainly couplets and triplets