...of ignominy

We were going along the Riviera and the officers urged us into a song, which soon died out. The sky was still grey, the sea a glassy green. Near Ventimiglia we looked with curious eyes at the houses and cement ponds which had crumbled under the explosions: they were the first bombed-out homes we had seen in our lives. From the entrance to a railway tunnel the famous armoured train, Hitler’s gift to Mussolini, was sticking out; they kept it under there to prevent it from being bombed.
We approached the old border at Ponte San Luigi, and Captain Bizantini, who was leading us, started to stir up national pride over this business of Italy’s borders moving. But the conversation quickly dwindled into an embarrassing silence, because, in that initial period of the war, the topic of our Western borders was delicate and embarrassing even for the most avid Fascists. For our entry into the war at the moment when France collapsed had not taken us to Nice, but only to that modest little border town of Menton. The rest would come our way, they said, at the peace settlement, but by now the triumphal entry with full pomp had faded, and even in the hearts of those who had least doubts there was the worry that that disappointing delay might go on indefinitely; and the feeling spread that Italy’s fate was not in Mussolini’s hands but in those of his powerful ally.

[The Avanguadisti in Menton, from Into The War, Calvino, I.]