El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Caballeros de Brusadelli

El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Caballeros de Brusadelli, also called the Order of Brusadelli, is a fictional organization created by the Colonel and the Gran Maestro. Its ceremonial language is comic, but the history beneath it is grave: the two founders’ shared experience of war, their understanding of soldiers who tried to escape it, and their contempt for those who made money from it. The Order’s small membership and private deliberations turn comradeship into a deliberately invented institution, one that sits beside the military hierarchy without pretending to command it.

Foundation and Name

The Order came into being in a series of conversations between the Colonel and the Gran Maestro, who at the time was a head waiter. Both men spoke Spanish, which they regarded as the best language for founding an order, and used it to give their invention a stately, foreign-sounding title. The joke is built into the institution from its first act: its name honors a notorious Milanese profiteer, a multimillionaire who avoided taxes and became publicly embroiled in a dispute with his young wife. The founders turn this disreputable figure into their supposed patron, setting ceremonial reverence against the unheroic realities of wealth and self-interest.

The Colonel and the Gran Maestro treat the Order’s existence with mock formality. The Colonel asks for news of its affairs and discusses possible plans as its Supreme Commander; the Gran Maestro answers in the same invented register. Their roles are part of the private language they share, not evidence of a public organization. The account explicitly identifies the Order as wholly fictitious, and gives it only five members.

Veterans’ Knowledge and Purpose

The founders’ bond rests on their experience as infantrymen: one had served as a sergeant and the other as a lieutenant, and both had fought at Pasubio, Grappa, and the Piave. They had also endured the earlier fighting on the Isonzo and the Carso, which they regarded with shame as stupid butchery. The Colonel retained its technical lessons, but otherwise wanted it remembered as something shameful and stupid, not as a source of glory. Their experience thus supplies the Order with an ethical counterweight to its mock nobility: its founders know what military decisions cost the people who must carry them out.

They also shared detailed knowledge of how soldiers tried to avoid attacks they did not wish to face. The men they remembered used different forms of deception or self-inflicted illness to evade service; the founders knew these practices not as abstract rumors but as part of the common knowledge of soldiers. Their recollections include poor men trying to escape another frontal attack and richer men seeking ways to avoid the war from elsewhere. The distinction sharpens the founders’ anger at those who profited from conflict: the burden of fighting and the means of escaping it were not shared equally.

The Colonel’s later account of combat gives that knowledge a broader context. He recalls killing enemy soldiers during a winter of attacks without hating them, and tells Renata that having killed so many had made it possible to be kind. The Order is not described as an organization that acts on the battlefield, but its founding animus belongs to this distinction: the enemy in front of a soldier is not the same as the people who profit from war or order others into avoidable danger. In a later conversation, the Colonel also describes a regiment destroyed under orders and explains the army’s expectation of obedience through the image of a dog hoping for a good master. That account echoes the Order’s skepticism about military authority without establishing a formal program for it.

Membership and Activities

The Order’s membership is small and personal. When the Colonel asks what has happened within it, the Gran Maestro reports that the cook at the Magnificent has been raised to the rank of Commendatore. The promotion is presented as a comic ceremony of trust: the cook has made a remarkable claim about his conduct on his fiftieth birthday, and the Gran Maestro says he accepted it without corroboration because the man never lied. The Colonel agrees that the cook is truthful, while teasingly warning that the subject calls for caution. Their exchange shows how the Order’s invented ranks let the two veterans mix affectionate respect with irreverence.

Their plans remain modest. They consider paying homage to their patron through a public gathering at Piazza San Marco or the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello, but the Gran Maestro doubts that religious authorities would permit such a manifestation at that moment. The Colonel therefore abandons public plans for the winter and proposes that they work within their own ranks; the Gran Maestro agrees that they should regroup. The decision leaves the Order’s activity where it began: among its members, sustained by conversation rather than public ceremony.

Narrative Function and Significance

The Order’s grand title, ranks, patron, and proposed homage parody the outward trappings of institutions, while its five members and unpublicized work reveal how little power it possesses. Its seriousness lies instead in what the founders remember and refuse to celebrate. Their war memories include both the skill required to survive attacks and the shame of campaigns they considered needless; their shared hostility is directed toward profiteering, not indiscriminately toward every person caught on the opposing side.

The Order also gives the Colonel and the Gran Maestro a form in which to express comradeship. Its mock hierarchy does not erase their respect for one another; it makes that respect playable, through titles, promotions, and deliberations whose solemnity is knowingly theatrical. Against the Colonel’s later descriptions of rationed supplies, damaged regiments, and obedience to distant command, this private brotherhood offers no solution to military failure. It does preserve a shared judgment about its human cost—and a small, invented structure through which the two veterans can keep that judgment between them.