The memorial is perhaps also echoing how the ones with the further seeing eye can know of the fate of those far away - seeing it in the embers of a dying fire, or sometimes in the surface of standing water as the wind moves it.

Maybe the 'fey pipie' is recollecting past battles and seeing in his mind's eye men long gone...

My mother's mother knew her first husband was shot and killed at the Somme in the Great War, as she heard the shot as she lay in bed - and she even knew where he was hit which put the wind up the friends who'd been with him, who came to pay their respects.

She was always a bit fey - at her old house the door to the living room used to open of its own accord at about twenty five past four in the afternoon. It was 'Old Horben' - a deceased lodger who, when alive, would arrive to wind up the clock on the mantlepiece and sit down - with his flat cap and work clothes on to eat his cooked tea.

And, yes, when he died the clock ran down and never went again.

I was thinking - isn't Sicily one of those places where the housen are painted white? Under grey skies it is often surprising how a white building will seem to almost glow against the hillside. I have seen that in Northern England when walking in the Pennines. One white painted building is visible from far further off than brick or even light coloured stone houses.