A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  The fires stretched so far into the distance that they seemed to be lapping at the base of the hills, and the earth seemed to have opened, and released a ghastly white light.

  Then an army officer carrying a pistol walked through the dining car. Though he was inspecting the interior, his eyes were turned upward to follow the footsteps of someone who paced him, out of sight, on the roof.

  They crossed the perimeter and rolled quietly into Innsbruck, where not a soldier was in sight.

  MORE THAN a hundred years before, Raphael's portrait of Bindo Altoviti, "when he was young," had traveled by horse cart from Florence to Munich. During rainstorms in the valley of the Adige the dirty gray canvas that protected the cart had leaked in many places, but the wooden case that held the painting was watertight, having been caulked at the seams, and Bindo Altoviti stayed dry. In the Brenner Pass after a quick snowstorm one of the mules slipped on a sheet of ice and nearly pulled everything down the face of a steep cliff. Otherwise, the journey had been unremarkable—except that an important part of the soul of Italy had been moved north to reside in the Alte Pinakothek. That the Germans should consider its few pfennigs' worth of oxides and canvas among their proudest possessions, and that the Italians should feel relatively empty for their absence, said a great deal about the principles that Alessandro Giuliani continually struggled to understand and that Raphael had mastered completely.

  Alessandro had wanted to go to Munich not only to study the painting but to look into the eyes of young Bindo Altoviti and see a man who had come through time propelled and pressured by the laws of art. He stood with Janet in a quiet gallery that smelled of freshly applied oils hundreds of years after the fact. How this came to be, they did not know, but the shadows, the great expanse of dark wooden flooring, and the snow-covered mountains that they could see through the windows seemed to conspire to lift and hold the paintings as if they were balanced atop columns of water or light. Had the paintings merely been tacked to the walls instead of resting atop the breaking surf of sunlight and shadow, they would not have been a tenth as arresting.

  Janet stepped off to the left to examine a huge painting of a medieval battle. The horses were as rounded and swollen as balloons and had red martingales and bridles of gold. And the horses, pathetically rotund, frozen, floating in time, bared their teeth in the fight, like dogs, as their enemies and their allies ascended quietly into the place of the imagination where their motion evaporated and left them infinitely wise.

  With neither apologies nor care, nor thought, nor credit given to the many contrary proofs, Alessandro believed that the portrait of Bindo Altoviti— "il ritratto suo quando era giovane," his portrait when he was young—was as alive as any of the light that calibrates the time that says of us that we live. His eyes could see, his hand could touch, and he was breathing. The black silk that fell from his shoulder was new, and beyond the emerald wall behind him, Rome breathed in May.

  Young Bindo Altoviti, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altoviti was saying, half with longing, half with delight, "These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds."

  The striking visage of Bindo Altoviti was of a type that had lasted and could be seen on the boys who worked in the cafes on the Via del Corso or drove tourists through the back streets, in carriages that hardly fit between the walls. If Bindo Altoviti could last through time not only to live in his portrait in a German cloister but to sweat in the bakeries of Rome, then perhaps Alessandro had to abandon his own short view of history in favor of the careful process of descent, the awesome repetitions, the inexplicable similarities and reappearances that made a unity of many generations of fathers and sons.

  In the eyes of Bindo Altoviti, Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph. In a sense they were still living. Bindo Altoviti, unknowingly, had become the young men, unknowing, on the streets of Rome. Had they been aware, they might have come to see his portrait, but it hardly mattered, for what they did would make no difference in the way time cracked and burst above their short lives like a thundering star shell. Except that now Alessandro had seen a benevolent diagram of passion and color in perfect balance, and he knew from Bindo Altoviti's brave and insolent expression that he was going to stay alive forever.

  A DISTANT sound rattled the windows of the Alte Pinakothek. Though faint, it shook Alessandro's chest and reverberated in his lungs.

  "What is that?" he asked an old museum guard.

  "Nothing to worry about," the guard replied in Italian, even though the question had been posed in German. "It has happened every morning at eleven, without fail, since the war began. It's the testing of the field guns."

  "Where is it done?" In the echoing rooms, Alessandro was unable to determine its direction.

  "I don't know."

  Alessandro and Janet went outside, and were able to tell that the firing was coming from the east. They hired a carriage and told the driver to take them to it.

  After an hour of following quiet streets, crossing railroad tracks, and traveling roads that went through forests and fields, they came to an enormous parade ground.

  Coils of barbed wire spilled into the dirt track, isolating the military encampment from walkers and picnickers. Cannon, caissons, and motorized trucks in tightly regimented equipment parks covered most of what had been green in the fields, and over and beyond them, on a low hill, were the guns, a hundred of them in a single unbroken line. The order of firing proceeded steadily down the long row almost like the ticking of a clock—except that clocks alternate, first ticking, then tocking, and this great machine expressed itself in a monotone.

  "Ka-phoom!" it would say, immediately after one of its segments had convulsed, sprung back, and coughed out a burst of fire and smoke, and then, "Ka-phoom!" when, two seconds later, the next gun let loose.

  Methodical as it was, neither the method nor the maddeningly exact timing was what held the carriage driver and his two passengers still, but, rather, the sound itself. Alessandro thought that no matter how many times he would hear it, he would never get used to it. He was wrong.

  The signature of each blast was a deep concussion, alone for a tenth of a second and then joined by a sharp metallic rattling like that of the sheet metal used in the theater to mimic thunder. "Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom!" As the metallic effect was slightly out of phase with the initial concussion, beginning an instant later and ending an instant later, so with the soundless waves that followed upon each shot. They were felt through the entire body; mostly in the chest and throat, but also in the extremities, on the forehead, and, depending upon the position of the jaw and the tightness of the cheeks, within the mouth. Natural thunder was neither as deep nor as sharp as this, and though Alessandro had grown up in Rome, a city that is perhaps the best catcher of thunder in all the world, he had never heard it come on so evenly, for even thunder rests.

  The horse was skittish. Just a little way over the fields, the snake of a hundred segments kept up its concussive bursts, and each report moved the carriage and made the wheels creak.

  "It's beginning to make me shake," Janet announced, trembling not from emotion bu
t from the charged air that shook her lips, her chest, and the muscles in her upper thighs and arms.

  The sound of the air blasts rolled down the hillsides and over the fields. With never a pause, tiny figures in gray next to each gun quickly reloaded. Alessandro's infatuation with Janet was overwhelmed by the imperative of the guns, for they were deeper even than thunder. "Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom!" This was the sound that, on the Western Front, had begun to drown out the music of the world. It was clear to Alessandro, and easily understandable, that, for some, music would cease to exist. But not for him, not for him. The electricity rose up his spine and he trembled not from shock but because, over the sound of the guns, he was still able to hear sonatas, symphonies, and songs.

  IV. THE 19TH RIVER GUARD

  SEPTEMBER, 1916... A dozen soldiers stood just inside the entrance to the tunnel, or squatted, leaning slightly forward, using their rifles for support. They loitered there to get out of the sun and to catch the continuous cool breeze that came from within. A lieutenant of infantry emerged from the grove of pale trees that protected the mouth of the shaft, walking briskly, with his left hand resting on his pistol belt and his right grasping a short stick. Following him was a stocky young naval cadet who struggled under the weight of a duffel bag, his rifle knocking against his side.

  The men in the tunnel began to rise, but sank back down when the lieutenant motioned with his hand that they should ignore him. Nonetheless, the ones who were smoking removed the cigarettes from their lips and held them at a polite angle in front of their stomachs until the officer had passed.

  "Is this a naval installation?" the cadet asked as they stepped into the tunnel, a hundred kilometers from the sea. "It has to be a mistake."

  "Put your duffel and the rest here," the lieutenant said, having taken up position next to a wooden cart on tracks that ran through the tunnel.

  The cadet had red hair and a chipped tooth in the front of his mouth. He gladly threw down his things. He followed the lieutenant into the shaft, pulling the cart after them. "I was on the sea," he said, as if to protest.

  "If a supply train comes through in either direction we'll have to lift this off the tracks. We each take an end and move the cart to the other side. The supply trains move fast, but you can hear them from far away."

  They had been walking for about ten minutes, passing beneath a seemingly endless chain of dim bulbs and wood beams, when the lieutenant answered the naval cadet's question. He didn't get right to the point, as if he didn't care, or could no longer concentrate. "Don't worry," he said. "It isn't really dangerous here anymore. At sea, you wouldn't be much safer."

  "Safer? I was on the Euridice."

  "The cruiser?"

  "Yes, sir, the cruiser. I came aboard in the evening, the next morning at four we left Brindisi, at two in the afternoon we hit a mine, and at two-ten we began to sink. Almost everyone would have escaped, but a submarine was following us. It surfaced and motored around to take advantage of our list. On the starboard side, our guns wouldn't depress low enough to hit it. Our shells passed over the conning tower, and as we rolled more and more they got higher and higher.

  "I saw their captain. He put three shots in our side point-blank. The first two shots made the ship shudder. The third hit the magazine and we blew apart in a dozen pieces. I had been in the signals room and I was blown through the door, over the sea. In mid air the wall passed by me and I went through the door again as it caught up with me and moved ahead. When I hit the water, I was thrown against the maps. They crumpled up and I slid into the sea. I smashed my face against something and swallowed brine, but I came to the surface and swam around until I grabbed a half-submerged chair."

  "A chair?"

  "I think it may have been the captain's chair, but I don't know. It wasn't the signals chair, it was too heavy. I sat in it and bled for an hour until I was picked up by one of our destroyers. I kept my head above water until the chair rolled over, and then I'd get up on it again and try to keep my balance. The wound was on my face, as you can see. I was lucky. If it had been lower down I would have bled into the sea until I died, the way a lot of us did.

  "When the submarine passed through the debris, I thought the crew looked remorseful—because the wounded were giving up, letting go, and sinking—but when they passed me they laughed. The bastards."

  "How many men were lost?"

  "We had twelve hundred and forty-two when we went out. The destroyer pulled a hundred and fifty-seven from the water."

  The lieutenant shook his head.

  "I got a medal. I was on the ship for less than a day, and I never even saw the code book. I got a medal for keeping my balance in a floating chair."

  "Every day," the lieutenant said, "shells land somewhere along this line with good effect, and soldiers sail through the air. They don't end up in floating chairs."

  Now and then they passed groups of men on their way out. Few wounded were among them, and those who were wounded were walking.

  "It's quiet now," the lieutenant told the naval cadet. "Very little has happened since the middle of August, which probably means that in the fall we're really going to get it."

  "There are cycles?"

  "Like the weather."

  "We've been in this tunnel for a half an hour."

  "It's four kilometers long. We'll emerge on the riverbank. It's the only way to go to and from the trenches, safe from artillery. We're descending not because we're going deeper into the earth but because the terrain slopes toward the river: we're always eight meters from the surface, unless we pass under a hill. The earth is soft here, no rock. The miners did this in less than a month."

  "Sir, I'm in the navy," the naval cadet said, stopping as if to go no farther.

  "So am I."

  "You are?" The cadet was astonished. In his well broken-in green uniform and infantry belts the lieutenant was the paradigm of a seasoned soldier.

  "Yes. Do you think you're going to wear that stupid uniform when you get up ahead? You'll exchange it for an army set within a day. It's too easy to be shot in blue. You stand out too clearly."

  "They have commissaries in the trenches?"

  "No, you pull it off a man who has been killed. He gets to be buried in your naval uniform, you wash his and sew up the holes, and you're both happy."

  "I see. We're both happy. Why is the navy in the trenches, anyway?" the cadet asked. Despite his experience on the Euridice, he thought the sea might be safer, and he considered going back to it.

  "We're the River Guard," the lieutenant answered. He stopped to take out a cigarette. The tunnel seemed infinite, and the cadet wondered if he were not dreaming or dead. "The river's water, isn't it? At the beginning of the war they didn't know things were going to go this way up here—so badly, so slow—and they apportioned too much to the navy."

  "Not when I went in."

  "You went in late. Before that, it was different. All kinds of clever asses joined the navy to keep out of the trenches, and ended up here."

  "Yes, but what is it that we do here?"

  "The North is always in danger of an Austrian wheeling movement, but, here, because we're near the mountains, we have few attempts at maneuver. The real infantry stays to the south, and we hold the water line. Someone thought it would assuage the pride of the navy, if we had to fight on land, to call us river guards."

  They started walking again. "The river runs like this," the lieu tenant said, motioning with a stick, "from the mountains. Ten kilometers to the north, on steep limestone cliffs, the Alpini take over. Nothing big can come through in a place as vertical as that.

  "We're deployed on the western bank of the Isonzo, from the cliffs to a point about ten kilometers south of where we are now. The river does most of our work for us, but you have to watch it closely.

  "They're not Jesus Christs, you see. They can't walk on water, so they can't make a massed attack, because we can deal with boats, swimmers, and bridges. When they try that kind of stuff they
get killed: volunteers—Czechs? Hungarians? How the hell do I know. I think they aren't told. They get in the boats, or they swim. Even at night, most of them die before they get to this side.

  "The only ones who make it into our trenches are the ones who swim on moonless nights, like Indians, and suddenly they jump down from nowhere and kill you with a bayonet."

  "That's happened?"

  "It happens every week. It's for morale. It's supposed to make them feel good and us feel bad. I know it makes us feel bad, but I really can't see how it makes them feel good. To begin with, they seldom get back to their lines. I told you. Volunteers. Idiots. Suicides. The same with us."

  "Us?"

  "We're supposed to reply in kind."

  "Am I going to have to do it?" the cadet asked, his voice cracking.

  "How many times do I have to tell you? It's all volunteers—the strange ones, the ones who think they're Indians, the ones who decide it's time to die."

  A white pinhole of light appeared ahead. As they moved toward it, they could hear the muted sound of machine-gun fire.

  "It's quiet," the officer said, "but we've got a problem."

  "What's that?"

  "No rain. The river's drying up. Another two weeks and you'll be able to run across."

  "Oh God."

  "Well, yes, they've been moving up lots of men. In the last month, their cooking fires doubled. I don't know what they eat, but it smells like shit."

  "We do the same, don't we?"