A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "Don't go up there," Guariglia warned him as he was about to grip the handholds in the wall and climb up.

  "Why not?" Euridice asked. He was still the new man.

  "It's on the edge," Guariglia told him. "They have the edge sighted-in."

  "But if I go quickly, stay low, and just grab it and fall back, they won't have time to shoot."

  "I wouldn't do it," Biondo said.

  "But we don't have another ball," Euridice insisted.

  "Let Microscopico get it," the Guitarist called out.

  "Fuck you," said Microscopico, who was sick of being a small target. "Why don't you get it?"

  "I didn't kick it up there," the Guitarist answered, "and I'm not a midget."

  "I told you what to do," Microscopico called out.

  Euridice was already up on the grassy part of the roof. Guariglia shouted for him to wait. Alessandro and the Guitarist rose to their feet. "Come back," Guariglia called. "Leave it until nightfall. Not now. It's not worth it."

  Flat on his stomach, Euridice crawled along the grass toward the ball. He stopped just short of the rim and looked back. "It's nice up here," he said. "All I have to do is reach out my hand."

  Alessandro stepped forward and shouted in anger. "Euridice, don't be an idiot. Come down from there."

  For a moment, Euridice didn't move. He twisted, and looked down the length of his body at everyone who was looking up at him. Now he was one of them. "All right," he said, "I'll get it later."

  They sighed in relief, but then, for a reason that no one ever knew, perhaps because he felt he was so close, perhaps because everyone was watching, because no one had died since he had arrived, or because he forgot where he was and imagined that he was still in school, Euridice stretched out his hand to get the ball.

  In so doing, he raised his head. The soldiers in the cortile froze where they stood, hoping that Euridice's impulsiveness would be his guardian, but just before his hand would have swept the ball back down the grassy slope, his head snapped back and he tumbled down the incline. The right arm punched the air, puffing the body with it. He went over the sandbag wall and fell into the cortile, on his side.

  They knew by now how to recognize death, and they stood silently as a hundred clouds passed overhead, rushing south.

  Dearest Mama and Papa, Alessandro wrote.

  I have been writing infrequently because, although we don't do much here, it takes up all the time we have. My life is a little like that of a forest ranger, so you'd think I'd have some peace. I stare out into the hills and mountains for twelve hours, and then I'm free. Presumably, with all the time in the world to reflect, I could write brilliant essays and letters that you might read more than once, but I can't. It's too tense here, and everyone is too unhappy. In fact, if I ever get a short leave, I'm going to go to Venice and drink three bottles of wine.

  Today I saw something miraculous. I was looking southward through a firing port, with a telescope. It was evening and the light was coming from the northwest. Over the trenches a black cloud appeared, changing direction and moving as rapidly as an airplane, but it was the size of a palace. It writhed dropped, rose, and fell again, catching the light like chain mail or dulled sequins. It was a cloud of starlings or swallows that feed upon the corpses in the no-man's-lands between the lines. Guariglia, who has served farther down, says that they come out every evening and dance over the dead. I don't know what to make of it, as it is at once so beautiful and so grotesque.

  We are continually expecting an Austrian 'tick-ass' to come from nowhere, throw a grenade, fire some shots, and bayonet a poor idiot coming out of the latrine. This kind of thing makes you tense twenty-four hours a day. So do the shells. On average, eight to ten a week hit the Bell Tower, and you never know when they're coming. When they do come, they knock you out of bed if you're sleeping, or knock you down if you're standing up, or get you up onto your feet if you're sitting down. These shells, they don't like the status quo. They reverse everything. Dirt comes down from the roof, the walls shake, objects fall to the ground.

  We always have to look out for cannon drawn up close to our position. The enemy would like to fire point-blank, in an almost flat trajectory, at our gun ports. The shell would go through the steel plates and that would be the end of the Bell Tower, so the minute we see a cannon we all run to fire at it with rifles and machine guns, we pull the trench mortar into the cortile and drop shells into it, and we call up our own artillery. Even if we see some sort of optical device or wood frame, we assume that they're pre-sighting the gun ports so that they can move the cannon up at night, and we respond with the same great diligence. If someone were to put up a cross or try to make a laundry frame, he would draw all our fire and he probably would never know why.

  I fire twenty or thirty rounds a day, which may account for my shaky handwriting. I don't hear very well anymore, either. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go to the opera again, because I could hardly hear it even before my right ear drum was ruined by my own rifle.

  Another source of tension here is that we have no privacy. Most people have never had their own rooms, as I did, and because they were never alone they learned to live without reflection or contemplation. If I'm in a room with Guariglia, for example, a Romano, a harness-maker, and I sink into thought, he'll feel it, it will make him uncomfortable, and he'll do his best to distract me or engage me in conversation. Physical privacy doesn't exist here. The best you can do is to go to one of the store rooms, where there might be only two other people, who are concentrating on observation and firing out the ports.

  Although I don't write often, at least not as much as I used to, I have some things I'd like to clear up with you, or try to clear up, while I can. I feel that I've been living beyond my time, that we may never see each other again. It wasn't that way at first, but something has changed. Anyway, the passes that I get are not long enough to let me come home, and I don't have a way of alerting you so that you could meet me in Venice. Perhaps I'll get home this Christmas—I don't know. We're safe at present, more or less. The last one killed was a boy who, for the sake of retrieving a soccer ball, exposed himself to enemy fire rather than wait until dark. One never knows what will happen, and we're expecting an offensive now at any time.

  I mean a local offensive, because it seems unlikely that the Austrians will move along the whole line, but even that is possible. It rained so little this summer that the river is very low. We used to go out at night to swim, and the last time we did we found that at its deepest it was only up to the middle of my chest. That was a few dry weeks ago, and since then the snow has stopped melting in the mountains. Now the river is shallow enough to walk through in a dozen places. In a few days they'll be able to walk across it anywhere. Even if it rains tonight, it's too late, which is why I write.

  I promise several things. I'll fight well, I'll try to stay alive, and I'll concentrate on the former rather than on the latter, because the best way to stay alive is to be resolute and to risk. I don't care about our claims on the Alto Adige, so I'm fighting for nothing, but so is everyone and that's not the point. A nightmare has no justification, but you try your best to last through it, even if that means playing by the rules. I suppose a nightmare is having to play by rules that make no sense, for a purpose that is entirely alien, without control of either one's fate or even one's actions. To the extent that I do have control, I'll do what I can. Unfortunately, the war is ruled inordinately by chance, to the point almost where human action seems to have lost its meaning. They're executing soldiers not only for theft and desertion, but, sometimes, for nothing. I believe that after the war, for a long time, perhaps even for the rest of the century, the implications of this will reverberate through almost everything, but I'll save that kind of speculation for when I get home. Weil sit in the garden and talk about all these things, because if I get home I want to buy the garden back. I want to take out the weeds, thicken the grass, prune the trees, and make it what it once was. I have the energy
, the will, and, for the first time in my life, the patience.

  I want to tell you now how much I love you, all of you, and I've always neglected Luciana but now I'm so proud that she has become the beautiful and impressive woman that she has become. Don't worry about me, no matter what happens. We're nervous here, but not afraid. We have all looked into our souls, one way or another, and are content to die if need be. The only thing left to say is that I love you.

  Alessandro

  At the end of the month summer had been pushed back, winter was beginning to flood the Veneto with high clouds that had begun their relaxed flight to Africa, and the mountains were covered in white. When far to the north a blue lake in the clouds enlarged to the size of a principality and the sun came through, the Alps would glare in their entirety like flash powder, and the great white image would roll over the north of Italy, hanging in the azure air for all to see.

  Thirty more men arrived in the Bell Tower, army conscripts who had been in the lower trenches taking the brunt of the fighting since the beginning. Cynical, violent, and mutinous, they com pletely destroyed the civilized equilibrium of the naval contingent, made a great deal of noise, fouled the latrine, and fought among themselves. They played cards, drank, vomited, and whacked at each other with sheathed bayonets.

  The River Guard was at their mercy because they had brought a sergeant with them who rearranged everything and told everyone what to do. With their raucous laughter, their unshavenness, their skin diseases, their syphilis, and their apparent delight in killing, they seemed as overpowering as the war itself.

  They sent out nightly patrols of men who could see in the dark and who brought back with them a boar, a feral pig, and once even a foolish buck that had followed the nearly dry riverbed far from his home in the mountains. Huge feasts of meat and wine followed each patrol, and even these did their part in setting everyone on edge and convincing the River Guard that they were doomed.

  In a week the clouds broke apart in cool sunshine, and hopes were raised, but shortly after the sun reappeared so did thousands of enemy cavalry. They were visible in the rear of their lines, beyond artillery range, raising dust as they came into formation or deployed from one sector to another. It was possible to tell where they were even without a telescope. Wagons and caissons made dust clouds that looked like smoldering grass fires. Cavalry raised dust like a train. It moved evenly and smoothly across the landscape in an unmistakable indication of swift well fed warhorses.

  "I wish I were in the cavalry," Alessandro said to Guariglia. "I was raised to it. I studied riding and swordsmanship all my life."

  "Don't be crazy," Guariglia told him. "Our machine guns are waiting for those bastards and their poor horses. They won't last a minute."

  The soldiers knew exactly what was coming, as if it had been in their blood. "They're here for the break," they said of the distant cavalry, "to make a hole in our lines in several places and then pour through like grain that spills from a torn sack. Horses are not like men. They don't have the patience to sit around waiting. They only bring up horses just before the attack. The river's low. They'll be knocking at our door in two or three days."

  The whole line came alive and was packed with men, but not as much as the Austrian lines, which nearly burst with new uniforms and bobbing bayonets. So much ammunition was carried into the Bell Tower that each bunker was greatly reduced in size. The army men cut new firing ports, laid new mines, and put up new wire.

  "You naval cocksuckers don't know how to landfight. Why don't you go back to the sea, where you came from?" asked an infantryman who had a disc-like scar in place of much of his chin.

  "Give me a ticket," said Biondo.

  They persecuted Microscopico until he told them why he was in the navy. He was conscripted to sweep chimneys and clean boilers. "Because I'm so small," he said, "I can crawl through the pipes. And don't tell me you're brave until you've crawled through the guts of a boiler and out the stack. If you get stuck, you're through. They don't dismantle warships on account of chimney sweeps, and you can get stuck. Keep the ticket, thanks: I'd much rather be here." It was totally a lie: he had been a baker's helper on a supply ship.

  Huge rain clouds were visible over the mountains on the day when the artillery bombardment started. The clouds looked like wine-colored rock walls, and they moved slowly southward, feeling their way with tendrils of yellow and white lightning.

  The Italian artillery had been active for weeks in harassing the Austrian build-up. Shells sped overhead several times a minute, and the Austrians compressed their answer into the period between dusk and dawn. They had no need of observation, because nothing failed to come under their fire.

  When Alessandro had stood at the edge of the testing ground in Munich he was shaken and awed. Now the line of a hundred guns was ten deep, and it fired continuously, a hundred at a time, without let-up, allowing not a second for breathing at ease. When a shell actually hit the Bell Tower, which happened scores of times that night, everyone would be thrown to the floor, hoping that the roof would not collapse.

  "I wonder if we're going to be ordered out on a charge," the army man between Alessandro and Guariglia kept saying. "I see no sign, but they may decide to send us on a charge." Then he would laugh. He did this all night. At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone was deaf and trembling from artillery, he came to Guariglia and said, "You won't tell them who I am, will you?"

  "Who are you?"

  With obvious pain and dread, the soldier replied, "The king's son."

  "What are you doing here?" Guariglia asked.

  "My father sent me here to die."

  "Who's your father?" Alessandro asked, not having heard.

  "The king."

  "The king of what?"

  "Of Italy."

  "I want to talk to him after the war," Guariglia said. "I have a few things I'd like to say to him."

  "Everyone says that," the soldier answered, "but when they come into his presence they find that they can hardly speak."

  "You'll be there, won't you?"

  The mad soldier shook his head from side to side. "I'll be dead."

  "You have a point," Alessandro said. The prince was suffering so from fear that he turned to run for the latrine. "All right, all right," Alessandro called out after him. "You'll go to heaven. The king's son always goes to heaven."

  At five o'clock, just before the light, the artillery stopped. Though as soon as the enemy formations rose from the trenches the Italian artillery would throw everything it could onto the advancing tide, it was quiet. For a while no one knew. Their senses had been so disrupted by exploding shells that it took them fifteen minutes to understand silence.

  The rain had begun, and at night the river had risen because of storms in the mountains. The wind lashed the Bell Tower and droplets flew through the gun ports. Every few seconds bolts of lightning were followed by a deep forest of thunder, but after the barrage these thundercracks seemed gentle. The air was full with the smell of whiskey as the besieged 19th River Guard listened to the reassuring sound of rain pattering lightly against the roof, and they all were thinking of home.

  THE GUITARIST was in the communications room, and at five-fifteen he screamed that his lines had been cut. An infiltrator was in the trench.

  The River Guard looked anxiously at the infantry, who looked back with contempt. "Its not our redoubt," one of them said.

  "Go ahead," another added nonchalantly. "Someone's knocking."

  Everyone looked at Guariglia, who was the toughest, and the biggest, but it wasn't fair, and they knew it. They knew his children as if they had met them, and they understood the love that had moved him to describe them again and again. Besides that, he had done more than his share of difficult and dangerous things. Then they looked at the Guitarist, who had not done his share, but he was a musician, he was soft, he had a family, and he stared at the ground. Microscopico was too small. Biondo was at the gun port. The others were in other bunkers.
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  With his heart fluttering, Alessandro threw the sheath off his bayonet. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor. In an instant he had picked up the rifle and was running through the doorway, then across the cortile, then past the machine-gunner and into the communications trench.

  When he started out he had been afraid, but with each step his anger rose, until, as he rounded the slight bends in the trench, he was ferocious and electrified. He flipped the safety catch on the rifle and steered the raised bayonet adroitly through the turns. He felt bodiless, as if he were only two strong arms, a well oiled rifle, and a flashing bayonet gliding through the trench at top speed. He wanted only to kill the interlopers who had dared cut the lines.

  It would be too dangerous for them to go back. They would be there, waiting. They were.

  As he came around a sharp corner a shot was fired at him. It missed and drove into the wall of the trench. The Austrian soldier who had fired it shrank back in panic and worked the bolt on his rifle.

  Alessandro kept running. Just as the enemy soldier, a young boy with a delicate face, a stranger, had expressed another round into the chamber and was about to raise his rifle, Alessandro plunged the bayonet into his chest, doubling him up as if his body were a clenched fist, killing him. Two shots sounded from ahead.

  The two companions of the boy Alessandro had just killed were firing at him. One shot missed. The other struck Alessandro at the top of his shoulder, throwing him backward into the sandy wall of the trench. He hadn't let go of his rifle, and it pulled out of the dead soldier and righted itself in his hands.

  The Austrians dropped to their knees and worked their bolts. Alessandro was in no condition to aim. He pointed the rifle in their direction and fired. One of them rolled onto the ground. The other fired and missed again. Seeing that his friend was now still, that Alessandro was reloading, and that he himself could not reload faster, he threw down his weapon and struggled over the top of the trench.