A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  The River Guard had washed and shaved, and they stood at the rails, peering at the land, their faces red from wind and sun. Only when they had rounded the Gargano and when they pulled into Brindisi Harbor had they smelled the sea rather than the land—the rich wet smell of salt, iodine, and shellfish curing in the sun. Brindisi was where the Adriatic flowed into the Mediterranean, where wind and waves rocked the brine back and forth through the coral.

  "Ah! We look good, don't we," said Fabio, a young soldier who was terribly handsome. Everyone liked him, and smiled in his presence. He had a thousand friends and had had a thousand women, and he was happy all the time, but he was afraid to be alone.

  "What does that mean?" Guariglia asked. Guariglia was balding and misshapen. The teeth on the right side of his mouth were bigger than those on the left, and his nose looked like the horn of Africa. Fabio had been a waiter in a fancy cafe near Guariglia's harness shop, but they hadn't known one another.

  "What does that mean?" Guariglia repeated.

  "What?"

  "What you just said."

  "What did I say?"

  "You said, Ah! We look good, don't we.'"

  Fabio blinked. "I was just wondering if there were any women in Brindisi."

  "How could a city not have women?" Alessandro asked.

  "I mean women" Fabio answered. "I'll go to a cafe. I know which women come to be taken away, and I've never looked better. In half an hour I'd be in bed with a woman with tits as big as the Matterhorn."

  They regarded him with wonder. "What's wrong with you, Fabio?"

  "Me? Nothing's wrong with me. I wear a white jacket and shiny shoes. I'm saving for my own automobile. What's wrong with you, Guariglia? You sit around in a filthy apron, pushing heavy needles through pieces of leather. Sometimes four or five women a day want me to sleep with them. You, you're lucky if a horse breaks wind in your face."

  "But Fabio," Guariglia said, "you're a feather."

  "I'm a feather?"

  "An ostrich plume. A man should not be an ostrich plume."

  Fabio straightened his hair and tucked-in his shirt. "You're jealous, Guariglia. You're ten years older than me and I've slept with one thousand, four hundred, and sixteen women. How many women have you slept with?"

  "You count?" Alessandro asked.

  "I have them in a book. How many, Guariglia?"

  "Just one, my wife."

  "Then I can't even talk to you," Fabio replied triumphantly.

  "She loves me," Guariglia said to the waves.

  After the cattle boat tied up next to a slender pier on the sea side of the naval base, not far from the red flags, the River Guard disembarked and marched up a rocky hill to an open shed where hammocks were slung from the beams. As they were eating, Fabio started the rumor that they were going to be allowed a few days in Brindisi. Even he believed it, until they were told that they could exercise by running up and down the hill, but that they would leave in the evening, when the colonel arrived.

  Alessandro was summoned to a corner of the shed, where the three officers had settled.

  "Alessandro, you'll go to tell the colonel that we've arrived. You speak well and I'm sure you'll make a fine impression on him," the lieutenant said.

  "You'd better," one of the sub-lieutenants added. "It'll be hell for us to be directly under a colonel. I think you should know why we're sending you, and I'm prepared to be frank."

  "I'm prepared to be Alessandro, and I know already."

  "You do?"

  "You want me to be the lightning rod."

  "Only because you're intelligent enough to handle it properly."

  "And you're not."

  "If one of us goes he'll treat us like corporals. If he arrives and finds us in charge, having sent you, he may treat us like majors. After all, he's used to dealing with majors. Tell him that we're here, and that we're ready. He's at the Hotel Monopol. Naturally, we don't know his name, but how many colonels could be staying in one small hotel?"

  "Who shall I say we are?"

  "Us."

  "Yes, but who are we?"

  "We don't know, Alessandro, and even if we did, you know we can't say."

  "I can't say we're the River Guard?"

  "No. I imagine he'll know who we are, even if we don't."

  "And if he doesn't?"

  "That's why we thought of you, Dottore."

  Alessandro rode a donkey-engine to the perimeter of the base. Then he walked into Brindisi, disappearing among the horse butcheries and the cemeteries. Before he went to the Hotel Monopol he bought a kilo of prosciutto in three packages, one for Guariglia and two for himself.

  In the Hotel Metropol, which stood across the street from the Hotel Monopol, a desk clerk told Alessandro that the colonel was on the fourth floor, in room 43.

  Alessandro labored up long flights of whitewashed stairs, to an open window that gave out on the town and the sea. He stood on a worn Persian carpet that covered the landing, gazing at the brilliant colors. The town had closed for the afternoon, with the exception of the faint sound of motors and engines and an occasional steam whistle in the naval area. To the south were no warships but only empty rooftops, date palms, and sparkling rust-colored headlands projecting into an agitated sea. Alessandro listened to the wind whistling dryly over the sill.

  He turned when he heard footsteps, and saw a woman descending from the floor above. Her hair was dyed blond badly enough to look orange, and she was cinched into a Bristol-blue dress that made parts of her appear much smaller than they really were and other parts overflow. She was almost short enough to have been a midget, and her expression was of permanent confusion. When she saw Alessandro she began to sway outlandishly as she came down the steps.

  "Where is your mama?" he asked.

  "At home," she answered.

  "And your papa?"

  She seemed not to understand, and looked at him blankly.

  "Your papa."

  She gave no response.

  "Go home!" Alessandro said, as if to a dog that had followed him on a country road, and she ran down the steps.

  He found the colonel's room on the fourth floor, straightened his uniform, stood at attention, and knocked sharply. After no response, he knocked again, and he kept on knocking thereafter, until an impatient voice screamed,

  "Why!"

  "Colonel."

  "Why!"

  "Messenger."

  "Goddamn it!" To a private, such irritation in the voice of a colonel was not encouraging. "Wait a minute," the colonel said.

  Alessandro remained at attention, listening to muffled conversation within, to shutters slamming, doors opening, and drawers closing. After ten minutes, he stood down. After half an hour, he began to pace. After an hour, he sat on the floor, his legs sticking out into to the hallway and resting on the crimson runner. Another half hour passed, and he took out one of the packages of prosciutto and began to eat.

  Then he heard the latches on the door. By the time they were unlocked, Alessandro was on his feet, trying to put the remaining prosciutto back into its package, but it wouldn't go, so, just before the door opened, he tried to eat it even though it was a very large piece. His cheeks ballooned to the breaking point, and a lengthy sheet of it, fat and all, hung down almost to his collar bone. The door opened.

  A woman with hat, parasol, and jewelry flitted past Alessandro on the way to the stairs. She looked very married to someone notable in the town.

  The colonel was in full uniform, tremendously beribboned, ready to kill. He held out his hand as if a message would land in it. When he saw Alessandro's stuffed cheeks, and the dangling ham, he looked skyward in disgust.

  "What is this?" he asked.

  Alessandro put his hand to his mouth and spat out a huge ball of saliva-covered prosciutto. He snapped to attention again, holding the prosciutto slightly behind him and out of the way. "Sir!" he said.

  "You shut up!" the colonel screamed. He pointed to the dispatch bag that Alessandro had bro
ught for carrying groceries. "Just give me my message and get the hell out of here!"

  "Sir, I..."

  "Shut up!" the colonel screamed. He grabbed the bag, breaking one of the straps and leaving a welt on Alessandro's neck. He ripped it open and pulled out the two packages. For a moment, he held them in his hands. Then he opened one. As the colonel saw the ham, Alessandro thought he was going to be killed. "Unwritten message!" he said as fast as he could.

  "Unwritten message?" the colonel repeated, with one eye closed, the other squinting, and his fist clenched around the ham.

  "Yes sir!"

  "What is the message?" the colonel asked, breathing like someone who is about to die.

  "We're here."

  "Who's here?"

  "We, sir."

  "Who is we?"

  "My unit, sir."

  "What unit, idiot!"

  "I can't say."

  "You can't say, or you don't know?" the colonel asked. "Who sent you? You have no insignia. Why are you out of uniform?"

  "The lieutenants sent me, sir."

  "What lieutenants?"

  "From the cattle boat."

  "I'm going to kill you," the colonel announced, "but first I want to know what you're doing. What's the name of your unit?"

  "You should know, even if I don't."

  "What is the name of the lieutenant who sent you?"

  "He has no name, and you know it!"

  "What about you, do you have a name?"

  "Of course not!" Alessandro screamed.

  "Your unit has no name either."

  "No."

  "You don't wear insignia."

  "No."

  "Are you in the army?"

  "Yes."

  "Well what the hell do you want from me?"

  "I'm supposed to tell you that we've arrived."

  "From where?"

  Alessandro thought the colonel was either an idiot or playing games. "I know," he said, "that you know that I don't know and that you do."

  "Where are you stationed? Did you escape from a hospital?" The colonel was now almost dejected.

  "We're not stationed anywhere. We float. I'm a private, but I warn you, don't play games with me."

  The colonel blinked.

  "We await your coming."

  "For what?"

  "To take command."

  The colonel was a decorated officer. Alessandro could see from his ribbons that he had been wounded in battle. He stepped into his room, looked back at Alessandro with a hurt expression, and slowly closed the door.

  "My prosciutto," Alessandro screamed. "Give me my ham!" When he heard no reply other than the sliding of bolts, he began to kick the door. "My prosciutto! Give me my prosciutto, you bastard! My ham!" A woman passing in the hall clung to the opposite wall and hurried to the landing.

  Alessandro charged down the stairs, knocking her into the banister. His teeth were clenched, and by the time he reached the lobby he was trembling. He felt abused and victimized. Switching the mass of half-chewed prosciutto from his left hand to his right, he pitched it as hard as he could at the desk clerk. The clerk ducked, and the ham jangled some keys as it penetrated deep into one of the cubbyholes behind the reception desk. The clerk rose, and held up his arms as if to say, What?, and Alessandro went out onto the street.

  As soon as he stepped on the pavement he saw a sign across the way that said HOTEL MONOPOL.

  UNDERWAY SINCE the previous midnight, beyond the capes of Otranto and Santa Maria di Leuca, they found themselves in the middle of the Ionian Sea, heading south into a space that was purely hot, blue, and empty, and in which no clouds appeared and the water was the same color as the sky. In mid-afternoon the wind stopped, so they had only the breeze they made with their own speed. All the soldiers stripped down to the waist and changed into the campaign shorts they had never worn, other than for swimming, in all the time they had been in the Veneto. Despite the heat they had to wear boots, or their feet would have been burned on the deck.

  "We haven't turned since we left Brindisi," Fabio said.

  "How do you know?" Alessandro asked. "You can't see any fixed points of reference."

  "What are fixed points of reference?"

  "Nothing."

  "Fuck you. We haven't turned."

  "We're heading directly south, to Africa," Guariglia mumbled.

  "You know what the Turks do, Guariglia?" asked a steelworker whose name was Ricardo. "I'll tell you what they do."

  "I know what they do...."

  "They cut you up in a thousand pieces while you're still alive."

  Fabio looked devastated.

  "What's the matter, Fabio? You'll still be handsome even when you're cut into a thousand pieces. You may even be a thousand times handsomer, and, think, you could sleep with a thousand women at once—-if they liked shish kebab."

  "Fabio would rather be dead than mutilated, wouldn't you, Fabio?"

  "Yes," said Fabio. "To be mutilated is the worst thing. I cannot think of anything worse."

  "That's because you're a feather," Guariglia added.

  "No, it's because I want to die knowing that I'm whole. What's wrong with that?"

  "Don't worry," Alessandro told him.

  "You may drown."

  "You said they wouldn't waste torpedoes on a cattle boat."

  "Now we're in the open sea. A submarine can surface, and sink us with its gun."

  "How can they get to the gun? When the little guys run from the inside, a hundred and fifty of us would shoot them."

  "They can emerge near the gun, which has an armored shield."

  It was too hot to read, and the two books that Alessandro had in his duffel were meant to be read not in the sun but in a warm library on a winter night, so he stared at the waves, which moved in flat swells and did not break. The water, though full of light, was translucent. As even and smooth as gelatin, it moved in shallow breathless sighs, and was a deep mesmerizing blue.

  In the evening they had bread, cheese, wine, and a lot of water. After they watched the sun go down they assembled in the main hold.

  The real colonel had called for the floodlight. It shined over their heads and lit the forward bulkhead as if it were a backdrop in the theater. Highlighted against the rusty orange, the colonel sat down on a canvas chair.

  He was a Neapolitan of about fifty. Though they didn't know it, his name was Pietro Insana. He was short, fat, and fatherly. Careful to think before he spoke, he had uncanny authority. Alessandro knew immediately that its source was mainly that he knew the right course of action. He had been a politician, but he spoke gently, and though they imagined that he did not know how to shoot a rifle or throw a grenade, all the power was his.

  "Good evening," he said when they were quiet. He could hardly be heard over the engines, and he relaxed in the chair as if he were at home in Naples, on the terrace, listening to his daughter play the violin. His feet did not touch the floor, and sometimes in the pauses and even as he spoke he stared up at the sky, where the stars had begun to appear.

  "I'm your colonel and perhaps you won't be surprised that I can't tell you my name," he said.

  The soldiers looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

  "This is madness, no? You've been instructed not to use your names, you have no insignia, your unit has no title, and here we are, sailing south, perhaps to Africa, you think, you have a colonel for three platoons, and the colonel is not a military man. What next?

  "This: not only must you not use one another's last names, you must forget them. You must forget the names of your friends, and you must forget your own names."

  This occasioned nervous laughter.

  "And that's not all. You!" he asked a soldier in the front row. "Where are you from?"

  "Santa Rosa delle Montagne," the soldier said, thinking of the contentment he had left behind.

  "No," the colonel said.

  "No?" the soldier asked meekly.

  "You are from Milano."

 
"But Colonel," the soldier ventured, "I'm from Santa Rosa delle Montagne. I was born there. My mother and my father both..."

  "No," the colonel interrupted, "you are from Milano. From now on, you are all from Milano." He looked away, and added, "Milano is very big."

  "Ahhh!" they said, almost to a man.

  "Upon pain of death," the colonel affirmed.

  "Upon pain of death," a soldier repeated.

  "Do you want your families to be murdered?"

  To this they responded with rapt attention.

  "I think it was a mistake to have brought you together already knowing each other, but the army thought you would be good for the job—naval infantry, only a hundred and fifty left, with nothing to do. Unfortunately for you, you were too few to be used in a conventional sense and too many to disband. In war it's dangerous to be experienced, battle-hardened, and decimated, because you are at once necessary and expendable.

  "We wanted to shut you up even before you left Mestre. You may find this hard to believe, but no one knows where you are—neither the army nor the navy. You won't be sending any mail, and you won't be getting it. Not because we want to deprive you of contact with home, but because we don't want any kind of trail, either to you or from you."

  He shifted in his chair and looked up at the night sky, which was crossed by a ribbon of smoke. "Why?" he asked, almost like a philosopher. Dancing courtesans could not have held the River Guard's attention better in the long moment during which the colonel composed the answer to his own question.

  "The army has had even more desertions from the line than are generally known: tens of thousands, in fact. In most cases the army relies upon the police, the carabinieri, or the military police. It's not hard to catch deserters if you know where they are. They seldom resist. If they do, two or three men are enough to deal with it, and that kind of thing is what the police do best.

  "But the army has a special problem. Deserters are of many types and strengths, like the sperm that try to reach the egg. Most are weak and frightened, and they're caught before they exit the Veneto. Some get as far as Rome or Milan, and these come in various shades of trouble. The very difficult ones, however, get all the way to Sicily. Sicily is the egg. There they are not content to remain mere deserters. Many of them have gone into the hills and banded together. Not just alone, with the Mafia. Before the war I was a magistrate, and I used to work on this kind of problem. We had begun to make inroads against these people. Half of them had gone to America, and we were beginning to get at their structure, but since the war they have revived, especially the ones deep in the country, because the army doesn't sweep anymore the way it used to: we don't have the manpower for anything but the struggle in the north. We don't know to what degree they maintain contact with their brothers in the cities, but we must assume that they remain loyal to each other and that they have strengthened.