A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Then they were hit again with the high-pressure brine. "Christ!" Fabio screamed, and, because he had protested, the soldier with the hose aimed the stream of water at his jaw. It hurled him against a wall. When they were done, Fabio was less steady than Guariglia.

  They stumbled through a corridor, went down some steps, and were literally pushed into a pool of warm water.

  "What is this?"

  "It's a swimming pool," Ludovico said.

  "It's too shallow."

  They were unable to figure out what it was as they sat in it and listened to the wind coming up from the sea.

  "It's a bubble bath," Fabio said, his hand pressed to his jaw. Then, for a few minutes, no one said anything.

  "Alessandro, you have money, don't you," Guariglia asked.

  "I don't. My father is fairly well off."

  "That's what all rich sons say," Ludovico mumbled.

  "Compared to me, you're rich," Guariglia continued.

  Ludovico had assumed the expression of a pointer in a bird sanctuary, because, for him, wealth was an indisputable sign of evil.

  "If you get out of here," Guariglia asked, "will you take care of my children? To help them ... It will be difficult for their mother."

  "I'm not getting out of here, Guariglia...."

  "Will you write a letter?"

  Luciana had many troubles. Their father was permanently incapacitated, and would need care. Alessandro didn't know the state of the Giuliani finances other than that the garden had been sold for the sake of acquiring the land near the Villa Borghese. He didn't know if this land was now worth anything at all, or even if they could afford to carry it. If Rafi were wounded or killed, Luciana would need all the money she could get. And yet, Guariglia was a harness-maker, and he had two small children. Their timidity and innocence had been perhaps the most beautiful thing Alessandro had seen since the war began.

  "Are we allowed to write letters?" Alessandro asked Ludovico.

  "After the trial you have the whole night to write letters. They give you the paper and pen, and they don't censor."

  Alessandro turned to Guariglia. "I will," he said. "We're not rich, but we have some money. I'll ask my father to do it for me, I promise."

  Guariglia bent his head until his face almost touched the water.

  WHEN THEY left the pool they were just as dizzy and breathless as when they had entered. At the end of the long corridor a soldier threw uniforms at them, and after they dressed they were brought onto a long terrace flanked by battlements. Fabio immediately went to look over the side and reported that anyone who wanted to drop down would not have to go through the trouble of being executed.

  Alessandro looked about for chains, ropes, cables, vines, or anything that might be useful in descent. He peered over the side, looking for holds, but the wall was perfectly smooth. They settled into a corner to await the return to cells.

  Though it was nearly dark, the sun struck the tops of huge clouds that had skidded in from the sea. They were not the kind of marine clouds that build up like mountains but, rather, like traveling foothills, ragged on the edges, black beneath, and pink and white on top. The sky was the mildest blue anyone had ever seen, and two planets shone just above the horizon.

  "Look at the clouds," Alessandro said. "They pass so gently and so quietly, but as if with such resolution. Someone once said they were rafts for souls."

  "I would like that," Guariglia said. "I'd prefer to stay nearby and look down, to pass over Rome. It sounds to me a little better than all the stuff about being in the stars, because you wouldn't be able to breathe up there, and it would be either too bright or too dark. In the clouds, on the other hand, ah, that would be nice."

  "Yes," Fabio added, innocently. "You would be able to see your children. You could paddle over Rome and check on them now and then."

  "I'm going to write a letter to my children and tell them to look for me there," Guariglia said. "Even if it's not true, it's a good way to remember.

  "A few days ago, my youngest, who is two and a half, refused to go to bed. She cried so hard she choked for air. My wife said leave her, it's the only thing to do if you don't want to ruin a child.

  "But in my daughter's cries I heard that she was hurt. I picked her up and held her. I couldn't help it. I find it almost impossible to be hard with her: I didn't see her for the first two years of her life. It took fifteen minutes for her to stop gasping for air. As soon as she'd stop for a moment, she'd start up again. She was red, her face was swollen, and she pounded my chest with her fists. Because she was so hot—she sleeps in a kind of sack that my wife made for her, which is very warm—I took her up to the roof, and she stopped crying. I don't think she'd ever seen the night sky. There's a war on, I told her, but the sky is still there, the stars are still there.

  "She loved them, she really did, and while she held on to my neck and stared up at the sky, half an hour passed. You could almost hear the dark clouds moving overhead. I know that something up there spoke to the soul of my child, so perhaps Alessandro is right. Perhaps the clouds are the rafts of souls."

  They watched the clouds slide by in the vanishing light until the terrace filled with soldiers who had finished the ordeal of the bath, and then they marched back to their cells. That night, in addition to bread and water and some sort of vegetable paste, each man was given an orange and a hard-boiled egg. Long after they stopped talking, they listened to the faint sound of the clippers, and when Alessandro awoke at about four all he could hear was the wind coming off the sea.

  NOW, TO dream, he did not have to sleep, but merely to consider, and he would find himself in tranquil scenes where action was so delicate it could cross memory and leave no track. The waking dreams came and went like things swept in and out on the waves. He saw a ship from all angles at once as it moved through air, water, and time. Though no one was visible on board, its stern light was glowing, and as it pushed over the dark ocean the light pulled away along a faint silvery furrow. He knew neither where the ship was headed nor how it would find its way, but the tiny lantern kept moving at an insistent and recognizable speed, until it was just a speck.

  Suddenly, darkness became light as hundreds of clear electric bulbs illuminated a children's carnival on the Piazza Navona, in the days before Christmas. The lights and caravans seemed to be a single mass, and the noise of the crowd was a cross between silence, the surf, and the weak high-pitched cries of children playing in the distance.

  A blur of coats and hats went by, but Alessandro was too close to make out what it was, or to understand how a group of people could travel by him as fast and evenly as water in a stream. They were hunched over into strange positions, grouped together in bunches, packed into tight spaces, and intent upon their forward course in a circle. He stepped back, amazed to see that a chain of electric lights moved above and with them. Grown men and little children were sitting in tiny cars that moved around a track. Each car was attached to a wooden spar extending from the hub of a wheel, and the whole contraption was spinning at a speed sufficient to dazzle the babies as the fathers pretended they were driving real cars.

  Alessandro effortlessly followed one father and his child. The man who bent over his little boy was wearing a brown coat and gray pants, and had no hat. He had taken it off and left it with the child's mother rather than lose it in the December wind. This was Alessandros father, and his mother was holding the hat, watching from beyond the rails. Gravity and centrifugal force made it difficult for Alessandro to look at them, as if he were on the ride, and not they.

  The little boy was dressed in a wool coat and a close-fitting cap with ear flaps. He turned the steering wheel back and forth with no reference whatsoever to the motion of the car, and sometimes excitedly pulled a rope that rang a bell mounted on the hood. Every now and then he would try to squeeze the horn mounted on the steering column, but he wasn't strong enough to make it sound, so his father held his hand and helped him.

  Alessandro tried to enter
the dream. He watched the attorney Giuliani's silver hair glinting in the electric lights, and for one brief and ecstatic moment his eyes settled somewhere between the man and the boy, and he felt himself trapped in their embrace. He felt the fathers pleasure at keeping an arm tightly around his small child, and he felt the child's pleasure at being held. They circled round and round, hoping that the ride would never end.

  THOUGH ALESSANDRO had lost track of the days, on a Tuesday, at seven-thirty in the morning, he was removed from his cell and led through so many long cold corridors that he thought he was being shown an underground passage to Rome. Finally he came to a drill hall configured as a courtroom. Sitting at a long desk upon a platform at one end of the room were three colonels. Other than from the fact that the colonel in the center possessed a gavel, not even their own mothers could have told them apart, and each was as tall as a boy of thirteen. Each seemed to be about seventy years old, with a narrow pink face culminating imperfectly in an unimpressive jaw hidden by a goatish beard and a dandyish waxed mustache twisted at each end, like the king's, into opposing points. They wore braided tunics with cylindrical military collars, peaked caps, high boots, swords, and jodhpurs. Because they had painstakingly aped the king, they looked the part of circus ringmasters.

  Herded onto benches facing the judges were the captured remnants of the 19th River Guard, in four sets of two: Alessandro and Guariglia, Fabio and the Puppet Soldier, and four others, in unexpected reunion. Though they were not allowed to exchange words, their sheepish smiles and flashing eyes said everything. Some had been captured at work, some at home, some on the street, one on the railroad, and one in a bordello. They assumed that, for the rest of the River Guard, in other prisons in other parts of the country, the scene was being repeated, had already played itself out, or soon would, but no matter what the outcome of the war, no matter what the measures yet to be adopted, they knew that at least a few of their original number would live on into the rest of the century, long after the urgency of the moment had faded, and from this they took some comfort.

  Even though they expected nothing from the trial, and knew they were going to die, they thought it was funny to see the three little colonels, with folders stacked in front of them, pitchers of water protected by upturned glasses, and ramrod straight little backs.

  The one with the gavel did most of the talking. First he identified each man—all the River Guard except one, a soldier from Milan whom they remembered for being sullen and depressed. For that reason, no one had wanted to know him well, and no one had. They didn't recall his name until the president of the court called it out. "Grigi, Alonzo," he said. Yes, that was his name, that depressing and nasty little son of a bitch, Alonzo Grigi.

  "No," Alonzo Grigi stated to everyone's surprise. "I am not Grigi, Alonzo."

  "You aren't?"

  "No."

  "Who are you?"

  "I am Modugno, Giancarlo Scarlatti Modugno."

  The River Guard were riveted by this claim.

  "Do you have identification?" the court president asked.

  "Of course I don't."

  "Why not?"

  "I left it in the bordello."

  "What were you doing in a bordello?"

  "What do you think I was doing in a bordello?" Grigi asked, to the wild delight of the River Guard.

  "What does anyone do in a bordello? What do you do? How do you do? How are you? I'm fine, thank you. They wouldn't take me in the army," he said, raising his arms in exasperation.

  "Why not?"

  "They said I was too stupid. I volunteered, which is why they said I was too stupid. I tried, but they wouldn't take me. It's not my fault. Don't execute me. I'm someone else."

  The court president inquired of the rest of the River Guard if they knew this man to be Alonzo Grigi. Of course they all said that he was not Alonzo Grigi, so he was removed from the courtroom and returned to his cell. Now seven of the River Guard remained, each with a triumphant smile on his face.

  The judge to the right of the court president reprimanded the defendants. Shaking his head from side to side, he appealed to a soldier's knowledge of hopelessness. "At most he will gain a week."

  A clerk was instructed to read the charges: dereliction of duty, desertion of a post in time of war, aiding the enemy, abandonment of prisoners, theft of government property, conspiracy, and murder. As the words tumbled off the clerk's tongue, the River Guard knew that death was coming.

  "Usually," the court president stated, "we don't have such a full measure. Do you plead innocent or guilty of these charges?" It was clear to anyone that nothing in the universe could have exonerated the River Guard, who knew that they were guilty of everything except the murder.

  Alessandro raised his hand and was given permission to speak. "One of the prisoners, Gianfranco di Rienzi, killed the colonel. None of us had anything to do with that, and when we discovered it, we took to the water."

  "Why?" the court president interrupted sharply, and with genuine puzzlement.

  "In the line, even before Caporetto, they were shooting people like dogs. We jumped into the sea to gain time."

  "But it was not a certainty that you would be shot."

  "That may be so, but we had been told that we were going back into the line. Given our rate of attrition, we hadn't much reason to take the chance of being forgiven."

  "You're admitting your guilt?"

  "Of course," Alessandro said. His temper rose in indignation, and he was supported by the rest of the River Guard. "Do you imagine," he asked, "that after several years of slaughter in the line and in our expedition to Sicily, we are going to quake like cowards in the face of the truth? Do you think that we did what we did from lack of courage? Each of us left knowing full well that we would end up here. We decided to take from you some days and weeks in which to see our families. It was just like going into battle. The feeling was the same. The reasoning was the same.

  "I am saying, sir, that the war has made your army brave enough to express its will. We did not desert—we rebelled."

  "That's a charge far more serious than even murder."

  "And more forgivable."

  "Tell me how you can think such an outrageous thought," the court president demanded.

  "Our rebellion shows that when we tell you what we are going to tell you, you'll be able to believe us."

  "Pray tell what you are going to tell us," asked the judge who had not yet spoken.

  "Put us to work."

  "Doing what?"

  "Fighting the enemy."

  "We've tried that," the court president said.

  "But you didn't have our consent."

  "I was under the impression that we didn't need your consent."

  "But you do, you do. You don't need our consent to put us in prison, or to shoot us, but you do need our consent if we are going to fight."

  "That's nonsense," the court president stated. "The terms cannot be set from below; nothing could be clearer."

  "On the contrary," Alessandro answered. "You've outmaneuvered us, and we offer our consent because you've forced us to it."

  "No, you were to have been forced to it originally, by the knowledge that anyone deciding otherwise would be condemned. The method works, it would only unravel were we to make exceptions."

  "Now is the one time that you can make exceptions."

  "Because of the defeat?"

  "The armies are in flight. We are not so unusual now."

  "We have a new line, and it seems to be holding," the court president declared.

  "We promise you that we'll go back and fight like the devil: eight hardened soldiers."

  "Seven."

  "Seven, then. Don't waste us. We were never afraid to fight."

  The judges conferred. It was not like a civilian court, and they made their decisions quickly. Only Guariglia had any hope for the success of Alessandro's appeal, and even he did not allow his hope to show.

  When the judges were finished, the president
of the court began his speech by looking down and shaking his head, and, after that, nothing that followed was a surprise.

  "In times of great stress the rules of the state come forward as the means of its preservation, and they become ever so much more important, if only because judgment is so hard to make. We fall back on them for the purposes not only of initial faith in their wisdom, but because we are forced to turn to something solid and unchanging. Furthermore, this court is not empowered to make exceptions.

  "The only way we might do so would be to find you not guilty, but neither are we free to contradict the facts. We have taken note of your appeal, and we are sympathetic, but now, above all, now, when the nation is threatened, we sharpen our loyalty to the state. Hard rules, in belated emergence, give us confidence and restore our bearings. We take note of the humanity of your appeal, but in war humanity is swept aside. This you already know."

  He paused. Perhaps he had a son. He intoned their names, and then he said, "I sentence you to death. The sentence shall be carried out by firing squad, at the customary time, in the execution yard of this prison, one week from today."

  Then Fabio asked, "Why a week?" as coolly and with as much detachment as a customer in a bank wanting to know why his funds had not cleared.

  The court president did not object to this unceremonious interruption, for the sentence was severe enough to cover any and all offenses, past, present, future, and imagined. His tone was friendly and somehow reassuring. "We need a little extra time for your friend Grigi."

  At this, the soldiers of the 19th River Guard, now condemned, began to laugh, and the gavel struck.

  THE DAYS before Tuesday passed slowly, but when they were remembered they were the shortest and quickest Alessandro had ever known. Every minute after dawn on Monday was a time of day that he would never see again, and he parted with the rich and familiar hours while the clock moved not in a circle but in a spiral. In near delirium, as the clouds built into white mountains and passed overhead on their way east, he imagined substituting for all the clocks of Europe a more honest machine, a finely threaded spiral of three dimensions, that would signify not only the coming and going of day and night, but that no single day and no single night would ever return.