A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  By the time Alessandro's turn came, a fire burned in the fire pit and water was boiling for tea. As the night grew colder and the car warmer, he spoke to men half illumined by flames, but he was also speaking to the darkness behind them. "I haven't eaten," he said, "I didn't enjoy a woman, and I didn't go home. What did I do? I stood in a toilet stall in the Ministry of War and debated within my heart whether or not to kill a little dwarf who combs his hair with ink and olive oil. He was perched on the toilet in front of me, with one foot in the bowl, ranting about what he calls the coming of the blessed sap."

  "Did you kill him?" asked a man whose face, like a planet in a candle-lit orrery, was yellow, orange, and black.

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Your question speaks to the heart of things. At the moment, and maybe forever, I can't answer it."

  Alessandro was happy to drink boiling-hot tea from a big tin cup. The frigid night air whistled outside as the train dashed through tunnels in the Apennines, and the black of night was like a cathedral. His eyes sought its infinitely high ceiling, and although they found nothing he felt as if he were going forward not to some obscure death but to the resurrection of beauty and a meeting with those who had gone before. As the train broke into open countryside, cutting a path through the dense cold air, racing the winter moon, Alessandro felt as content as a child in its mother's arms.

  SOMEWHERE PAST Bologna and before Ferrara the train went onto a siding and the doors were opened. The soldiers folded their blankets and jumped down from the boxcar to walk in the sodden fields and breathe the fresh air, as a winter afternoon precociously imitated evening. The sky was dark gray with solid cloud and sporadic rain.

  Walking across an inundated field on islands that barely rose from shallow puddles with wind-ruffled tops, Alessandro smelled the air and was reminded of other winters and other dark places, where, after you came in from the cold, the battle was over. The one thing above all others that distinguished army from civilian life was that in the army you lived outside. The wind and the cold came in from under the sides of the tents, through the flaps, and through the cloth itself, both the seams and the weave: a breeze that passes through a tent is remarkably cool and persistent and sometimes strong enough not only to pressure its way in but to go right out again.

  A soldier who spends years in the open air gets something about him like a deer. He can hear events in the wind and read the terrain, distinguishing readily between the scent of a pine forest, carried on droplets of rain that have been blown through it horizontally, and the scent of air rising from a field of shoots and stubble soaked in cold water. Hunters returning on November nights are grateful that the skin is flushed, the nose is cold, and the senses as sharp as those of the animals that have been killed. So it is with soldiers in wartime, and much more so, for they live in the wind and cold for years.

  Alessandro turned around at a row of impenetrable brambles and went back across the field to the train. Several thousand men had grouped around small fires: now and then sharp gusts of wind sprayed water on them, but the wind was cold and dry enough to take the water up in almost instantaneous transpiration.

  A tall soldier with a beard so thick and black that he looked Persian whispered to a man inside the boxcar to bring him a rifle. He had seen a buck come to rest after it had tucked itself into a thicket of its own color. The rifles were chained. "Get an officer," the man in the boxcar whispered back.

  With his eyes fixed on the place in the bushes where he thought the buck had stopped, the Persian stumbled along the trackbed until he found an officer. Immediately interested, the officer unlocked a stand of rifles, and the Persian disappeared into the semidarkness as the officer wondered if he were going to come back.

  Ten minutes later a shot cracked across the field, and everyone stared into the dusk. Then the Persian appeared as a dancing black dot that eventually grew arms waving for others to join it. Soon the buck was carried in, its head and horns hanging down, the nose still glistening. The fur, somewhere between the color of a chestnut and the color of dust, hadn't a single blemish other than the bullet hole.

  "You have to drain the blood, it takes at least a day," someone offered.

  "In peacetime you drain the blood, but now you get a butcher," the Persian responded.

  "From where?"

  Calls went out for a butcher, and they got two, who eviscerated, skinned, and carved the carcass with bayonets that they stopped several times to hone on sharpening-stones they had been carrying in their pockets. Alessandro imagined that the butchers had taken them from civilian life as he had taken a small volume on Giorgione.

  For their labor they were given some cuts of venison, and the rest was left for the soldiers in Alessandro's car, with the Persian in charge of both cooking and rationing. The wood fire was too small and had already burned down, so they took a gas cylinder from the caboose and flared a welding torch into a cooking fire that was as bright as a gold flag in the midday sun.

  They made a rack from their ramrods, and swept the flare back and forth as if it were an enormous basting brush. As the sizzling venison was distributed, a train from the north came whistling through the dark and shrieked by them, shaking the earth. As soon as it had passed, they were ordered to re-embark.

  Alessandro returned to his blankets with a banquet-sized piece of meat too hot to eat. The fire in the fire box was re-ignited, the doors were slammed shut, and the train began to move. By the time it had clicked across the switch that routed it back onto the main line, paused to pick up the switchman, and started gaining speed, the soldiers were silently devouring their roast, which, though it had been cooked without salt, herbs, or wine, was the best that Alessandro had ever had. He tried not to think of the head and horns upside down on the field, with neither a living thing nearby, nor a light, nor a sound except for the wind whipping occasional sheets of rain through the dark.

  THE TRAIN ventured onto every millimeter of railroad track in Italy and crossed into every siding to await with deference the passing of generals in their private cars. After the slaughter of the buck, the soldiers had been in the dark. They went outside to eat and stretch only at night, in cold fields and damp forests through which their fires shone like lights in a jack-o'—lantern.

  And then one morning the soldiers grew suddenly still as the heavy latches were lifted and turned. Just before the doors slid apart, a man from Pisa took the opportunity to say, "The air is thin. We're in the mountains."

  Alessandro straightened his back and raised his head. The mountains, unpredictable in their power, were the heart of his recollection, and he knew that the Pisano was right. He had known it all along from the way the train took the many grades, from the metallic thunder of bridges over which they had run in the middle of the night, and from the white sound of streams falling and flowing in velocities that could have been imparted only by awesome mountainsides.

  When the doors were opened the mountains appeared in massive scale. They seemed to advance upon the car, threatening to break apart its filthy wooden walls. They were blindingly white, in volumes so great and cold that they forced open the eye to admit the glare of day. Fifty kilometers away, ice-covered peaks blazed in the morning sun. Down a valley that seemed to run forever, its floor hidden under deep snow, its sides patchworked with stands of pine and meadows in a dappled coat of green and white with borders as trim as military haircuts, walls of glistening gray rock rose to spectacular heights and ribbons of water and ice fell silently from overhangs and outcrops. Before the water could hit the ground it froze into mist, briefly turned gold in the sunshine, and disappeared on the wind.

  Their view of this made the soldiers in the freight car as giddy as glider pilots, and Alessandro was painfully thrown back to his youth. In summer, emerging from a deep forest, he would hold fast in the sudden revelation of a sunlit peak, or watch from above as mist traveled through a valley as if it were possessed of human tenderness. "The valley is tired and sick," his
father had said. "Clouds and mist have come to blanket it as it rests." At the age of ten, Alessandro had not known the further meanings of words like rest and peace, and although now he did, he realized that he would never fully know the mountains in all their guises and enchantments.

  The lieutenant who had opened the doors told his company to collect packs and weapons, and form ranks. As the soldiers leapt to the ground their rifles banged against their backs and awakened them with an exact reminder of who they were and what they were doing. The rifle, Alessandro had long known, is the infantryman's tool, franchise, and birthright. Without it he is a creature of indefinite despair—a gazelle without legs, a rhinoceros without a horn. With it, he knows his small place in the universe, and that not a being alive will take him for granted until he is stone dead.

  Still primed to run, the compact engine that had pulled the train through alpine dawn exhaled at short intervals. It shuddered and dripped as fragrant pine smoke flew from its stubby chimney, and the soldiers formed ranks, adjusting straps and belts, squaring their rifles, and straightening their backs. Two thousand men, not a single one of whom had eaten breakfast, finally stood at attention in groups of fifty.

  Low-ranking officers inspected, cajoled, and firmed them up in preparation for two things. The sun was going to rise over the mountains to the southeast, making brilliant a landscape already packed with light, and a general was due. No one knew which would come first, and only a few understood which was more important.

  "Oh Christ," the man next to Alessandro said under his breath.

  "What's the matter?" Alessandro asked.

  "You can wait all day for generals."

  "Still, when they arrive, everyone smiles."

  "True," said the soldier, "but why?"

  "That's what makes a general," Alessandro stated. "They have the ability to cause any number of miserable sons of bitches to smile like idiots in an insane asylum. Even I myself, and I know all about it, begin to feel like a grateful and adoring dog."

  "Yes, yes, it's true. How do they do it?"

  "I think it comes from the feudal past," Alessandro answered. "When the lord of the manor met his assembled serfs they were always intoxicated with happiness that they could neither justify, nor explain, nor prolong in his absence."

  "What did you do before the war?" asked the other soldier, who spoke like a Milanese.

  "I was a sardine," Alessandro said, looking straight ahead. "A blue-and-gold, in the Mediterranean." Alessandro stole a glance at the Milanese, yet another intellectual with an air of deadly seriousness. "I swam about. I ate tiny sea creatures. At night," he added, almost as an afterthought, "I was the managing director of a company that decorated roller coasters."

  "The economy is rich and complex, and we have much in common," the Milanese said.

  "How is that?"

  "I, too, was the managing director of a company that decorated roller coasters, and I worked almost exclusively at night."

  "Perhaps it was the same company. Where was it?"

  "Where was yours?" the Milanese asked.

  "In Rome."

  "Mine was in Ostia."

  "We had a branch in Ostia."

  "Then you must have been our competitor."

  "The branch was inactive."

  "Ours as well."

  "Shut up!" an officer screamed. In an army wracked by mutiny, conversations such as these were nothing more than coded sedition, and if the officer didn't understand the code, all the more reason to stop it.

  The Milanese said so softly that only Alessandro could hear, "You should be more exact."

  "What do you want from a sardine?"

  "Precision. A sardine is a precise kind of fish. Look how many get in one can. They don't fuck around, because they don't have heads. We should be like that."

  "We are." Alessandro smiled crookedly at the Milanese, who briefly smiled back. Then, as the ranks grew still, they stared ahead, listening to the occasional exhalations of steam and watching a curtain of light envelop the mountain range ahead of them.

  They heard an automobile engine in the distance. Officers began to primp, and some ran to and fro. It was just like the action on stage before the curtain rises on the elephant scene of Aïa.

  "Dogs," someone said, in reference to their officers, but, still—without orders—the ranks stiffened.

  A staff car approached from down the mountainside, winding through a small Alpine village and shifting gears for the last, steep, snow-covered stretch. Alessandro had never seen a car go uphill in snow. This one had chains on the drive wheels, and its tires dug into the compacted road surface, like a cookie cutter.

  Though the general was young, he had been in the mountains for years, and he was attentive not to the scenery but to the fresh troops. They stood rigidly, but they still had an air of confusion and dizziness. He, on the other hand, had long ago assimilated the grand scale of the peaks.

  Realizing that it would be difficult to speak above the noise of his automobile, he signaled for his driver to stop the engine. Then, apart from the irregular hissing of the locomotive, the only sound was the sound of the wind. As a hawk passed over them, the general let it speak for him, and not until it had disappeared did he begin, by raising his stick to point to the section of blue that the hawk had deserted.

  "Did you see that?" he asked, referring to the hawk. "That tells the story. A lot of hawks are still up here. They don't pick at carcasses. They fly above us as if we were unworthy of notice, which, in their world, with its time, is quite true. As impossible as it now seems, the mountains will soon be silent. We and our guns will have come and gone, and the wind and trees will stay forever.

  "This white and silver one that flew overhead was going north up the valley. You'd think that I'd sent him, because that's where I'm going to send you." He turned to the north, and, with his arm still extended, turned three-quarters back—an attractive gesture that seemed to say he might understand paradoxes and contradictions.

  "That ridge, in the west," he said, pointing to a line, far above the tree line, disappearing into the mass of white summits, "goes all the way to Innsbruck. Between it and its twin to the east, not far north, is the Brennero. Some of you may have passed through the Brennero on the way to Munich or Warsaw. We are going that way too, on our way to Innsbruck, because we haven't any other way to go. If we move through the valley they'll fire down at us, so we have to go straight on, confined to a narrow field of maneuver.

  "I myself would prefer to outflank them by way of Norway or the Black Sea, but, not being British, we don't have that option. For us, it's straight up the camel's back and right down his throat. They know we're coming and they've got the route fortified with belt after belt of trenchwork, mine fields, and firing positions.

  "These things are a rather intricate piece of art, at least in the Germanic sense. Whenever they have a trench, they've got a number of trenches behind it, like zither strings. If you see wire, it means mines. And it seems they never are content with just one row. They alternate in many layers. After all, they invented the Sacher torte, didn't they?

  "You may wonder how I can ask you to die so that we can take apart their layer cake, especially when you and I know that no matter what we do, the mountains will soon be silent. How is it that, if you turn from this meaningless task, I will have you shot?

  "It's rather simple. If I turn from this unpleasant task, I, too, will be shot. So it goes all the way to the top, and you know as well as I that the chiefs of the people, if they surrender, are shot by the people they would shoot for surrendering.

  "This is a conundrum easily resolved by shooting only the people on the other side, and that's how war goes on and on. Though the whole world may have gone mad, we are going to regain our sanity, gradually and fully, by means of a slow and rewarding fiction. I am asking you to go to Innsbruck. Every meter will be contested, and for every meter, someone will die, but we are going to regain our sanity by vesting in each particle of ground
an artificial value. It has been done throughout history with metals and spices. Merchants assess their lives in numbers, and they are almost always saner than those who set out to seek the truth. Like merchants, we will peg our sanity to artificial standards—land taken, and days alive.

  "I'm responsible to Rome for capturing ground, and I cannot change that. I'm responsible to you for keeping you alive, and that I will not change. I do my best to balance the two. We don't practice the same carnage up here as they do lower down. It's the terrain, the thin air, and our relative lack of mass. And the north is not infinity, for the mountains stop, and then you're in Germany. If you survive, you'll be able to remember having been there. You'll recall it fifty years from now, in some quiet place, surrounded by children, not a single one knowing the folly to which you were committed, and all sweetly ready to commit it anew."

  He hesitated. "And if you don't ever leave this place ... Well, the air is magical here, and so is the sudden darkness, and so is the chill. In the daytime, in the light, with the sky changing, nothing is quite as alive. At night or in storms it seems like the tunnel to death. Don't misinterpret me. I want that tunnel so crowded with the braying enemy that no room will be left for us, but, should you not make it back to a table in the piazza, you will have died in the best place for dying the world has ever known. What I mean is, here, you're practically at the gates."

  AFTER THREE hours' march they turned off the road into a pine forest heavy with wet snow, the last stand of trees before the meadows that led, eventually, to Innsbruck. In the near distance they could see the Italian fortifications and trenchworks, and, beyond them, the Austrian.