by Mark Helprin
Just to fly in the Alps, with no place to land, was an act of daring. Parachuting onto a glacier or the slopes of a mountain was extremely dangerous, but flying in winter winds and storms that were lifted over mountain walls like soldiers going over the top of a trench made parachuting seem safe. When the planes lined up on the field, engines bellowing and snow lifting from the ground in patches that rocketed away on the wind, the pilots cleansed themselves of inhibition, and in the unbearable sound of the motors and the ceaseless vibration they entirely forgot fear and softness.
One by one the planes lumbered forward on the clean snow still violet in the dawn, gunned their engines, and sailed down the runway. The pilots were dressed in leather and fur. They had hot-water bottles that they would jettison as soon as the heat dissipated, vacuum bottles of hot tea, and meat sandwiches. Though they were not to be aloft for long, they wanted to be warm, and the cold air made them hungry.
They left the valley floor and soon were in the mountains, an abstract of ice and rock devoid of greenery and human works. In the shadows below them, the slightly blue-gray ridges woven into desolate ice fields were the color of someone who has frozen to death. They turned west and flew briefly over Switzerland, and then started a broad left-hand bank that would bring them to the Italian lines from the rear, with the morning sun at their backs. As parts of their faces froze in the wind they threw out their used hot-water bottles and joked, with hand signs, of having bombed the glaciers. Below them, the ice was still blue.
By the time the sun, now high enough to bring yellow and gold into the world, had carpeted the snowfields with shadows, they were over Italy, patiently cutting through the air in their broad turn. They opened the tea and sandwiches. So appreciative were they of the heat that they let the tea scald them. It strained through their tea-colored mustaches, and the vapor from the vacuum flasks was instantaneously left behind to hang quietly in frigid sun-filled air several thousand meters above a snowy plateau.
Arising that morning at three, as troops of soldiers often do, a group of Italian lancers had broken camp under dazzling starlight. It had taken them an hour to dress, wash in the thundering black Adige, and kindle the breakfast fires. The river water was so cold that it made the air seem like the morning air in Rome in late spring. Just to breathe the mist that hung above the rapids was to wake a hundred times.
The fires burned quickly and with a lot of crackling. Orange sparks ascended from wave-like sheets of flame that showed the same intense and shadowy glow as footlights. The thousand lancers had their bread and coffee by scores of these fires. They were silent and reflective almost to a man, thinking of their families in recollections brought on by the special grace of early morning. At times like these, they felt as if the war were over, they had won it, and they were about to start home.
By first light the littered camp on the riverbank had been forgotten, its bright fires turned to patches of lukewarm ash. A column of a thousand men and almost two thousand horses, wagons, and caisson-borne machine guns moved slowly northward to the Brennero, with the river always in sight. Now the black water that had slipped away so fast in the starlight was pale blue, or white where it boiled over rocks. Forced between huge boulders in the riverbed, it rose in serpentine arches with silver underbellies. The saddlery and harnesses had long before been worn to soft, dark colors, and could hardly be heard, but the click of metal bits as nervous horses worked their jaws back and forth, the snortings and whinnies, the creak of wagon wheels, the slappings of sabre cases against the horses' flanks, and the high-pitched commands shouted by the officers floated on the sound of the water, and when the column rounded a bend and was hit by a gust of cold wind, the lances and pennants made a whistling noise.
They were marching north on a snow-covered road because a general studying a map in Rome had come across the long narrow fingers of flat ground that rested on the great north-south ridges, and decided that a proper conquest required a regiment of cavalry. Not much room existed for maneuver, but a small cavalry unit, lances down, might exploit a break in the enemy lines and rush across the windblown ground to the next and distant redoubt.
The cavalrymen were not used to the mountains, and their officers were unfamiliar with the terrain. Accustomed to the thick, sweet air of sea-level farms, the horses were agitated and unnerved by the light, the thinness of the atmosphere, and the ways in which sound carried. Cliffs rearing up to dizzying heights were beyond their ken, and they grew skittish as the road began to bend into steep switchbacks.
Shortly before ten in the morning the lancers began to move onto the plateau upon which sat Gruensee. The head of the column halted at a fork in the road. The way right led down toward the valley and up again, and the way left passed through Gruensee to the high plains where the lancers were bound. They had been marching for six hours, and wanted least of all to descend only to climb again, so they went left toward the town.
THE UNIT of Alipini to which Alessandro had been assigned was camped far to the north, under the precipitous walls of the Cima Blanca. Trying to wrest the heights of this massif from the Austrians, it had suffered heavy casualties, and needed men to work machine guns, do guard duty, haul wood, and take care of isolated outposts.
The car that had been sent for Alessandro was so large in comparison with the diminutive platform upon which sat the driver and a tiny freight box, that Alessandro asked about it. He was told that the machine pulled field guns up mountain roads and did not need a large freight box, and that he would ride on the running-board.
He examined the grooved metal wheels, tossed his pack into the box, and, as the motor idled, left to say goodbye to Ariane. He would tell her that he loved her, and take leave as if they were going see one another the next day. He knew what to do, and he would come back.
As he walked across the meadow at Gruensee, his step was light. The sun was brighter and higher, summer would come. Someday he might be an old man sitting by a fountain in Rome, knocking at the rim with his cane to chase away the flies, shielding his eyes from the sun, and waiting for autumn, when the fields burned and the smell of ash covered the countryside and drifted into the city on cool currents of air over the Tiber.
Alessandro saw the column of lancers entering the village, a hundred meters from the dispensary where Ariane was on duty. It was halfway up the street when two doctors ran from one of the houses, their hands at shoulder height, palms out, making a gesture that said, go back. Gruensee was a medical refuge in which active formations were forbidden.
The argument with the colonel at the head of the troop was short. He was not about to turn on the narrow road, reverse-march his tired lancers and their mounts, and drop into the valley to reach the whitened meadow that was his goal, when it was visible above the town, like a dancing-platform at a seaside resort, only a few kilometers distant. The column moved forward, lances as high as the upper storeys of the chalets.
Nurses, orderlies, and patients stood at the windows to watch the mass of horses, men, and caissons, and all the metal flashing in the light. Alessandro saw Ariane, her hair shining in the sun, looking down from an upper window.
From the air, Gruensee was a spot on the flank of a huge snow-covered hill. Behind it, far to the north, the spires of the Cima Bianca sat like a wall, rose-colored at the base and as white as a flare on top. Beyond the valley of the Adige, and west to Switzerland, other mountains and their glaciers caught the light and cast stark country-sized shadows. The line of aircraft coming up on Gruensee from the south was funneled toward it by the disposition of mountains and the track of the sun.
When the pilots neared Gruensee they saw a black line, centered upon the village, running north to south. At first it looked like a buttonhole with a button in the middle. Then it looked like a mule drivers whip lying on the snow. And finally, when the pilots were close enough to see that it was not a solid strip but something broken and of many parts, and that it moved, they knew that they had found a rich target.
As they pulled up their gloves and tightened their harnesses, their expressions changed. The leader signaled that they would drop into single file and loose their bombs along the line of the enemy column. Then they would bank from the north to strafe east to west and west to east. The sun would be in their eyes on the return run, but the road was outlined between houses and steep meadows, the column trapped on a narrow axis, aim nearly automatic. The squadron leader pulled ahead, twisted, and corrected the twist as he descended, and the others followed in well practiced order. Each pilot lightly touched the bomb levers, to make sure that at the right moment his hand would find them quickly, just as drivers blindly pat their controls before they are needed in a difficult maneuver. Here, the maneuver was precise and dangerous, for if a bomb was released at the wrong moment its shock waves could bring down the plane, and if the levers were not operated symmetrically, the change in weight at a slow bombing speed could flip the plane over and cause it to plow into the ground.
The first to see the aircraft was a young officer who had wheeled his horse around and was about to gallop to the end of the column. His eyes had been directed to the upper windows of the houses, where he had hoped to see the face of a beautiful woman so that he could hold it in his memory as he rode into battle. He saw, instead, black dots in a tight constellation that moved as if it were damped in oil. For a moment, he hesitated. He pulled at the reins of his mount, reversing his prior command. Frustrated and confused, the horse gasped and sidled. The officer narrowed his eyes. Now he was sure, and he shouted.
The colonel turned in the saddle. It was hard to find the formation of planes as they came out of the sun, and he heard them before he saw them. From a distance they sounded like insects. He could hear each one individually and as it combined into the roar that subsumed it.
With his column trapped in the grave of the road, with no place to go and no cover to seek, the colonel told his men to dismount and fire. "Machine-gunners! Machine-gunners!" he shouted, but it was too late.
The order was passed down the line with phenomenal speed. Before the planes were overhead most of the troopers had dismounted and a few had swung their rifles into the air and were working the bolts. The horses panicked and lurched from side to side, forward, and back, rearing up hysterically, breaking wagon shafts, bouncing into the walls of houses that shuddered as if in an earthquake. Some animals stood stock still and whinnied as softly as if they were commenting upon the scene. Others flashed their teeth and showed red eyes as they tore their harnesses and broke from the traces of wagons and carts. Some men who were knocked to the ground laughed because they and their friends looked so foolish.
Alessandro had not understood what was happening. Then he heard the planes, and then, as he stood paralyzed on the snow, he saw them. When the first bombs were dropped, he was running at full speed toward the dispensary.
The planes raced directly above the long column, clearing chimneys by the length of a lance. Their engines were deafening. When they loosed bombs they went to full power and veered alternately left and right, rising in a roar that compounded the concussion of the explosions they left behind.
Horses that were lifted into the air on geysers of dirty blood and smoke somersaulted and landed dead on their backs. Men were blown to pieces, vaporized, or slammed down by shock waves. Others, who had taken shrapnel through their cheeks or their shoulders, staggered blindly away, but many of the wounded pointed their rifles into the air and fired.
Bloody horses ran up on the snowbanks, pumping their haunches in the climb. Some dragged dead troopers still caught in the stirrups. Others limped and panted. As a horse dragging a lance galloped past him, Alessandro saw the second from the last plane release its bombs. They floated through the air and hit the side of the dispensary where he had seen Ariane a moment before. As they went in with a thud, the building collapsed upon itself, and it was halfway down, compressed, puffing out white dust, when they exploded. In the explosion the house expanded to three times its volume, with unidentifiable pieces tumbling in the air above a ball of orange flame that kept the ruin suspended for what seemed like an impossibly long time. Only after everything had collapsed did the fire stop burning in a circle and the flames orient themselves on vertical lines. The house of two and a half storeys had become a pile of rubble a meter high, burning so fiercely that Alessandro had to hold up his hands to shield his eyes from the heat.
The planes came back to strafe. They flew up and down the column, firing machine guns at what remained. Bullets slammed into the ground, into the carcasses of dead horses, and into walls. Only now had the machine-gunners set up and begun to fire.
Alessandro grieved. His punishment was that nothing in the world could touch him. His punishment was that God had put him into battle and preserved him from its dangers.
THE GUN tractor with the short freight box wound through sunlit mountain forests, steep switchbacks, and dark greenery in the valleys of the streams that tumbled to meet the Adige. Just off the road where lines of howitzers and columns of infantry often passed in great drama, trees sang in the wind and rocked to and fro as if nothing were amiss.
Alessandro stood on the right running-board. The wind and sun burned his face, and the sensation of fast gliding only a short distance above the ground was much the same as in a dream of flying, and when they turned on the switchbacks he found himself hanging over the edge of a five-hundred-meter drop with nothing in sight but massive pearly-gray clouds. Peering tensely through his goggles, the driver labored to run his machine safely along the road. Now and then he caught sight of the passenger, who was standing on the running-board and grasping the heavy nickel-plated mirror struts in his fur-lined gloves.
When they came to the forest where the Milanese had died, Alessandro turned to look into the grove of trees. The brigades had moved on and the woods were deserted. The gun tractor drove on a makeshift bridge over the Austrian trenches, and strained to the top of the ridge. Here, except for prairie-like undulations where in summer wild flowers grew sheltered from the wind, the terrain was flat all the way to the Cima Bianca. They moved forward with the pleasing motion of a launch in swollen seas, and at the top of each wave the Cima Bianca glinted in the distance. It sparkled in lines across its lower ridges, and, unlike the spangling of the sun on crystals in rock, or upon a lens of broken water, the flashes moved slowly.
"What's the flashing under the snow line?" Alessandro asked.
The driver turned, almost happily, to talk. "What snow line?" he asked. "The snow is everywhere."
"The glacier line, then," Alessandro answered.
"Muzzle flashes," the driver shouted, his words half blown back into his lungs by the force of the wind. "The Austrians fire their guns straight out, and the shells fall upon our fortifications. The trajectories are the same as if you were firing on level ground, but instead of tilting back the barrel of the gun, the whole earth has been bent."
"I understand," Alessandro said.
"Put it this way. Instead of elevating the guns, the target has been depressed. So the guns point straight out, and way over here we see straight into them. They like to fire at lunchtime. They eat before we do, and for them it's not a big meal, so they try to ruin it for us. The barrage never lasts more than fifteen minutes because they can't afford to waste shells. You know how hard it is to move shells up to those heights?"
Alessandro was hardly listening, but the driver went on. "Then they'll fire one every few minutes just to keep us on edge. They can see us so clearly through their field glasses that they know when we eat, and they aim for the kitchens, but we ordered stove pipe from Bolzano, and now we pipe the smoke away from the cooking fires. The Austrians aim for the smoke, and we eat in peace.
"I'm hungry. Just ahead is a good place to stop. Do you have food?" When Alessandro didn't answer, the driver spoke louder. "Do you have food?"
"Yes. I have a sandwich and a bottle of tea."
The field in which they halted was sheltered from the w
ind and littered with the dead. After the driver unpacked his lunch and sat on the lee running-board, Alessandro poured tea from his vacuum bottle, held the steaming cup in his hands, and drank. Then he put the cup on the hood of the tractor and replaced his gloves. He walked through a gentle wind into the middle of the field.
Some yellow stubble, like hay, was projecting out of the snow where the grass would have been high in summer. Uniformed corpses, not two weeks down, were scattered alone and in groups. They had been Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and Italians. Some had died in close combat, but most had been either shot as they ran across the field toward the trenches on each side, or stopped by artillery. They rested unnaturally. Sleeping men would hot have been able to hold the positions they held, with necks bent, shoulders hunched forward, and heads pushed into the snow. Even the ones on their backs did not look like they were sleeping, for those who still had faces stared at the sky with open eyes, their mouths fallen into expressions of astonishment.
Here were three hundred fathers, brothers, and sons. Their families had been told only that they were missing. Had the people who loved them known, each of the corpses would have been retrieved, each tenderly bathed, their dirty cheeks kissed, their hands caressed by parents, children, and wives. But they were to lie in the open air and decompose like branches.
THOUGH THE regular army was still stuck on the plain at the base of the Cima Bianca, subject to spiteful bombardment by mountain guns that appeared to be fired point-blank, the Alpini had filtered into the eastern flank and begun a war of high places.
Here, where the air was thin, the ground was treeless, and a single unwary step could easily end one's life, the great nations at war had been stretched to their limits. On level ground and in richer air their vast economies had produced armies of millions, luxuriously supplied, attended by monstrous machines that ran on rails, over the ground, or on the sea. Here it had all been reduced to a few men carrying pieces of wood or packs of ammunition to the heights. A single mortar shell, shot off in a second and almost sure to miss, had been a day's work for the strong man who had carried it up the mountain.