A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  When Alessandro had awakened he was apprehensive of the cold and the wind. Most early mornings in the mountains are cold and wet, as the wind blows moist clouds across the rocks and snowfields. To start a climb in the howling darkness is one of the most unnatural things a human being can do, but the morning that Alessandro climbed to Post 06 was warm and dry. It seemed unbelievable that the sky, twisting and boiling like burning phosphorus, was silent, for its light and motion suggested thunder, explosions, and the sound of the sea. The stars were busy and intent, as if before the moon came up they had to unburden themselves of all they had seen during the daylight hours, when they could not speak. Now they ran riot, and their light made the snowfields breathlessly dim.

  The equipment was checked, and gloves removed and replaced dozens of times while ropes were adjusted, buckles tightened, and knots tied. A soldier went from man to man with a small torch, and, as the men bent slightly toward him, lit their lanterns. After the lanterns were lit, each soldier dropped the glass shield, straightened his back, and stamped his crampons into the snow, ready to move forward.

  The six lines formed into one, with Alessandro near the end. He watched the lights ahead move onto the glacier as if to match the stars, for not only did every lantern sparkle like a little golden sun, but it made a small circle of yellow light that darted back and forth in front of the man who carried it, oscillating as he moved his head. The procession of lights and circles danced across the snow like a glowing serpent, its many bright segments continually trembling. Soon it came to the fractured part of a small glacier and, without slowing, the soldiers leapt crevasses, landing sometimes so that the only way not to fall back into the abyss was to bring the head of one's ice axe down ahead, and use it to pull oneself aright.

  The column assaulted a steep and dusty ridge. It faced south, and the snow had transpired as if to make a trail. Crampons slid on the rocks and were buried in the dust. It was like walking up a sand dune while contending with a slow shower of boulders dislodged by walkers ahead. The rocks rolled negligently into ankles, and now and then a small round rock would glance off its flatter cousins and take to the air in a series of leaps that successfully aspired to the momentum of a military projectile. A scream would emanate from someone ahead, all the lanterns would drop as one, and the rock would whistle by like an artillery shell. Then the lanterns popped up, and the climb would resume.

  As the moon rose and set, they marched across glaciers, dusty ridges, and flat pools of pure ice upon which they might have skated. When they stopped to drink and eat they were quickly frozen in the wind, and they would shudder uncontrollably, but when they set out again they soon were hot. The air grew thinner, they panted for breath, and by the time the sun came up they were sitting in groups on a snowy platform more than a thousand meters above their starting point.

  Their shirts were stiff with salt, they breathed like the wounded, and they didn't talk. With the sun came a wind so cold and strong that it froze the water in their canteens. Not a cloud was in the sky other than in the white carpet near the horizon, and as the sun rose the wind stopped and the air became tolerably warm. As soon as they ceased shivering, they ate. Those who had forgotten to snuff their candles did so, and they started out again, this time on pure snow that ascended in an incredibly steep hump to a great wall of rock.

  They marched upon the slope for several hours, crampons crunching the snow and metal jangling in hypnotic rhythm. With the air so thin and volatile, Alessandro began to smell his own clothes. They had been washed only recently, but cookfires in the headquarters trenches had given them a salty, smoky smell, as sweet as resin, so that here, where trees could never grow, Alessandro had the forest to the point of enchantment.

  When the sun was high enough, they stopped on the glaring snow and pushed their ice axes into it to serve as coat racks for their anoraks as they removed sweaters and stuffed them into already bulging packs. Then the anoraks went back on and the soldiers ate biscuits and sipped achingly cold water from their half-iced canteens. As they were about to start off again, five hundred meters from the base of the cliff, Austrian guns opened up below.

  First came the flash, then a peal of thunder, and then a shattered chorus of tangled repetitions, each slightly altered in volume and pitch, rambling around the cirque like a thunderstorm. With three or four guns launching a shell a minute, the concussions and echoes were reminiscent of the pounding of a rain-swollen falls.

  "It isn't time for the afternoon meal," Alessandro said to the man in front of him. "Why are they firing?"

  "They're firing at us."

  "At us?"

  "Yes, but they can't reach us. The shells land on the glacier to the west, and we can't even see them explode. They picked us up in their telescopes and they don't like that we're so far behind their lines. They don't have us in sight until we round the hump, and by then we're out of range. They can't stand the fact that from the minute they start out we have them in our sights. It especially irritates them because when we built the lookout they sent a company to intercept us, and we destroyed them with our artillery before they crossed the glacier. The shells exploding on the ice were as catastrophic as a bomb in a hall of mirrors. The ice did the killing, and it buried them too."

  "Tell me why they bother to fire at us if we're so far out of range."

  "They're trying for an avalanche. Fifteen of our soldiers are buried at the base of this ramp, just so."

  "And fifteen escaped?"

  "No one escaped. At that time Zero-Six was manned for two weeks at a stretch. We changed it to a month to lessen the chances of being caught. Don't worry, we haven't had much snow, and it's been dry. Besides, we're more than three-quarters up the slope, so we've passed most of the danger. The higher we get, the smaller the avalanche and the more likely we are to survive it."

  Rocks of all sizes were glancing from the wall. As the supply party got closer, the snow was littered with bigger and bigger stones. It seemed that the Austrians had done the Italian column a favor by jarring loose the rockfall before they arrived.

  The foot of a cliff hundreds of meters high and the end of a snow ramp two thousand meters long met in a tiny scalloped edge of ice that, if pressured with the little finger, tumbled into the small crease between the two. That two such masses should touch with inimitable delicacy prompted Alessandro to think of the sea and the shore. As the soldiers rested at the base of the cliff, apprehensive of rockfalls and quieter than usual, Alessandro spoke about the variability of the Atlantic. He had seen pictures of houses in France and Spain safely perched five meters from maximum high tide and two meters above it. Their actual distance from the sea, then, was less than five and a half meters. Calling it six, he divided it into the twelve thousand kilometers that he guessed stretched over the open sea to southern Argentina without a break, and determined that the mass of the sea, in all its unimaginable weight and volume, never expanded more than one part in two million, and, indeed, was more stable than that, for he had failed to consider the immense volume of the ocean, which would make the ratio much more severe. The margins of the sea were as delicate and immobile as the fine border of ice that touched the cliff.

  "And what do you conclude from that?" a soldier sitting next to him asked with a note of hostility.

  "That the natural world is infinitely more reliable than the world of man," Alessandro said, "and that in our short lives we must have volatility or we will not know motion. With more time, perhaps, we might be more serene, and happier."

  "You're crazy."

  "Of course. And you?"

  "Link up," the officer in command ordered, motioning with his gloved hand to two ropes of men. "Form six pairs. I want the relay done fast, so we can get out of here. The Austrians couldn't make an avalanche, but the afternoon sun can."

  Although thirty men had been required to carry the supplies to this point, their packs, which they had begun to repack and combine, would go the remaining five hundred meters by rope, passed f
rom team to team. Only Alessandro would reach the lookout, still invisibly tucked into the cliff face. The others would be spread along the route, belayed on ledges or off bolts on the sheer face, working to hoist the supplies with ropes and pulleys.

  Alessandro and the soldier who had told him about the avalanches formed the lead team. The other man looked at Alessandro intently. "Are you sure you know how to do this?"

  "I haven't climbed in a number of years. I may be slow at first in shifting the étriers, but, as the bolts are already in, I'll manage. I've climbed the west tower of the Cima Bianca three times. On the third time, I led."

  The other man was impressed.

  Alessandro reached up to the first bolt and clipped fast the étriers. Soon, having ascended even more rapidly than they might have expected, the two soldiers were a hundred meters above the snow ramp. The world seemed far distant. Once again, it had been reduced to simple and satisfying elements: when a carabiner was clicked into place around a bolt, all was secure. Moving beyond the last position engentlered enough fear to make exceedingly lovely the action of clipping in where it was solid, and during the cycles of fear and relief one found immense satisfaction in upward progression. At the top of the last pitch, a broad ledge upon which they were comfortably belayed to a larger than usual bolt in the rock, Alessandro was brimming with joy, even if only for a moment. His feeling was much like the disproportionate satisfaction that old people can find, regardless of their losses, infirmities, and disappointments, in small things, like sitting under the trees and watching the birds flit from branch to branch, or drinking tea from a china cup with a gold rim.

  "It's like the days before the war," he said to his partner on the rope.

  The other soldier breathed-in the sweet smell of the rock lichen. "Yes," he answered. "Think how fine it will be when hour after hour passes without the report or threat of a single gun—for years without end. Life will be like a dream."

  "And no one will appreciate it," Alessandro said to the vast distances around him.

  "Except us, and screw them."

  Twenty-five meters overhead, a bearded face looked down in agitated anticipation. Then it darted back into the shelter of the observation post, and two ropes sailed into the air. The looped ends slapped the vertical rock halfway down, jiggling the rest of the way as the lookout slowly dropped them by hand. Soon they jiggled right in front of Alessandro's face.

  "Goodbye," the other soldier said. "He'll tell you what's required."

  "What's he going to do, hang us?" Alessandro asked, looking at the two nooses that swayed next to him.

  "Bilgiri."

  "Off belay?"

  "He's a good man. I wouldn't worry."

  Alessandro unclipped himself from the bolt, untied himself from the rope, and stood up on the ledge, which now, thousands of meters above the valley floor, seemed rather narrow. He put a foot in each loop and took hold of the ropes. When the observer saw this, he disappeared once more, and in an instant Alessandro felt the rope under his left foot begin to rise. He followed it, bending his knee, and then stepped up, putting his weight on it. As soon as the observer had belayed the left rope, he pulled the other one a step beyond it, and, so, shifting his weight from loop to loop as the one was pulled past the other, Alessandro climbed a ladder that was crafted for him at each step. In peacetime he would have been belayed by a rope to his waist. Now he had no such guarantee.

  Had he fallen he would have bounced against the cliff in several places one or two hundred meters down and been hurled onto the snow ramp, perhaps close enough to the base of the cliff so as not to slide down it. From his exposed perspective, however, not that it mattered, it looked as if he would land in the upper course of the Talvera, which made a disheveled green-and-white line through the gray rock of the lower valley. The air seemed so thin as to allow a man who fell to hear no whistling and feel no wind.

  The minute Alessandro put his hands on the stone sill over which the ropes passed, the observer began to question him. "You're new," he said. "I don't know you. "What happened?"

  Still standing in the loops, Alessandro answered, "Right. May I come in?"

  "Were they overrun? I haven't spoken to them since my batteries ran out five days ago."

  "Do you mind?" Alessandro asked, straining his stomach muscles as he climbed in.

  "Let me help."

  The observer was so awkward and enthusiastic that he pulled in Alessandro head over heels, and they both were caught in a tangle of ropes, hooks, and empty knapsacks. Looking around at the cell carved into the rock, Alessandro immediately asked if he had to sleep in the blankets the observer had used for the past month.

  "They have fresh blankets for you, and some surprises, too. It's not bad if you don't mind being alone. We've got seven books now, and they've undoubtedly brought up another. If the war lasts for five more years they'll have sixty-eight books up here, and it'll be the world's highest library."

  "What about Potala?" Alessandro asked.

  "Who's he?"

  "The great monastery in Tibet."

  "Fuck him."

  Alessandro and the observer worked feverishly to haul up the supplies. As they pulled at the ropes the observer spoke at high speed, explaining the tasks and tricks that Alessandro would have to master. When everything was received, the observer took him around and demonstrated how to open ports, change batteries, and record coordinates. Through a powerful telescope chained to a plate in the ceiling so it would not be inadvertently dropped from the window, he showed Alessandro the latest Austrian dispositions, upon which he had become expert. He explained the dangers and defenses of the observation post, the system of rationing, and the miracle of the telephone that sat upon the table in the center of the floor, its wire traveling straight up to a wooden beam in the ceiling, as if it were in a business office in Rome rather than in a cell in the rock just below the summit of a peak several thousand meters high.

  Hundreds of spools of telephone wire had been brought up, carefully spliced and reinforced, and then lowered on the other side of the summit. The line dropped straight down a vertical cliff onto a glacier, and detoured across the snowfields, for if it had been laid on the glacier it would have been ripped apart in the shifting of crevasses. For several kilometers it was buried in the snow, until it emerged at headquarters. In daylight, reports were made every two hours. At night Alessandro would be awakened now and then to listen for bolts driven into the rock below him.

  After the observer rappelled down, Alessandro was all alone in a miraculous cabin that had taken three hundred alpinists and ar tisans four months to requisition from the rock, and on account of which fifteen men lay buried on the glacier and two had died in falls.

  THEY HAD hollowed out a chamber seven meters deep, two meters high, and four meters wide. It went lengthwise into the mountain, level and true, and its granite walls were perfectly smooth and dry. Two chimneys passed through the rock for ten meters and were vented under rainproof baffles. The chimney shafts were narrow, but smoke from the lamps and the cookstove were sucked into them in quick swirls that, in the alternate rush and hesitation of their spirals, reminded Alessandro of circus acrobats in candle-lit tents. Alessandro had known since his childhood that the circus was bittersweet, and after he had lit the lamps he watched the smoke twist into the chimneys as he floated in and out of circuses—impoverished Gypsy circuses in coastal Sicilian towns, at odds with the blue surf and the citrus groves; Baltic circuses that were colorful and warm despite the dirty gray clouds that lashed the tents with rain; and Roman circuses, the perfect median, with tents of saffron-colored canvas, and sparkling lights, in balance in every way, just like Rome itself.

  One wall was empty, which made the room seem bigger. Upon this wall was a grid in which each occupant had three boxes, running from side to side, for the inscription of his name, the dates of his sojourn, and a comment: "Bottai, Rudolpho: I was the first. Send me a postcard to tell me what you think." "Giammatti, Andrea: Don't
talk to yourself, and do not smile inappropriately." "Labrera, Anselmo: Any woman would have been welcome, even if she had had a wart on her nose." "Ceceni, Michele: I warned of the Austrian attack of the 5th." "Agnello, Giuseppe: Killed several enemy trying to take this post. Wounded in shoulder." "Costanza, Benito: Why not talk to yourself? I talk to myself all the time."

  Alessandro impulsively wrote his name, the dates of his assignment, and his comment, for he did not want to spend a month trying to distill the wisdom of the ages into one line. The message read, "Though now I am the safest man in Italy, I cannot wait to fly." Let them try to figure that out, he thought, though probably most would assume that he was slated to become a pilot. And perhaps not—not after they had spent a month staring out at the clouds, watching the birds disappear beyond the war to places over the sea or islands within it, where the animals had never heard the crack of a gun.

  Another wall was entirely taken up by heavy cedar shelves, which gave off a fragrance that filled the chamber. Upon them, in military order, were the supplies and equipment that had been carried up at such great cost. Most of it had been there already, and Alessandro neatly stacked and lined up what he had brought, so he could ration his inventories as time passed: thirty packets apiece of bread, pasta, jam, sugar, tea, powdered soup, dried fruit, chocolate, and cured beef; a small sack of potatoes and onions; two cans of salmon; a diminutive panettone; two one-liter bottles of red wine; a crock of butter; a bunch of carrots; a kilo and a half of cheese; two bars of soap; a box of tooth salts; iodine swabs; bandages; aspirin; tincture of opium; six newly washed woolen blankets; a down pillow; eight rolls of toilet paper; ten grenades; twenty signal or illumination flares; a Mauser 98; five hundred rounds of ammunition in ten boxes of fifty rounds; a bayonet; a first-aid kit; an alpine hammer; two dozen pitons; 150 meters of rope; a box of hooks and nails; pliers; a screwdriver; eight extra dry-cells for the telephone; a wash-basin; two huge bottles into which water from a small cistern passed through a hose connected to a stopcock in the wall; and eight liters of kerosene, for cooking and illumination, along with extra wicks for the lamps, and several boxes of wooden matches.