A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Then he called them to attention, and they snapped to as if the last that was gentle about them was fleeing along their rifles and shining bayonets straight into the dark sky above Mestre.

  They went southwest along dirt roads, across railroad tracks, through fields, and past factories for an hour and a half at double time in the dark. As the sky lightened they came to an arm of the lagoon that surrounds Venice. They marched along the edge of this until they stopped at a wooden pier that pointed to the rising sun. Three large steam launches, boilers fired, were lined up to receive them. Usually military units take a long time to load, but the River Guard were so light and so practiced at being together that they were in the boats, caissons and all, in five minutes.

  Guariglia turned to the sailor who manned the tiller of the boat in which he and Alessandro sat aft and to the starboard. "Are we going to a battleship?" he asked.

  "No," the sailor answered. "You're going to a bucket of shit."

  "I don't understand," Guariglia said, thinking that perhaps the sailor merely disliked his ship.

  "Neither do I," the sailor said, "and I'm not supposed to talk to you."

  The three launches cast off, sidled into the currentless estuary, and moved forward. Though the River Guard didn't know where they were going, at least they didn't have to walk. The land and its tangles were replaced by the blank slate of the waves, but the seaward journey did not take the infantrymen into the clear. By some perversity the sailors directed the launches straight for the silhouetted spires of Venice. They drew closer and closer as the sun pushed through the slots and cuts in the dark mass of the city and blinded them with its pale bright light. Trapped in the glare, Venice looked threatening and enormous, until they came to it and entered the Grand Canal.

  Except for Alessandro, no one had been near a city for many months, and with their weary eyes they looted it in its every detail. Young soldiers who hadn't the slightest idea of form (other than in a woman) took in the lines of Venice as if they were architects on their way to being executed. When a waiter in a black dinner jacket and starched apron stepped to the side of the canal and tossed a bucket-full of soapy water into the air, they watched intently the motion of his arms and back. As nearby gondoliers strained forward, the River Guard passed a house at the end of the canal and heard a piano, and as they rode by with their rifles on their shoulders they wished that they could stay.

  As quickly as they had entered Venice and steamed through the Grand Canal, they exited. The sun caught San Giorgio Maggiore in a warm flare of orange, ochre, and white, as the hesitant blue dawn over the Adriatic was cleared of all but the most tentative clouds. These had red underbellies, or gold, and were grouped together in long luminous strings like golden willow branches.

  The waves picked up as the sun strengthened, and the River Guard headed out to the roads, where many ships lay at anchor. The prows of the launches rose up and down vigorously, sometimes slapping the water into spray that was blown back into the boat.

  AS THE hysterical morning bells of Venice rang out six, the three launches looped around a rusty cattle boat that lay between a destroyer and a cruiser. At first the River Guard thought they would board the cruiser, and, then, the destroyer. When they came alongside the cattle boat, they groaned.

  "It doesn't even have a name," someone said. "Don't ships always have names?"

  "Why should it? We don't."

  "What will they write if we get torpedoed?"

  "Don't worry. Torpedoes are too expensive to waste. What do they care about a load of cattle, sheep, and goats?"

  "But what if they see us?"

  "That's what I'm talking about."

  "You know what I say," Guariglia shouted to all the launches. "I say, I don't have a name, I'm not from anywhere, I have no family, I don't know where I'm going, what I'm doing, or when I'll be back. So you know what I say? I say ... fuck it!"

  "I know where we're going," a normally quiet soldier said. "We're going south."

  "Perhaps that's because ships don't go on land."

  "We're going to conquer Turkey."

  "I'd rather fight them than the Germans."

  Then they thought back to the War of 1911, and someone said, "I wouldn't."

  When they embarked they were in high spirits, hauling caissons over the sides two at a time with hoists that usually lifted terrified horses and cows. The launches cast off, the caissons were stowed below, and the cattle boat began to move. A hatch popped up in the bow and two sailors emerged to winch up the anchor. Soon, they were underway in the wind, gulls maneuvered around them, and whitecaps appeared in the water.

  The two sailors, who wore decrepit uniforms without insignia, brought up a large metal container with sides that were fogged and covered with droplets. It was a bucket of vanilla ice cream and strawberries. "This is a gift from the cruiser," they said, "and it's the last of it. We have no refrigeration."

  "Where are we going?" they were asked.

  "We don't know. The captain doesn't know either. They give him an envelope with the name of the next port, the course, and the speed. When we arrive, he gets another envelope. It's been like that since the beginning of the war."

  The lieutenant came down from the bridge. He knew. "First we're sailing for the naval base at Brindisi, where a colonel will embark and tell us what we're going to do."

  "Sir?"

  "Yes?"

  "A colonel?"

  "That's what I said."

  "For three platoons? Colonels are for brigades."

  "Find places to sleep on deck," the lieutenant commanded.

  "At sea the dew is impossible," a soldier said. "We'll get soaking wet.

  "No. This boat has a shallow draught, because it was built to skim the reefs of out-islands where it transported animals. The captain says we're going to follow the coast. The wind comes off the land at night, and it will be dry. We'll be so close to shore you'll think you're on a train."

  After the ice cream, Alessandro and Guariglia settled on the upper deck amidships on the starboard side. They washed their bowls by lowering them over the rails and allowing the sea to batter them clean, and they lay down on the beds they had made of their blankets and packs. They were so comfortable and tired that they slept through intense heat, and only awoke now and then to look at the gulls vibrating on the wind as they held position over the ship.

  BY LATE afternoon their uniforms were stiff and white with salt. "I saw a man's ashes once," Guariglia said. "They're grayish white, just like those lines on your shirt."

  "That's not so bad," Alessandro stated. "When you realize that everyone is not much different from the stuff that's listed on the sides of bottles of mineral water, death takes on an air of tranquillity."

  "Why don't they do it on wine bottles?" Guariglia asked.

  "Because there's too much crap in wine, and if the stuff in water takes up the whole side of a bottle, in microscopic print, every liter of wine would have to come with a manual."

  "When my brother was a kid," Guariglia said, "he tried to make wine from chicken shit."

  "Did it work?"

  "Yes and no. He put what he got in a Chianti bottle and took it around to the cafes. No one liked it, but a lot of people bought a glass or two."

  "Or two?"

  "They wanted to be nice to a kid. Most of them were pretty old, anyway."

  The soldiers lined up at the water casks and drank deeply of the warm and tainted water that would not have tasted better had it been from a numbing alpine spring. They let it pour over their heads and soak their shirts.

  When the sun, still white and yellow, was hovering over the mountaintops, one of the sailors staggered from the hold under a quarter of beef. So many flies were around him that at first they thought he was carrying a huge cluster of grapes.

  "Are we supposed to eat that?" someone asked.

  "You'll love it," the sailor said. "It's good meat and it's been curing."

  "Since before or after the birth of Ch
rist?"

  "It's safe. We live on it."

  A small circle of men including Alessandro and Guariglia gathered around the sailor as he opened a locker and dragged out a long rope and a steel grappling hook. He pushed the hook through the quarter of beef, attached the rope to a cleat on deck, and threw the beef into the sea. It crashed into the brine and skidded across the surface, turning and bouncing violently on the waves in an enormous amount of froth and foam. The flies disappeared and the meat took on a good color.

  As the meat was pulled through the sea the cook used a short bayonet to cut up several sacks of carrots, potatoes, and onions that he threw into a huge cauldron. The cauldron was carried to a hatch cover upon which a barefooted soldier had burned himself earlier in the day. The cook opened the hatch with the receiver on the bayonet. "Main steam pipe," he said, lowering the cauldron into a recess for which it had been designed. "Bring me two buckets of sea water."

  They pulled in the beef, which now looked like the meat in the windows of expensive butcher shops on the Via del Corso. The cook set upon it with the bayonet until blood flowed off the deck into the sea, and dumped the pieces into the cauldron to boil with the sea water and vegetables.

  While the soldiers washed down the deck, he disappeared, and bobbed up again carrying two enormous straw-covered wine bottles, and a string of garlic that he put on the deck and crushed under his boots. He threw the garlic, a box of ground pepper, two liters of olive oil, and five liters of wine into the boiling brine.

  "One hour," he said. "The other bottle is for you, two long drinks each—not too long."

  After the bottle was passed around and each soldier had drunk as much as he could, they went to sit on their improvised beds and watch the sun go down over the mountains. Cool and dry, ravenously hungry, lost, perplexed, and safe, they leaned back against their packs and blankets as they listened to the engines and the sea and watched the shore go by.

  The beaches were completely deserted, but now and then the River Guard saw a peasant in the fields or an ox cart on the road that paralleled the sea. The perfect rows of olive trees and the net of stone walls looked as if they had been there since the creation. Even fortress-like villages perched on outcroppings of rock seemed empty, until dusk, when their lights went on. At dusk, too, occasional bonfires on the beach told of a military encampment and an army dinner.

  "Why couldn't we have done something like that?" Guariglia asked. "I'd like to spend the whole war on the beach, fishing, making fires, never firing a shot."

  "That's for the old men of the civil guard," Alessandro answered.

  "They must have some real units among them."

  "Why?"

  "What if the Austrians invaded? Rome is just beyond the mountains."

  "How could they invade here?" Alessandro asked. "You know that every single man they've got is up there," he said, pointing toward the Isonzo, "and if they were to move them, we would take Vienna."

  Guariglia lit up a cigar. He was upwind of Alessandro, but Alessandro didn't care.

  The fields beyond the beaches were low and gold, and they stretched to the mountains. By day, white smoke followed the contours of the land in slowly rising walls drawn like a curtain along the entire length of coast. As the farmers burned their fields for the second crop, in some places the fire was bright enough to be seen in full sunlight, and though a thousand human hands had set and were guiding it, no one could see the men at such a distance, and it seemed out of control. As the sun dropped behind the mountains the smoke grew dark and the flames brighter, until finally the smoke was invisible except when it blocked the stars, and the River Guard could see only the silhouettes of the Apennines, with endless and repetitive chains of smoldering orange flame at their feet. The wind came from ashore and brought them the smell of rich summer grass, and smoke. It brought them back to life.

  "I feel like a civilian," Guariglia said, "because it makes me remember. Sometimes I'd get a big order from an estate. I'd work for months and then deliver the stuff myself, and fit the horses in the field, line them up along a fence and harness them one by one. The stable boys would use the opportunity to pull off the ticks and throw them in the fire. I don't think I've ever been happier than when I'm standing in a pasture, quietly harnessing a line of good horses. It's better than working in the shop. They say that God's everywhere, but I think they just say that, because He must prefer the open fields."

  "Guariglia," Alessandro said, his eyes fixed on the mountains.

  "What?"

  "Can you swim?"

  Guariglia nodded. "Naturally I can swim."

  "Three hundred meters?"

  "Three thousand."

  "Rome is ninety kilometers beyond those mountains."

  "They'd catch us, and they'd shoot us."

  "But the mountains are empty, and I know them."

  "They wouldn't look for us there, they'd wait until we got home."

  "Who said they go looking?"

  "Rome will last until after the war."

  "We could go to America."

  "I thought you wanted to go to Rome?"

  "We'd stay in Rome for a year or two."

  "Sure."

  "Over the side," Alessandro mused, "a swim in the sea, onto the beach in darkness, walking through the fields and across the rings of fire, into the mountains by dawn, and then, in a few days, Rome."

  AFTER THEY had eaten, the captain directed a spotlight into the hold. Then he opened the bridge window and threw down a soccer ball that bounced from bulkhead to bulkhead, and, even before it stopped bouncing, two teams had formed, and the River Guard played a triple-fast game with no out-of-bounds and many soldiers bloodying themselves as they hit the walls. "Why don't you play?" Alessandro asked Guariglia, remembering from games in the cortile of the Bell Tower that Guariglia was capable of shaming the younger men.

  "I don't fancy splitting my head on a steel beam, thank you. When I was a kid and would get hurt playing soccer my mother would beat me with a whisk broom. I remember her chasing me around the kitchen table. I was bigger than her when I was eight, but she'd still chase me.

  "I thought she was crazy, beating me for getting hurt, but then I began not to get hurt just so she wouldn't beat me, and it made sense. It became a habit. In the shop my assistants are always cutting themselves. They drive needles and spikes into their hands and thighs as if they were drunk." He proudly pointed at his own chest. "Not me. Never. I never shed my own blood." Then he leaned back. "Because of a whisk broom."

  "My mother left that aspect of my upbringing to my father," Alessandro said, "and he didn't know about whisk brooms."

  "What'd he use, a riding crop?"

  "He only hit me twice in my life, and one of the times didn't really count, as he had no choice."

  "Then who hit you?"

  "Nobody. Once, I accidentally knocked some spokes off one of the carriage wheels. So I tried to even up the pattern—with a hatchet. In my quest for symmetry I left my father a carriage resting on four empty hoops."

  "He really gave it to you...."

  "Just that once. He chased me into the garden. As I went up an apple tree he waited until my behind was at good striking height, and he slapped me like a rug."

  "Your mother never hit you with a broom?"

  "Never."

  "Didn't she love you?"

  "I don't know," Alessandro answered, staring at the bonfires.

  "How could you not know?"

  "I never knew her. She was born in Rome in eighteen sixty-eight, and she died in Rome in nineteen sixteen. I never thought of her as being anyone but my mother. She was just my mother, like a wall of the house—always there, always the same, you didn't have to think about her."

  "I didn't know that she died," Guariglia said.

  "When I went across to Venice I found out that she died in December. The army said I was beyond reach."

  "The bastards," Guariglia said, throwing his cigar into the sea.

  "I wonder what s
he looked like when she was young. We have one picture of her, on my father's desk. She must have been about seventeen, but you really can't see her. The picture is brown, she's as stiff as a board, and her hair is in all kinds of knobby little knots, which was the style then. I wonder what her voice was like. My father knows. He loved her, and he'll carry the memory, but he can carry it only so far."

  "Someday the war will be over, Alessandro. Then you'll go home and they won't call you back again. In the next war they'll take some other son of a bitch, and you can sit in a cafe and read in the paper about each offensive."

  Alessandro wasn't listening. He was looking at the fires against the mountains. "Guariglia, what happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there's nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how you try? Perhaps it's then, when you have neither pride nor power, that you are saved, brought to an unimaginably great reward."

  "I don't think so," Guariglia said.

  "You don't believe it?"

  "No."

  "The saints believed it."

  "The saints were wrong."

  After the soccer game ended and the floodlight was extinguished, the River Guard returned to their makeshift beds, and a full moon came up and hung over the mountains. Half the soldiers slept and half did not. The land was close and lines of fire crept through the darkness up and down the coast. Over the buoyant waves, across the beach, and on the other side of the mountains, was Rome. Perhaps because of the parchment-colored moon, Alessandro was comforted by his passion for the city, as if by the passion of unrequited love.

  THEY GLIDED into the protected harbor of Brindisi, steaming between shore batteries on windy promontories, and a dazzling white city that rose up on a hill. Brindisi was so hot and bright that anyone who looked at it too long would go blind, and, apart from Virgil's Column, everything was as square and flat as if it had been hewn from salt. The naval base, which had been built with Africa in mind but now was the jailer of the Hapsburg fleet, was choked with gray. At its edge, however, where the mass of warships thinned, huge flags of brilliant scarlet fluttered above barges laden with explosives.