A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  They regrouped at a raised trackbed, far from any village or town, and waited while eating oranges and lying against the gravel bank that supported the rails. A corridor of stars in a moon-whitened sky brightened as far as the eye could see down the track.

  "When we get to Catania," Fabio said, "I'm going to go to a cafe and have five cups of cappuccino."

  "No you're not, feather," Guariglia told him. "You're going to run through the streets just like the rest of us, pointing your rifle at your prisoners and hoping you don't get shot in the back of the head."

  "No," Fabio said. "Cappuccino, five cups."

  "You'll be so lean when you get off the volcano," Alessandro said, "if you get off the volcano, that your body won't need or recognize cappuccino. You won't need food or cafes, Fabio. You'll be as hard as steel and no more hungry than a bayonet."

  Fabio blinked. "I'm already as hard as steel," he responded. "We all are."

  "The mountain soldiers know what they're doing," Alessandro continued, clutching a handful of stones until the softer ones shattered in his fist. "When you get through there, you won't want to go to a cafe."

  "What will I want?" Fabio asked.

  "You'll drink urine, you'll smash rocks, you'll be a fighter."

  "I was in the line for two years," Fabio protested. "I am a fighter."

  "You never ate dirt."

  "That's right," Guariglia said. "You never ate rocks."

  "Oh fuck off," Fabio told them, and bit into an orange.

  Far down the line, to the west, a light appeared. At first it was just a splinter of white, like a star lost in the orchards, but then it grew and overflowed until it was a bright blinding yellow that moved slowly up the track. The lieutenants ordered everyone except Guariglia into the trees, and they ordered him to stand between the rails and light a cigar.

  Though Guariglia was apprehensive, he didn't protest, so great was his love of Cuban tobacco. He stood puffing contentedly, and inquired of the officers, who now were crouched invisibly under an orange bough, "What for?"

  "The train was supposed to have been here when we arrived," the colonel whispered, although he had no need to whisper.

  "I see," Guariglia said.

  "If they see the glow of your cigar, they'll stop."

  "That's nice," Guariglia stated, blocking out the stars with a huge cloud of fragrant smoke. "If..."

  The light approached, slewing back and forth as the engine swayed over small inconsistencies in the otherwise perfectly parallel steel rails. The train crept along as if it were ashamed of being late and running flat into a company of soldiers waiting for it amid the trees.

  When it got so close that the petulant and neurotic motion of the rods and cams was audible, and when the steam escaping from half a hundred pre-war gaskets sounded like a menagerie of snakes, Guariglia stepped off the tracks and waved the cigar.

  "Don't wave your cigar," he heard the colonel say from the darkness. "We're not beggars. These people are under orders."

  Even though the engine was relatively small and pulled only three gondola cars, when it came to Guariglia it seemed like a huge tower of iron.

  "I'm supposed to pick up some people," the engineer said. "Where are they?"

  "Let me look inside your cars," Guariglia demanded.

  "Go ahead."

  They were all empty. "Come forward," Guariglia called into the darkness, with undisguised triumph. "No one's on board."

  From both sides of the dark orchard the soldiers appeared, and climbed into the cars. In no time they were all in and the officers had entered the cab. After a few minutes the colonel mounted a platform at the rear of the engine. Over the steam, the roar of the fires, and the dripping of water from condensers and leaky tanks, he addressed his men.

  "The engineer says he's sorry to be late. His daughter was married today and he couldn't tear himself away from the celebration. Besides, it would have looked suspicious. At least he didn't lie, didn't tell us some filth about track repairs or broken wheels.... He says that the volcano is a long way from here, as we know, but he says that he can get us there by daylight, because he assures us that, no matter what his train looks like, it can go very fast."

  "Bravo!" some soldiers cried out.

  The engineer appeared unbidden on the platform, next to the colonel. "Soldiers," he said, "my train goes very fast. It's dangerous to go at top speed." He smiled at the rows of heavily armed young men. "But this is war."

  THEY LAY against the sides of the gondola cars, their rifles leaning with them, sheathed bayonets extending above the steel bulkheads and whistling in the wind. Guariglia had the only seat, on a crate in the first car. He had lit another cigar, and was enjoying it as the wind flew past and occasionally flicked the ashes off the tip, making it flame. Even the last soldier in the last car could smell the smoke, and Guariglia's head was turned up to the stars as if he were on the porch of a summer resort.

  Lower down, on Guariglia's right, Alessandro was also looking up at the night sky. He was hungry. They had had nothing for dinner but oranges, and they felt bodiless and giddy. As the train picked up speed it was as if they were high in the air, running with the constellations. Alessandro loved the stars for being unassailable, and believed that each and every one of them was his ally. As if they were jewels that he possessed, and he were a different man altogether, they gave him tremendous satisfaction. Though war might make a soldier inconsequential, a soldier in turn could delight that they would always put war in its place.

  The engineer had been telling the truth. To judge from the speed and jostling of the train, he had had two bottles of whiskey and was beating at the throttle with a hammer. Metal things popped and snapped. The cars wanted to separate one from an other, and yanked at their couplings if one lurched left and the other right. The wind got stronger and stronger as they left the lowlands and ascended to plains with not a single tree to stop it.

  When they came to a grade, they slowed, and everyone was relieved that the engineer had come to his senses, but as they crested the top and started down, they grew dizzy with acceleration. Neither prudence nor restraint, but just gravity, had slowed the train, and the driver had been cursing it until, when it began to throw him forward, he blessed it.

  In the middle of the night they broke out at white-hot speed onto a vast plain that could hardly hold the onslaught of the broad sky and its blazing, three-dimensional, phosphorescent cargo. A meteor shower shot through the clear, like tracer bullets, and enhanced the depth of the sky by shining so close to earth. With no lights and no fires, only the animals were up, and in the open. Their masters were barricaded in bedchambers, but they were under a shower of stars, and, even though they were lowly and suffering and mute, the light spoke to them so clearly that even they could understand, promising an end to their burdens, promising them souls, and tongues, and perfected spirits. The soldiers in the gondola cars, under the same stars, racing through the same fields, breathing the same scented air, were included in the pact. They too were promised redemption, love, and a ride out.

  THEY WERE dropped in several groups around the base of Aetna. While the officers struggled with their maps, many of the River Guard went to sleep in the fields. "I thought it would be like the mountains around Rome, but its as big as a province. How do we know where to find them?" Fabio asked Valtorta.

  "We don't," the lieutenant answered. "We have a sector to comb. If they're in it, we'll find them. If they're not, we won't. We'll start here, and walk around in zigzags until we get to the top."

  "It would take a million years to cover all that ground," Guariglia protested.

  "Not if we go individually," Valtorta said, his eyes focused on the clouds at the top of the cone, thirty kilometers distant. He started to load his pack. "You don't fight wars that way, but this isn't exactly a war. With so many individual patrols on the volcano, they won't be able to elude us."

  "What if one of us finds a dozen of them," Alessandro asked.

 
"Shoot them. We'll all close in on the sound of firing."

  "You may not arrive for an hour."

  The lieutenant dropped loads of ammunition in the side pockets, and cinched them up.

  "What are you worried about? You have a lot of ammunition and a good rifle. Keep a distance; you'll be all right."

  "They'll scatter."

  "We'll be closing in. We'll pick them up one by one, or drive them into the clear."

  "The smart ones will lie down and wait for us to pass," Guariglia said, "and then escape into the valley."

  "I don't think so," Alessandro said. "I think that, like hunted animals, they'll seek the deep forests or they'll run for the heights. The colonel must be a hunter."

  "He is," the lieutenant confirmed. "Are you?"

  "No, but I used to have a hunt horse. Sometimes we'd chase game, and, when we did, by evening we always found ourselves deep in a forest or high on a hill."

  STILL EARLY in the morning, Alessandro and Guariglia, who had left together to proceed to adjoining sections, happened upon a farmhouse surrounded by barns, a mill, and a cistern. Two women were doing laundry at a sluice where the water flowed as plentifully as in the Alps. At the sight of the heavily armed soldiers they froze like deer, but were reassured when Alessandro asked to see the men. "Only my father is here," the younger one said, and then put her hand to her mouth as if she had written her own death sentence.

  "Don't worry," Guariglia told her. "All we want is to eat and take a bath."

  She ran into the orchard to get her father.

  "Why so much water," Alessandro asked the other woman.

  "We sell it."

  "Will you sell some to us?"

  "Why not?"

  Within half an hour Alessandro and Guariglia were floating in a huge cistern as the father of one of the girls harangued them about patriotism and the king. He was a veteran of the African wars. He had seen other soldiers walking through the fields, and he suspected that Alessandro and Guariglia were hunting for the deserters on the volcano. Though he insisted that they bathe and eat for free, they refused to answer any of his questions for fear that he was other than what he seemed.

  "How do we know," Guariglia whispered, with ice-cold water dripping from his mustache, "that he won't shoot us in the pool, like Euripides?"

  "He's been playing with our rifles, Euripides," Alessandro answered, motioning toward the farmer, who was fondling the weapons, "and he hasn't shot us yet, has he? Besides, only old soldiers fool around with rifles that way." Then Alessandro dived for the bottom. In complete darkness, he swam downward until the pressure against his eardrums was unbearable. He turned about and surfaced as fast as he could, releasing from his aching lungs silver bubbles of air that preceded him on the way up, until he broke the surface with a gasp.

  "How deep is it?" he asked the owner.

  "I don't know," the old man said. "It's part of the mountain. Sometimes it bubbles, but not often. We drink it. We've never had a line long enough to reach the bottom. When I was young, my father brought in a reel with a thousand meters of wire on it. The sinker never hit anything. May I look at the bayonets?"

  "Sure," they said, nervously.

  He unsheathed the bayonets and watched the light glint off their oiled blades.

  "He's a moron," Guariglia said under his breath, treading water.

  "I can't argue with that," Alessandro answered.

  When they got out they shaved with hot water and put on their newly washed, wet uniforms. Then they went to a loggia where they propped the rifles on their packs and sat down to eat. The women, whose husbands had been in the north for years, and who had been peeking at the two soldiers as they swam, had worked themselves into a frenzy. As if afflicted by a disease of the nerves, they made strange, unmistakable, and yet obscure gestures with their lips, tongues, jaws, eyes, hands, and fingers.

  The old man sat at the table with Alessandro and Guariglia, declaiming about the Austrians and the Africans. Slamming his fist down now and then, he failed to notice that his daughter's eyes were glazed, or that his daughter-in-law stood behind him for a few seconds, placed both her hands on her breasts, touched her tongue to her nose, closed her eyes, gyrated her pelvis, and moaned like a wolf.

  Alessandro and Guariglia did not know quite what to think. From the way their mouths hung open and their eyes popped, the old man thought they were totally mesmerized by his account of the war in Eritrea, and that he was inspiring them with the will to fight.

  The one who moaned like a wolf threw open the kitchen shutters and, still holding on to them so that she could close them if her father turned around, let her blouse drop to her waist. Alessandro and Guariglia cleared their throats, sighed, whistled, and stabbed their veal chops.

  "That's right!" the old man shouted. "Those fucking Turks! We knew what to do with them!"

  When the meal was just about over, the daughter-in-law turned briefly, stuck a huge Sicilian bread into her dress, and hopped into the kitchen.

  "Now what, boys?" the old man asked.

  "Maybe we should sleep. We were up all night," Alessandro offered.

  "And waste daylight? My God! When I was in the corps, we marched for weeks on end, every night, and fought through each day. Go out there! Get those bastards!"

  "If we sleep, we'll be better fighters!" Guariglia begged.

  "Bullshit!" the old man shouted, jumping to his feet. "And God bless you!" He brought their rifles and packs. The three of them left together and walked up a hill that led to the volcano. The farmer blessed and congratulated them again, and departed for his fields.

  Alessandro and Guariglia walked a short distance and then turned to look back at the house. In the windows of the upper storey, the two women were doing a rather strange dance.

  "They're naked," Guariglia stated.

  "I can see that."

  "Let's go back."

  "He's watching."

  Guariglia turned.

  "He's waving. The son of a bitch is waving. He's going to watch us like a dog, until we disappear."

  "He's devoted to a cause."

  "Wait a minute," Guariglia said. "Who's that?"

  From the side of the compound, within their view but just out of the farmer's sight, a soldier with a rifle plodded up to the house. His knocks on the door made the women run from the windows as fast as greyhounds.

  "Who is it!" Guariglia shouted.

  "You know who it is," Alessandro answered. "Look at him standing there tucking in his shirt and arranging his hair. Who else could it be? Who else would it be?"

  "I'm going to kill him," Guariglia said.

  Then they separated and began to zigzag up the side of Aetna. By now the sun was high, their uniforms were dry, and they were so hot that they craved altitude if only because they knew that the wind on the heights would be cold.

  ALESSANDRO'S PACK was too heavy. He had to carry 150 rounds of ammunition, probably far more than he would need, heavy clothing, enough food to last for a few days, and water. This, combined with the weight of boots, belts, clips, leather pouches, rifle, bayonet and sheath, pistol, pistol ammunition, and the many miscellaneous items that had accumulated in his pack and pockets, weighed almost as much as he did.

  At four in the afternoon he halted in a clearing of young chestnut trees. Even before summer was over, the leaves were beginning to yellow—not, as elsewhere, from the heat, but from the cold at high altitude. At several thousand meters, the gradually receding forest seemed more appropriate to Northern Europe than to Sicily, and so dark and well watered that it looked like a wood in medieval France, or the Villa Borghese at the beginning of December. In their sweet alarmed chatter, the birds seemed to be saying that they had never before seen a man, although that could not have been true, because the peasants came to Aetna to gather chestnuts. Perhaps the birds had never seen a soldier.

  Alessandro dropped his pack and rifle, and without the weight on his shoulders he felt like an angel drawn skyward. He sat d
own. For many hours he had labored up the mountainside, through forest, scrub, vineyard, field, and over black lava runs that scuffed his boots and bruised his ankles. His uniform had darkened with his own sweat, and the part of the pack that rested against his back was wringing wet.

  Twice he had passed Guariglia, though no one else, and they had remarked that they would never find anyone, because with their eyes stinging and their heads bent forward with the weight on their shoulders, they did not have the freedom to observe. "Undoubtedly," Guariglia had said, "they hear us and they see us."

  An ice-cold stream in the middle of the clearing was just deep enough to flow over Alessandro as he pushed himself down in the middle of it. The breeze was cool and he knew that the night would be frigid, but he would find Guariglia, hunt for the first time, and they would roast their dinner over a fire.

  He emerged from the stream, shook off the water, dressed, and went to sit on his pack. A long way in the distance, the sea was illuminated by the hot afternoon light. Something about the color blue, placid and cool, far away, in a silent dazzling band below the horizon, allowed Alessandro to give up all care and let the moment have its way.

  He leaned over, grasped his rifle near the base of the bayonet, and pivoted it around to rest it against the fork of a sapling, ready and within his sight. At sea a ship moved slowly across the strip of blue, the white speck of its wake becoming a thread that eventually disappeared. Alessandro picked up a chestnut and smelled it. It made him think of Rome in autumn, of looking down the Via Condotti from the Piazza Trinità dei Monti at dusk, when the fires began to blaze in restaurants along the Tiber and a darkening orange sky silhouetted the royal palms on the Gianicolo. He regretted not having taken his mother to see the views of Rome that he had come to know as he was growing up. Never would she see them again, and never had they seen them together, because she walked slowly, and he had not had the patience to walk slowly with her.