A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  They took no notice of the Giulianis, and moved their patient about as if no one else were in the room. Luciana felt her heart go into check. Alessandro asked if they had the right room.

  "This is the room," an orderly said, "and we're going to bring another one."

  The attorney Giuliani fell back against his pillows. The dying soldier, whose eyes were closed and whose lips were white, had told him far more about his chances than had the doctor.

  "We need the privacy!" Alessandro said to Luciana. "He's grown used to this room. The balance is delicate." As he left, Luciana went to her father to be comforted as well as to comfort.

  In the hallways outside, orderlies were running a railroad, and every bed in the hospital seemed to be in transit. Patients from the enormous halls on the first floors were being moved to the small chambers upstairs. On the stairs themselves, the procession of orderlies and nuns transporting men on stretchers looked like something from a religious tableau, for they moved in and out of mitred beams of light alive with flashing dust.

  Flattening himself against the railings to let the stretcher-bearers rise, Alessandro made his way downstairs. When he found De Roos, he asked, "What is it?"

  "We've been ordered to triple our capacity all at once."

  "All at once?"

  "By tomorrow afternoon."

  "Why?"

  "The Germans and the Austrians," De Roos said, "have broken the front on the Isonzo."

  "Where?" Alessandro asked.

  "Everywhere."

  "Everywhere? That's impossible."

  "They tell us that a million men are in flight."

  Alessandro raced back upstairs, on fire. Perhaps he and Luciana could care for their father at home. Perhaps, in the confusion of a million men in flight, he could rejoin the River Guard, or the army would proclaim an amnesty, reclaim the deserters, and make a final stand against the enemy, who was now in Italy itself.

  He felt like a soldier once again. When he met a military messenger on the stairs he urgently asked him where the front had collapsed.

  The messenger looked at him with the brotherly look that soldiers have for one another in civilian places, and took note of Alessandro's medals. "At Caporetto," he answered, "but they say the line has folded everywhere. Maybe they can regroup."

  As Alessandro climbed the stairs with the nursing-sisters, the orderlies, and the mortally wounded soldiers on stretchers, he was full of schemes. They would take his father home, get him out of the room that was now a ward of the dying, allow him once again some sunlight and tranquillity. He was in his eighth decade, and he deserved privacy and honor. When he was well, Alessandro, with Guariglia and Fabio, would rejoin the 19th River Guard. His father would live, he would be forgiven. The winter would be hard and dangerous, but then spring would come.

  He came to his father's room, and his heart went out to Luciana, for three soldiers were there, not a single one conscious, and delicate Luciana, with her elbows on the covers, was trying to shield her father from the presence of death.

  Alessandro approached the bed. "Papa, I spoke to De Roos, and I'm going to speak to him again. Perhaps we can take you home, to your own room, with a private nurse."

  "Alessandro," his father said. "Don't fear for me."

  "I want to take you home."

  "You must understand that I'm your father, Alessandro. I'm your father. I came before you, I split the path into this world, and I'll split the path into the next. It isn't unreasonable, and you mustn't fear, for you will follow in time, and then, it will all come clear."

  "I'm going to get De Roos," Alessandro said.

  He made his way downstairs again, and brought back the doctor, who thoroughly examined the patient. "You may know something I don't," De Roos said to their father, "but I don't think so. I see no imminent danger. After a few more days, we should start to think about your going home."

  The attorney Giuliani lifted his hand slightly, smiled, and fell asleep.

  "I'll stay with him," Luciana said to Alessandro. "Go do what you have to do."

  As Alessandro set out on what he realized might be his last walk through Rome, the sun was blazing in the cool air and the city was half gold, half blue.

  THE TREES on the banks of the Tiber had not lost their leaves, and as the wind coursed through them it rattled their brittle foliage and raised fantastic black clouds, for Rome was occupied by millions of birds, perching on every branch, singing as if to warm the wind, hopping about in mad distraction on rails and cornices. The starlings, warblers, finches, and swallows had come from Northern Europe, the Baltic, and Scandinavia, and were about to cross to Africa, to the deserts and the savannahs, the Congo, and the Cape of Good Hope.

  Their journey was so deep and impulsive that even at rest they knew only delirium and drive, and their immediate and explosive rising at any sound or motion was not an indication of fear but rather of the love of flight. When someone below merely clapped his hands, when a truck lurched by, or when the wind itself became anxious or fierce, they rose in a buoyant cloud that hovered over the trees like a ball of hot smoke and then formed into a wing that rallied back and forth until it broke into a hundred thousand anarchic flights and the air was uniformly colored by birds darting on the winds of catastrophe.

  The smaller birds rose with a deafening sound. Sometimes their flickering mass was shifted by the wind, like a black balloon, but one by one they returned to their perches, gliding to a landing with the seriousness of new pilots, and then they jumped and chirped in the branches until they took to the air once again.

  As the warblers and finches filled the skies, people looked up at the weaving above them and felt their more prosaic burdens lighten. The starlings were a plague, almost like bats, though somewhat smoother as they moved. They were the birds that formed the clouds that held the sunlight and the air, and hovered gently over the swollen Tiber. Though they seemed to float with great ease, Alessandro discovered in watching them that the motion of each one was no less a struggle and no less beautiful for their having been caught up in such a way that their individual paths were hard to trace, for if you followed one, and if you had the patience, if your eyes were quick enough to keep him separate and to stay with him in the dizzying turns, you could see that the way he took the air was a great thing.

  But of all the birds resting in the trees along the Tiber at the end of October, none was half the flier, half the sounder, half the whistler, or half the darter of the swallow. The swallows flew in great circles, picking up speed, and rising like leaves in a whirlwind. They ascended in this madness, climbing up and up, until they flew among the higher and thicker clouds, in the soft and rosy walls of which they would disappear and from which they would then suddenly burst in surprise. Though you could barely see them—at those altitudes they were only spots and flecks that vanished as readily as they came into view, as if they were merely the coloration of the air—it was very clear that in the higher altitudes they encountered something of extraordinary beauty and import, which is why they strained so hard to rise and stayed so long.

  Coursing from cloud to cloud, in roseate light, they had escaped, they knew the pure and the abstract and were freed from everything save light, force, and proportion. The waves of air high above the clouds were more hypnotic than waves in the sea. The light was a burst of pink and gold, and the color of the sky ran from China blue to the pale white that held the sun.

  And yet, though they were taken by the wind, and flew like golden confetti in the clouds, and might have stayed, they descended, they came down, they whistled like rockets as they fell toward the ground. They chose to return, as if they had no choice, and what struck Alessandro above all was the consummate and decisive beauty of their fall. It was not a hopeless fall, for as they shot downward they fought the air, and, ascending momentarily with great strain, they sailed off to left or right, and circled about on the plateau they had marked, before another dizzying drop, another spreading of wings, and another partia
l ascension.

  They seemed to fly faster than the imagination could imagine. They turned with breathtaking force. They made perfect curves. The air sang with their passage.

  And when they were finished, these small birds that had been flecks of gold airborne on light and wind in a place from which they need never have returned, they settled gently in the dark spaces among the branches, and here, at the end, they sang a simple and beautiful song.

  GUARIGLIA'S SHOP was in a ramshackle building that was part of a ruin. Hanging from heavy wooden beams and cast-iron rods were hundreds of harnesses and bridles. Two dozen saddles were mounted on small logs that projected from the walls.

  Guariglia looked different out of uniform, yet neither better nor worse. Although his worn leather apron suggested that he knew his trade (and he did), he did not seem like a man with good prospects. When Alessandro entered the shop, Guariglia was anxious.

  He crossed the floor, locked the door, and put up his lunch card. Alessandro noticed that Guariglia, too, wore all his medals. A small chill ran up Alessandros back when he realized that no doubt every deserter in Italy had decided on the same strategy. Guariglia, too, limped, but he was not pretending: his left leg below the knee was wood.

  "What happened?" Alessandro asked.

  "A harness-maker doesn't need legs. He only needs his hands."

  "Who did this to you?"

  As Guariglia walked to the back of the shop, Alessandro saw his children illuminated in the light of a brazier—a boy of about five and a girl of three. They huddled in a corner, with little leather horses in their hands, afraid to move.

  "It's all right," Guariglia told them. He took them into his arms one at a time, and then they went to play. Embracing them as if he would never see them again, he had paused as he held them, taken a breath, and briefly closed his eyes.

  "How can you live this way?" Alessandro asked as the children resumed galloping their leather horses across fields and forests on the floor.

  "I have no choice."

  "I don't understand why you submitted to such a thing. It's your leg, for Christ's sake."

  "I submitted to nothing," Guariglia said firmly. "Harness-makers must sometimes work with the thickest and most stubborn pieces of leather. Did you ever cut a saddle? A harness-maker knows nothing if he doesn't know how to cut. We have the tools and the practice, and we cut leather, brass, and iron all day long."

  "A harness-maker did it? You're lucky you didn't die. Who was it?"

  Guariglia smiled half with embarrassment and half with pride. When Alessandros silence seemed as if it would last forever, Guariglia broke it. "I did it for them," he said, looking at the children. "It wasn't that difficult when I thought of why I had to do it."

  "How did you stay conscious?"

  "I willed it. I tied my leg above the knee for a long time. After that the whole thing was numb and there wasn't much blood. I made everything clean, I drank half a bottle of brandy, I bathed it all in alcohol, and I had the right tools. I can't tell you how much it hurt. It took an hour. What an hour. After I cauterized the wound I was near death for a week, but then I recovered."

  Alessandro was astonished.

  "When I pass military police, they salute! How do you like that? I've never been asked for my papers, not once. At my age, with this," he said, patting the wooden leg, "with the medals ... We're moving to the south as soon as we can. I'll use a different name. After the war, when things settle down, we'll come home.

  "Alessandro, I killed at least eight of the enemy, that I know of. I served in the line for more than two years. I did my part. They took me away from this one," he said, meaning the girl, "before she was a year old."

  "You don't have to justify yourself to me, Guariglia. I gave you the idea."

  Guariglia shook his head. "No you didn't. I'd been thinking about it since the first day. I think I gave you the idea."

  "The police may simply come and take you away."

  "We're leaving soon," Guariglia said. "Until then, I don't have any other place to go. We live upstairs, and I might as well work. It could take months until they get around to us, and, if they just walk in, I'll tell them that I'm my cousin. I'll make something up. They'll see my leg."

  "Do you need money?"

  "I always need money, but not the way you mean. I'll know when they come, because they'll take Fabio first."

  "Why?"

  "The alphabet. Adami comes before Guariglia. He works on the next street over, between here and the piazza, in the cafe on the corner. He doesn't even bother to wear medals, because he's too young, and he knows that trick won't work for him."

  "What about America?"

  "He doesn't care about anything but laying Englishwomen who come to his cafe."

  "He might like American women. They have lots of them in America, although he may not know that."

  "It isn't that he's dumb, Alessandro, it's that he's pretty. His face skates over his brain, if you know what I mean. If he's not caught, I won't be. And if they come for him, there's a place underground where I can stay for a few days."

  "A catacomb?"

  Guariglia nodded.

  "That's probably the first place they'd look."

  "They're afraid. They go there only when their officers force them to."

  "How do you know?"

  "I've been there. Alessandro, at least ten thousand deserters are living under the city right now."

  "They'll smoke them out. There's no safety in numbers. It's too big a prize to forgo."

  "You don't know the catacombs. They have thousands of exits and entrances. The tunnels are endless. More of Rome is underground than above it."

  "How do they eat?"

  "With their mouths."

  Come on.

  "They steal. They slaughter cows and sheep that they get from the fields—the tunnels go far beyond the walls. And they have people who help, like me."

  "I'm going back," Alessandro said.

  "They'll just shoot you."

  "Not now," Alessandro said.

  "Because of the collapse?"

  "Yes."

  "They'll be shooting so many people now," Guariglia said, "they won't have enough bullets."

  "No. When they regroup they'll need everyone alive."

  "You're crazy," Guariglia told him.

  "I don't want them to come for me at my father's bedside. He's sick. It would kill him. I have a strange feeling that, if I tell the truth, I can help keep him alive. So I'm going to tell him that I have to go back, and I will go back."

  "As you can see," Guariglia stated, with a trace of bitterness, "even if I agreed with you, I wouldn't be able to do anything about it."

  "I know."

  "But you're going to take my warning bell, aren't you."

  "He may be a little light of mind, but he's more than just your warning bell, and he deserves a chance."

  "Some chance."

  "That's his decision."

  "Naturally it's his decision. And he'll go with you. He's so young and he's so stupid that he'll go with you. They'll take you both and put you up against a wall."

  "Maybe." Guariglia went to his children, who were playing by the brazier. "Look at them," he said. "I know they may not be as beautiful to you as they are to me...."

  "They are," Alessandro interrupted.

  "No," Guariglia insisted, "they're not beautiful in that way, but to me, Alessandro, they are all that is good and holy. I didn't know God until I saw them. Its funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens."

  The little girl came up to her father. "Da Da? When are you going to make me another horse?" she asked.

  "I'll think of you," Alessandro said as he left. Guariglia locked the door and turned inward.

  BY THE time Alessandro reached the cafe, the clouds had disappeared and the sky was as blue as a gem, with no variations, and no white on the horizon. Though the day had become hot and blindingly bright, the inside of the cafe was coo
l and dark, and the waiters squinted when they looked through the large windows that faced the street. It was quiet. Nevertheless, long banks of expresso machines were steaming like locomotives. They gleamed in highly polished copper, brass, and silver, their tanks full of pressurized boiling water to shunt into armies of cups next to armies of saucers and brigades of shining spoons. The lighted glass cases were packed with cakes and pastries, and on the marble counters, between tubs of sugar and pitchers of milk, were marble salvers that held little wood-piles of buttered bread. The aromas of coffee, pastries, and chocolate fought battles in the air like fighter planes. Everything was polished to a sparkle, the water bubbled, and the waiters, mostly old men, stood in a crooked front along a copper and mahogany bar, waiting to charge forward at their customers.

  Eight pairs of eyes kept track of every motion. If someone moved uncomfortably in his chair, a man with a towel over his arm would appear, ready to carry to or from the table anything within reason. The waiters were psychic. They could tell of a bicyclist whether or not he would brake and come in, and exactly what he would order if he did.

  When Alessandro stepped into the shade, an old waiter said softly to the man behind the bar, "One hot chocolate, extra dark, very hot, and three breads."

  "Tea and two breads," the expresso operator said, and they had a bet.

  Fabio stepped forward out of place. From this they knew that he was Fabio's friend, and the bet was off. No matter, in another hour they would be so busy that a man would not be able to hear his own voice.

  "Not bad, Alessandro. We made it!" Fabio said, bending over the menu as if he were explaining it to a customer he didn't know.

  "Can you sit down?" Alessandro asked. "You mean in the abstract?"

  "I mean now."

  "On my coccyx?"

  "What?"

  "Gluteus maximus? Obturator internus? Pyriformis?"

  "What's gotten into you?"