A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "Unsling your weapons," one of the officers ordered. "Express rounds. Take aim."

  Alessandro was overcome by the sound of the rifles loading, but then all was tranquil, and in the silence before the fusillade he heard Guariglia say, "God keep my children."

  VII. A SOLDIER OF THE LINE

  A THOUSAND soldiers labored on the cliffs of a chalk-white bowl in the Apennines, cutting marble plinths to mark graves. At the beginning of the war a few hundred military prisoners had been sent to work under a cadre of quarry workers, but time and the course of successive battles had greatly augmented their number. When working in daylight proved insufficient to honor the dead, the quarry detail had been divided into groups and shifts as complex and disorganized as the rock faces they mined, and their industry continued into the night at a fast and even pace, under and above the glare of torches, floodlights, and strings of clear electric bulbs. The engines never were quiet. As one shut down, others took over, supplying current, traction, drive for the cutting blades, cables, and pumps, and steam to polish the plinths until they were whiter than the bones they would memorialize. When the mechanics took one generator out of service and switched over to another, the lights would surge under double power and then fall back to something that was merely steady and bright.

  The few accountants and bookkeepers who found themselves laboring alongside revolutionary factory workers and lethargic peasants might have calculated that even had each man turned out one complete stone every day—which was not the case, for each stone had to be cut from the steep cliffs, lowered, re-cut, beveled, polished, and transported—they would have had to labor for many years to mark the graves of their fellow soldiers.

  Given the extent of the operation—men crawling like ants upon scaffolding that hung over nothing; the crews sawing, cutting, and driving wedges; and trains moving back and forth carrying what looked like sugar cubes—it was hard to believe, though it was true, that this kind of stone was being cut all over Italy.

  Alessandro arrived in the middle of the night. Two sergeants armed with pistols met him at a small station a few kilometers away. "Are you the only one?" they asked.

  "Yes," he said.

  "We were under the impression that a platoon was on its way."

  "You were betrayed," he said.

  Because he despised their familiarity, they marched him double time down a moonlit road that threaded between bare rock cliffs, and allowed him none of the customary rests on the uphill portions. Only when they came to the ridge that gave onto the quarry did they let him pause, and this they did not to be kind but to impress him with the otherworldliness of their work.

  From the quarry, scepters of light emerged at sharp angles, like mineral crystals, and the thicket from which they came was a fume of light. Sometimes the beams were cranked into different positions as if they were choosing new targets among the stars. Hundreds of men worked below, in a brilliance that made the vast quarry look like a piece of bright moon that had crashed to earth. They appeared to be mining not stone but white light, and when they took the stone in slabs and caused it to float through empty space, tracked by searchlights, hanging on gossamer cables and unseen chains, it was as if they were handling light in cubic measure, cutting and transporting it in dense self-generating quanta from the heart of magical cliffs.

  Huge rectilinear masses of white marble glided at all angles past each other in skew paths of descent, suddenly emerging in full blaze from darkness, and then dimming, only to gain strength again upon reaching the steel frames where they would be cut apart in the glare.

  The sound of hammers striking rock and steel never ceased. From above they seemed to be the individual ticks and tocks of thousands of clocks that had been freed from telling time and taught to talk. Patterns and cross-patterns emerged in their excited conversation, music extracted from the gossip of the rocks.

  Wheels spun hypnotically, illusions among their spokes oscillating back and forth in gleaming counterpoint. Open fires, forges, and white-hot boiler fires were fed by stokers and incensed by bellows. Rows of machines surrounded by tenders and oilers pulled an astonishing web of cables past innumerable pulleys mounted on every dihedral and face. The movement of the cables suggested that the whole scene was steadily rising. Scores of men dragged about clay-colored rubber hoses from which jets of water were ejected onto the cables that slowly cut into the marble. On a wide section of quarry floor a corps of bevelers and polishers worked in an orderly crowd not unlike that in armories where military clerks milled about their desks. In rows of tents beyond, no one was sleeping, for Alessandro had arrived right before the change of shifts, and every row between the tents was occupied by men pulling on their clothes. Camp stoves steamed with vats of broth and pasta. Alessandro could smell coffee, tea, and freshly baked bread. The shift engaged would eat before they slept. The shift that had been sleeping would eat before they were engaged.

  "Everyone here eats a lot," one of the sergeants said. "Here you don't just sit on your ass the way they do on the fronts. You work. Each man is like a goddamned engine, and engines need fuel."

  Alessandro didn't know what to say, but he did know he was hungry.

  "Don't you have any things?" the talkative sergeant asked. Though he had been repulsed he could not cease being proprietary.

  "What things?"

  "A mess kit, a blanket. You don't have anything, do you."

  "No," Alessandro answered as they started him down the path that shortcutted the vehicle road into the quarry. "They took everything away from me before they were about to shoot me, and they never gave it back."

  "What luck. Why didn't they shoot you?" he was asked cheerfully.

  "I don't know."

  "Don't worry about it. In your two months here you can make the gravestones for the boys who were going to shoot you. We need hammer men. You look like you were pretty strong before you softened up in Stella Maris, and in a couple of weeks you'll be stronger than you've ever been in your life. You're going to be swinging a ten-kilogram hammer sixteen hours a day, and I don't mean like some ass-head clerk. I mean sixteen hours, and you don't steal from us even a minute."

  Then they reached the floor, and they were bathed in light and noise.

  THE SOLDIERS in the quarry grunted, groaned, and hummed when they consumed their bread and soup. Half were shirtless in the cold night wind. Their muscles, seemingly as dense as steel, pressed against their skin like swellings. Veins and arteries with no place to go stood in isolation between hard muscle and elastic skin, like the vines that strangle oaks.

  Alessandro had never seen human beings who looked like this. He had always been strong, especially when he climbed, but these men were three or four times stronger than the strongmen in the circus. Next to them, weightlifters were fat-ladies. The only people to whom they bore resemblance were the ancients who served as models for anatomical sketches and statues. Hundreds of men who had been born ordinary men, some of small stature, some surprised waiters and tailors and other unathletic weaklings, had become as strong as galley slaves. Whatever the process that had turned them to stone, it had also frozen their tongues and given them mythical appetites. A huge dark-haired man next to Alessandro drank hot soup until he sweated in the cold wind, and, as Alessandro watched, he ate four loaves of bread.

  "Do you always eat like that?" Alessandro asked.

  "Arrrghh!" was the answer he received, followed by a long arm extended as if to cuff him, but the arm was on its way to one of the two loaves that was still on the marble slab beside Alessandro's half-finished soup.

  "Go ahead," Alessandro said, but only after the bread-eater had done away with most of it. "Would you like some of this one? I can't eat the whole thing. Here." The bread-eater took it like a trout taking a fly. "For me," Alessandro went on, "it's a great luxury to have so much bread. I was in a line battalion, where we didn't get much to eat. And then, in prison, well, I suppose everyone starves in prison."

  The bread-eater's exp
ression seemed to say, talk all you want, but wait until you face what it is that makes me eat five loaves of bread at a sitting. This silent communication was punctuated by one of the hammer men, who broke wind, which elicited the most extraordinary chain reaction from all of them, as if they were a drill team.

  Alessandro, who felt that he had nothing to lose, addressed the hammer men. "I don't want to be like you," he said. "I don't want to be a muscle-bound bread-eating jackass who sings in a fart chorus."

  "What did you do on the line, kill people?" asked a dark little ape.

  "Naturally," Alessandro answered. "What else was I supposed to have done?"

  "More work for us," the bread-eater said to his bowl.

  "Is this a company of pacifists?" Alessandro asked.

  They smiled an astonishing array of toothless, half-toothed, and toothy grins. "Less work," someone said.

  "I take it you don't care about the soldiers who are killed, just about the demands they make upon your time?"

  "We never see them," the little ape said.

  "You should be ashamed," Alessandro told them. "I've seen them. You should be ashamed."

  "Tell us that after you've used the hammer."

  "I will," Alessandro shot back. "And I won't eat half a dozen loaves of bread at a sitting, either. You become an ape only if you're an ape to start."

  "Not all of us are apes," he was told by a soldier who looked, indeed, like the model for the statue of Perseus.

  "At least you can talk."

  "All of us can talk, but we save our energy."

  "I was in the line for two years," Alessandro said, as if to identify and defend himself.

  "This is not the line," Perseus said, "but something entirely different. This is a dream."

  AS ALESSANDRO marched in a line three or four hundred men long on a steep path that led across the shelves and ledges of a cliff, he felt exceptional peace. Rising on a rock face was cause for an inner jubilation that, perhaps because it could not find an exit past the discipline and caution necessary to stay on, spun like the gleaming armature of an electric motor and stabilized the soul of the climber as surely as if it had been a gyroscope. Alessandro had once remarked on this to Rafi, when they were invisible to the world, hidden in the crags of a cliff in the clouds. Not only had Rafi understood, which surprised Alessandro, for Rafi was not partial to metaphysics, but he had responded immediately, telling Alessandro that the real beauty of forward motion was that, to achieve it, something else had to move either around or up and down—like wheels on a train or a cart, or the pistons and propellers of a flying machine, or the screw of a ship, or, in the case of a man walking, his bones, his ligaments, and his heart.

  The hammer was ungainly, badly balanced, and heavier than a rifle. It pulled Alessandro off his stride and was hard to carry, and he wondered how he could possibly have the strength to swing it through a sixteen-hour day. And yet for the others it seemed as light as air.

  Squads of men veered off to ledges and tables on different levels, but Alessandro, being near the end of the line, went as high as it was possible to go, to a platform of clean rock a hundred meters above the quarry floor. He and a dozen other men were taken to a forest of iron stakes, which served many purposes. They made fissure lines for the eventual separation of the slabs, provided bases and pivots for cables, cranes, and hooks, and, in a fanciful sense, they killed the virginal marble just as harpoons kill a whale before it, too, is cut into slabs.

  "Take this one," a sergeant instructed Alessandro, guiding him to a stake that was waist high. "Work on it until you lose so much blood that you faint."

  "I beg your pardon?" Alessandro asked.

  "Fainting is a pleasure, and, don't worry, we carry you down."

  "I don't understand."

  "Your hands. The skin will come off your hands."

  "Why not use gloves?" Alessandro asked.

  "You're better off facing it directly," the sergeant said. "If you use gloves it takes longer, you're more exhausted because you're not yet fit, and you tend to succumb to infections more readily. And a glove will stick to the tissue underneath the skin."

  Alessandro found the sergeant's account hard to believe, thinking himself strong enough to drive this and other stakes without much injury to his hands. "It all depends on control of the hammer," he told the sergeant.

  "Exactly. The more the shaft moves, the faster you come apart. Grip the shaft hard," he said as he left.

  Alessandro looked at the iron stake. The head was partially flattened and exfoliated, but its disintegration had been checked as if the stress of the hammering had hardened it.

  He swung the hammer, and when he connected with the stake he heard a lovely metallic ring that joined the fast-moving chorus on the cliff face. The first strokes were pleasant, as were the following dozen or two, even though ten minutes of labor pushed the stake in only a few millimeters.

  Because he knew he couldn't rest he started a slow and deliberate stroke that he hoped would protect him. After half an hour the skin of his palms and fingers was pink and blistered. Had he or anyone else been doing this in the garden, he would have gone inside for lemonade.

  He stopped. The blisters were not painful, but they covered the inside of his hands. As he was looking at the stake and hoping for the best, the sergeant returned with another sergeant in tow. Now Alessandro became acutely aware of the pistols at their sides.

  "Why stop now?" the new sergeant asked.

  "Blisters," Alessandro said, knowing their answer and that they would give it with utter dispassion.

  "Not a reason for stopping, a blister or two."

  "My hands are like water skins."

  "The bar has hardly moved."

  "All right," Alessandro said. "If it has to be," and he knew it did.

  The blisters didn't break until he had struck the stake twenty times or more, and when they did break, the fluid kept the pain from him for another twenty blows.

  "Keep on," the sergeant ordered.

  When his hands had dried and the handle was hot, each bell-like ring rolled up the loose skin that had been hanging from his palms and tore it so that eventually it all fell to the ground. In fifteen minutes his hands were the color of a rose, and in half an hour they had started to bleed, to exude viscous white fluids, and to crack apart.

  The air itself hurt his harrowed fingers and palms. To grip something solid was out of the question, to hold a heavy object, quite insane, to swing a sledgehammer, unimaginable—and yet he did, for he knew that when he had bled enough he would faint and they would carry him down.

  He surprised them with how long he kept going, and they had to step back because the blood flew in distorted parabolas that made thickening lines upon the rock floor. At times it appeared to be raining in a dense windblown cloud whose underside had turned red as it passed over a raging fire. The sergeants waited for Alessandro to fall. He didn't fall. Instead, he struck as hard as he could, for he had come to believe that he was holding a piece of the sun in his hands, and that he would use it to cleave the rock as Guariglia had severed his own leg. His muscles tightened and then relaxed, his arms flew out before him as flexibly as elastic bands, and the head of the hammer struck the top of the stake with costly precision. The stake was driven down until it disappeared flush into the floor.

  Alessandro's clothes were soaked with sweat and blood, and his eyelashes were stuck to his eyebrows by drops of blood that had blown against his face like raindrops in a squall. He dropped the hammer and turned to the two sergeants. "Is that the procedure?" he asked, and fainted dead away.

  THREE DAYS later he awoke on his back in a tent through which both the sunlight and blue sky appeared pale white. Wind-luffed plains of fabric shook the seasoned mahogany-colored poles.

  His hands were bandaged in clean gauze that made him feel as if he had been changed into a nursery toy. Beneath the bandages he felt no pain, but only heat. After three days of sleep, he awoke as untroubled as if he had
been in a tent on the beach during a seaside holiday.

  Perseus came through the tent flaps. "You have only a few minutes," he said.

  "No," Alessandro replied. "I have, in one form or another, all of eternity and the rest of time."

  "Not before you begin to work you don't."

  "How am I supposed to work?" Alessandro asked, holding up his padded hands.

  "Your hands will be healed in ten days," Perseus told him, "and then you'll have the hammer all over again, but they let you do it in stages."

  "Ten days is not a few minutes, or has Orfeo changed time?"

  Perseus was ignorant of Orfeo. "Until you start the hammer again, you'll carry. Then they mix hammering and carrying. Your hands gradually toughen and you end up only hammering."

  "What am I going to carry?"

  "Steel rods."

  "They have cranes," Alessandro protested. "And if they let me do the hammering gradually now, why didn't they to begin with? Did they want to see if I had special skin?"

  "No, they wanted to lay you so low that you'd be able to carry rather than hammer."

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Alessandro asked, "Why didn't they just assign me to carry?"

  "If they had done that, they wouldn't have been able to transfer you to hammering. Now all they have to do is transfer you back. It's easier for them."

  "Did you go through the same lunacy?"

  "We all did."

  "Why didn't you warn me?"

  "Had you been anxious, it would have been worse."

  "What do they do if you refuse to work?"

  "Hit you with a rifle butt."

  "And if you still refuse?"

  "Shoot you. Do you know how many graves have to be dug?" Perseus asked. "In my estimation we're the most important men in Italy. Cadorna was a fop and a jerk. He'll be forgotten as nothing, and our gravestones will last ten thousand years."

  "In the courtyard of my house," Alessandro stated, "are fragments of stone that came from the days of empire. They are devoid of anything but the quality of having lasted. The old laundress washing blouses in a tin tub used to catch my eye a hundred times better. A pine tree bending in the wind, or a bird alighting, would easily overshadow them—and I knew what they meant, because my father had translated them, and he told me. He used to take guests around after dinner, discoursing upon the fragments. I knew it all by heart at a very early age, but the maid walking past them in the corridor, her fat legs like spindle cones, her blue dress wrinkled everywhere except where it had been pressed by the heat of her stupendous ass, was far more gripping."