A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  As the brigade heard the Austrians breathing and watched them emerge from the smoke they tried to move to either side, but their own lines had curled into flanks and they had to fall back. This they did without hesitation, racing into the trees as if they were game-birds racing out.

  Alessandro and the Milanese stayed together even at a run, and they found themselves in the brigade clearing with a thousand terrified soldiers. A few officers who had made it through the mortar barrage on their return from headquarters were screaming assembly orders, but it was hopeless. Then they gave up on making formations. "Fight among the trees! Fight among the trees!" they commanded as the Austrians entered the thicket and started to fire.

  "We have no ammunition!" they were answered.

  "Fix bayonets! Stay in the trees!" the officers shouted, knowing that to be chased into the open would be the end.

  Alessandro and the Milanese fixed bayonets and stood in the pines. Bullets were knocking against the tree trunks like woodpeckers, and severed branches fell as if a hundred foresters were in the air above them pruning the greenery. A third soldier joined them. "What are we supposed to do?" he asked, and when he received no answer, he left.

  No time had remained for an answer. Thinking that the Italians were so disciplined as to forgo firing in thick cover, the Austrians ceased fire and charged with bayonets and trench clubs. Even the most inexperienced among the Italians, the little clerks and the young boys who had never been away from home, knew that they now had an even chance.

  The Austrians were bigger almost to the man, and wore barbaric cloaks and furs that made the neatly tailored Italians shudder. Alessandro thought that his own uniform, in comparison to the pointed hoods, horned helmets, and sheepskin vests of the enemy, made him seem very weak. As the Austrians ran through the trees, cutting the obstructive tent cords with bayonets and short-swords, and as a line of enemy advanced toward him, cocking their arms if they carried clubs and raising their rifles if they were going to use bayonets, Alessandro realized that the entire Italian army was dressed like waiters. He wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, and, when he found he could do neither, he was angry.

  Three men approached. Never in his life would he forget them. The one on the left had no neck, a snapping-turtles jaw, a mouton cap, and, in his right hand, a long mace with steel spikes mounted on four gleaming brass plates at the head. In his left hand was a small sword. The man in the middle, in fur vest and spiked helmet, was preparing to lunge with a bayonet, and the one on the right had a red beard and was carrying all kinds of leather holsters and sheaths that were strapped onto his coat. He raised his rifle as if to shoot.

  The Milanese was nowhere to be seen, and Alessandro had no place to fall back. Although these three were the immediate threat, their companions had fully infiltrated the wood, and everyone was surrounded. Certain that he was going to die, Alessandro watched the red-bearded man slowly draw a bead on his chest.

  "You're out of uniform," Alessandro said, thinking that this pointless declaration would be his last, but he was surprised to see the three of them suddenly take their eyes from him. He heard a loud crack and saw the red beard tip back as the rifleman was thrown dead off his feet. The round intended for Alessandro ignited as the dead man's finger closed on the trigger, but the short Mauser was already pointed into the trees.

  "I saved a bullet," the Milanese said, stepping from behind a tree. "I don't need it. I've got my aura."

  Then the one in the spiked steel helmet and animal-skin vest came running, bayonet gliding ahead. Steel coming toward Alessandro at whatever velocity, as long as it was a blade, allowed him a surge of happiness undoubtedly derived from the many hours of vigorous release and good fellowship of fencing classes that broke day-long immersions in Greek and Latin. He held his ground, firmly parried the blade, and drove it to his left. Not without experience himself, the Austrian accepted the blow and turned his rifle so the butt flew toward Alessandro's jaw.

  I don't have a helmet, Alessandro thought in the instant he raised his rifle and met the blow. The weapons slammed together and both men pulled off as fast as they could, rocking their rifles down and forward again, but whereas the Austrian took the direct route and went straight ahead as soon as his blade was aligned, Alessandro took a small step left and, with the bayonet, knocked his opponent's rifle also slightly left. In that restrained gesture, he gained the advantage. The Austrian followed through and missed, and as he was trying to correct his vanishing momentum, Alessandro took a tiny step back, rocked for half a second, and drove the point of the bayonet a hand's depth through the sheepskin and into the man's side.

  As the Austrian convulsed, his bayonet cut Alessandro's left forearm cleanly, opening it like a butcher's stroke against a steak, but his force was spent and he could not recover. With the bayonet pointing off to the side, he received Alessandro's full thrust in the solar plexus, and when the point of the knife reached the spine, the whole body shuddered and left the ground in a stiff jump.

  Talking to himself, moaning, gasping for air, Alessandro pulled out the blade. When he turned he saw the Milanese backed up against a tree, holding his rifle in front of him to protect himself from the remaining Austrian, who was swinging his mace as if he were a knight. It splintered the wood of the Milanese's rifle, broke off the bolt lever, and made pocks and grooves in the barrel. The Milanese's hands were battered and covered with blood, but he held the rifle even as he collapsed.

  As the Austrian hit harder and harder, Alessandro started to run. The mace took off most of the fingers of the Milanese's already bloody left hand. The rifle dropped, the Milanese's head tilted to one side, and the mace, like a machine that could think, came down hard and quick against his face and skull, puncturing it in twenty places and turning half of his head into what looked like ground meat. His cheeks fluttered and air came rattling through his mouth like wind vibrating a reed.

  Alessandro clenched his teeth and drove his bayonet at the barbarian in the mouton cap. The barbarian knew how to fight. With his left: arm he brought his sword up to deflect Alessandro's bayonet, and with his right hand, and a huge grunt, he swung the mace at the center of the rifle, intending to knock it from Alessandro's hands.

  Alessandro's entire body vibrated, and only because he was enraged was he able to hold on. The mace had embedded itself in the wood of the rifle and would not come loose. With every move either man made came a howl or a grunt, as if they had no other way to breathe.

  Alessandro pulled hard on his own rifle, jerking the mace from the hands of the Austrian, who now had only a sword, as in a fencing class.

  For Alessandro, every move was predictable. In school, the match would have been called and a better opponent found for the Italian. "Education," Alessandro said as he steadily and easily beat the man back. Baring his teeth, as the word demanded, and widening his eyes, he said it ferociously in German: "Erziehung!Erziehung! Erziehung!"

  He knocked the small sword from his hands and pushed the bayonet into him. The Austrian had jumped backward, but Alessandro had jumped forward, and he heard what sounded like an apple being cut in two. The man had not died, but he was dying. Alessandro turned away from him.

  His arm hurt. Clutching the wound to try to stop the flow of blood, he fell on his knees and crawled to the Milanese. The Milanese's mouth was open, his tongue projecting, blood still seeping from within. The side of his head had been transformed into an anatomical drawing. His right eye had been knocked from its socket, and lay between his legs in the snow, and his left arm was upraised, locked in the position he had faithfully held until and after the rifle had fallen from his hand as the fingers had been severed. The Milanese looked like a body that had been left in the trenches for days, but he had been dead for less than two minutes.

  Alessandro had never known his name. As he stared at the corpse, he imagined a woman going into a neat little study and carefully winding the clock.

  WHEN THEY found Alessandro he was unconscious, but he
was kneeling, with his shoulder against the tree, and his mouth open. They went right to him, because he looked like someone who was about to stand up. His pulse was twenty, and the corpsman who closed the wound expected him to die.

  The name of the village to which Alessandro was sent to recover had been changed from Gruensee, a pond that reflected emerald meadows, to Vittorio, where the Italian army had gained the momentum it needed to reach villages like this so as to dictate to them their new names.

  Three-quarters of the population had fled and half the rest had been put in detention. The fifty empty houses, three small hotels, and two public buildings had become an army hospital. For the first time since he had run through the streets of Rome, from Orfeo's toilet stall in the Ministry of War to the train station, Alessandro saw women—not just the sullen German matrons who had stayed to tend livestock and little children, but a large number of army nurses and volunteers: not only Italian women, but French, English, American, and Scandinavian. They went alone or in small groups, and for wounded soldiers removed from the front they awakened an entirely new sense of the world.

  As Alessandro rode into Gruensee on the back of a flatbed truck, the sight of these women assaulted him with more force than had the fleece-jacketed Austrians. Their gentleness, tentativeness, and beauty made him feel as if he were in a vivid dream. Some wore gray uniforms, others gray coats over white uniforms. The mountain light was such that blond hair took on a fine metallic sheen, like white gold, and darker hair came up in full color. Light glancing from faraway snowfields and glaciers filled in the faces of these women as if they were angels.

  Just before the truck halted, it passed a dispensary. A young nurse in a white gown was standing at the door, looking out at the mountains. She was slight and blonde, with a beautiful, evenly proportioned face. A starched nurse's cap rested almost invisibly on the back of her head, framing her face with a thin white border, as if it were a Swedish halo. Her standard-issue nurse's gown was closed at the neck by a red-and-white enameled cross that was repeated, in cloth, on a white band around her left arm, and the gown fell away voluminously, belted with a sash of the same wrinkled cotton. Her hands were clasped behind her as she rocked slowly back and forth from heel to toe, with her head tilted toward the mountains. Enveloped by gray light reflected from the snowfields, her eyes were brown with a touch of slate and green. Had they been blue, her golden hair would not have been so warm. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  AFTER AN orderly moved Alessandro from the hallway of Ambulatory Clinic 2, a nurse took him into an examination room. She had shallow black curls and teeth as white as the ice on the mountains. Her bright eyes were magnified by spectacles that made them sparkle as if they were wet. As she cut his bloody sleeve, her gown fell forward and Alessandro saw her breasts. Even though her body was nearly touching his, he stared at the mountain range that separated Gruensee from the battle beyond. The light was vanishing but the image of the nurse in the afternoon sun did not fade.

  Alessandro's tunic was in shreds, and the dressing applied by the nurse with the spectacles was growing heavy with warm blood. He watched as the mountains turned gold and then salmon-colored in light so delicate that it seemed as if it might have been blown out like a candle. Cold rain swept by in the valley below, raiding the fields of Gruensee, and when the mountains shone through they seemed to be floating on movable platforms of cloud.

  Alessandro was not surprised at how long he had to wait. In the army, it was said, if you entered a dispensary with an arrow through your heart you would have to wait at least four hours, and, according to a rumor that had swept the ranks after Caporetto, a soldier carrying his own severed head appeared at a field hospital and was told to come back later.

  When a doctor finally removed Alessandro's bandage he did so with a roughness that suggested more than just fatigue. Alessandro felt a cold and treacherous pain echoing through him. The cut spiraled gently from just beyond the elbow to just above the wrist, and underlying the pain was a chill lack of feeling, as if the flesh were dead or dying.

  "Not a hint of gangrene. The circulation has been impeded, which is the quality you feel that suggests death. Look," the surgeon said, spreading the wound to prepare it for cleaning—and nearly killing the patient. "It's purple. Hardly touched the muscle, except in the center. How did you get it?"

  "Bayonet," Alessandro answered, grimacing in pain.

  "Whose?" the doctor asked aggressively.

  As the accusation came clear, Alessandro felt a surge of contempt. "I didn't know his name, and after I killed him he was dead, so I couldn't ask."

  The surgeon dipped a handful of gauze in a jar of alcohol, and slapped it down on the wound. "I'm doing this," he stated, "to clean the wound so you won't die of infection, and because of the way you speak to officers."

  Alessandro had no words. He tried to imagine that his arm was not a part of him, and that the son of a bitch who was his doctor was not there.

  "Some soldiers wound themselves to get out of the line," the doctor said as he finished bathing the cut. "Because of the way they miss the vital part and yet make convincingly bloody gouges, you'd think that they were surgeons, but they're not as clever as they think, and a third of them die of sepsis.

  "Now, this," he continued, examining the wound, "is very neatly done. It looks as if you paid someone."

  "I didn't."

  "Whether you did or didn't, you'll need a drink while I sew it up. I'll only have to put in twenty or thirty shallow stitches, but some will be in muscle."

  "A drink of what?"

  "Grappa." The doctor went to a cabinet, poured some grappa from a five-liter can into a laboratory flask, and presented it to Alessandro.

  "Is this a lot? Is it enough?" Alessandro asked.

  "Here, I'll help you." The doctor took a drink.

  "If you finish what's left you won't be able to walk. Put these tablets in your pocket. Later, when you feel sick, take one or two in water. Let them dissolve."

  Alessandro acquiesced.

  "Drink as much as you can."

  Alessandro had long before met his match in wine, of which he had had, at most, a glass a day, always cut with water as if he were ten years old, and he downed the grappa as he held his breath. It burned his throat, but the heat was not entirely unpleasant: his face flushed until it was the color of the red velvet that lines an expensive box at the opera or the public rooms of an Egyptian whorehouse.

  "Keep it down," the surgeon ordered. "I'll be back in ten minutes. Don't fall off the chair. Pretend you're on a ship. When I stitch you up you won't know what's happening. Do you feel it?"

  "Yes."

  "After I finish, a nurse will take you to a room. You'll be able to walk. Do you feel it?"

  "Oh yes. A nun?"

  "What do you mean, a nun?"

  "Take me to a room."

  "A nurse, not a nun. We have no nursing-sisters here."

  "Which nurse?"

  "I don't know."

  "Get the one with the beautiful face."

  "The beautiful face?"

  "The beautiful one."

  "To soldiers who come from the line," the surgeon answered, "they're all beautiful."

  When Alessandro was alone, he entertained himself with speech. At one point it grew so loud and emotional that a nurse came up to him, put her finger to her lips, and said, "Shhh!" very slowly and with great sympathy.

  Comfortably swaying in a little ellipse, Alessandro was convinced that his spirit had left his body and was floating high in the examination room, but he refused to trust the notion that floating free would bring him eternal joy, and kept his eyes open.

  The surgeon re-entered, trailed by two orderlies. They approached so rapidly and were so business-like that before Alessandro knew it they had lifted him up and pinned him to a table in the center of the floor. They strapped-in his ankles, his unwounded arm, and only one thigh, because one of the thigh restraints had been snapped or cut. Th
e orderlies held his wrist and his head.

  At first none of this seemed like either a threat or an indignity. He didn't have a body, and his spirit, now curiously upside down, observed with detachment.

  Then the surgeon began to thread his needles. They were curved, of varying lengths and thicknesses, and they glinted in the light of the kerosene lantern by which he planned to work. Alessandro's spirit said, "Oh no," as the surgeon laid out his skinny arsenal. Like a diver who is about to dive from a height that frightens him, the surgeon looked at the wound for a long time. Then, with his right hand, he picked up the first needle, and, with his left, an alcohol-soaked bandage.

  Each time the surgeon pushed one of the steel needles through Alessandro's flesh, Alessandro screamed, and his body locked as rigidly as a cannon breach. The needle found its way forward in three or four pushes per stitch, and at every one Alessandro jerked like one of Galvani's frogs. After the needle emerged, the stitch was tied, and Alessandro shuddered in fear of the next. Some stitches, deeper in muscle, were worse than others. After half an hour the orderlies unstrapped him and moved on to a patient who had been sleeping on a stretcher in the corridor, and soon this next patient's screams were sufficient to awaken all the soldiers who had died in the Alto Adige. Though drunk, Alessandro was lucid. He knew that over the next several weeks his body would respond to the half hour that had just passed, but while the body was still trying to decide what had hit it, he would enjoy his equanimity.

  "What about dinner?" Alessandro inquired of the air. When no one answered, he appeared to be mildly annoyed.

  Soon the same nurse who had put her finger to her lips and said "Shhhh!" came to take him to the house where he would sleep. Again she said "Shhhh!" He thought that perhaps this was her way of breathing, or that she had emphysema or belonged to a Hindu cult. They had had such things before the war, to teach people how to breathe and how to laugh. But the unstated purpose of each and every one was to outwit death, and trustworthy Hindus who had come to Italy grew rich.