A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  In the center of the floor was a huge oak table that had been put together in the chamber after the components were taken up by rope. Arrayed upon it were the telephone and a row of four cells to power it; the telescope, with its chain rising to the plate in the ceiling; a pelorus, for establishing bearings; an optical range-finder; a daily log; a codebook; a box of pencils and a penknife for whittling them sharp; a pair of binoculars—even the king did not have better binoculars; and a kerosene lamp with a brightly polished reflector. Between bookends of solid granite were the Bible; Scaramouche, by Rafaello Sabbatini; the 1909 edition of Baedeker's Die Schweiz, with the subtitle Oberitalien, Savoyen und Tirol; Orlando Furioso; the original French edition of La Chartreuse de Parme; a Boy Scout manual that had been split in two; a small volume of Dante entitled Vita Nuova—Rime; and an extraordinary short English pornographic novella (that Alessandro read even before he unpacked) in which a barely disguised Prince of Wales traveled to Paris to spend time in a warm pool with half a dozen of the world's most beautiful and licentious women, exploring with every part of his anatomy every part of theirs as they did the same for him and among themselves. The end degenerated into such a tangle of beautiful limbs, turgid breasts, and open mouths against the fat barrel of the Prince of Wales and his various appendages, that it made Alessandro think of a belaying pin in a vat of calamari.

  The outside wall had the large opening through which he had entered, and two narrow rectangular windows on either side. All three were covered by steel shutters hinged at the top. A little window opened in the center of the plate that fit over the entrance, and the plate itself was so heavy that it had to be raised and lowered by cranking a winch. A steel trap-door led to the roof without benefit of a ladder: one had to reach up and pull oneself through. The roof itself, nothing more than a narrow ledge carved into the cliff, gave access to the absolutely vertical cliff face above, which went another hundred meters or so to a summit that was nothing more than a needle the size of a hitching post. This roof platform was the latrine, in which one had to hang out, while grasping two bolts, over a drop of nearly a thousand meters.

  Alessandro lit the lamps. A thin line of orange light marked the west, and the lights in the Austrian and Italian trenches sparkled in the darkness into which they had been cast an hour previously.

  He folded the knapsacks and stashed them on a shelf, made the bed (a cot under the wall of inscriptions), and got things ready in case the Austrians were bold enough to attack at night, which he thought even more unlikely than that they would attack in the day. Still, he bolted shut the steel doors, cleaned and loaded the Mauser and stood it in the corner, and hung his Colt pistol and the bayonet on pegs next to the bed. The pegs had been neatly placed in holes bored in the granite, which reminded him of the Prince of Wales, and he dreamed that night of wonderfully perfumed women with rosy flesh and intoxicated, licentious stares. But when he awoke in the middle of the night, the memory of their beautiful bodies reminded him so much of Ariane that he was lost in despair.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE isolation is the mother of meticulousness, Alessandro kept his aerie sharper and better organized than the bridge of a flagship of the Royal Navy. When the bells churned on the telephone, he was always ready to give his reports, and he read them in precise military language as if he had been doing it all his life. On two occasions in the first ten days he warned Italian outposts of impending air attacks. Because of the high winds, he had been unable to hear the aircraft, though he had seen them with the telescope as they rounded the easternmost peaks of Switzerland. He never would have picked them up individually, but five moving together as one were visible, with the aid of a telescope, even a hundred kilometers away. His warnings were well appreciated, and they suggested to him that if he were able to see Austrian squadrons a hundred kilometers distant in the ice-world, then perhaps someone was able to see him, too. He never relaxed, glancing frequently at the trap-door and listening for bolts driven in the rock below him. A bolt could be inserted both slowly and silently. The party climbing toward him could do it a little at a time, and then retreat until the next night. It was possible as well that the Austrians would make the arduous climb up the other side, undetected, and abseil down to his post in utter silence.

  The chamber was cold. When the steel shutters were open, as most of the time they had to be, his water froze. The winds were sometimes so high that his ears popped with the change in pressure, and the normally hypnotic whistling of the wind through fissures in the shutter frames became louder than the horn of an express train. He could neither ignore the sound nor do anything until it stopped, and it was occasionally so loud that objects vibrated across the table and things jumped from the pegs on the walls.

  During a thunder-and-lightning storm two days after he arrived, the vibrations from the wind were so great that they dumped the hand grenades onto the floor all at once. Alessandro had experienced this nightmare while sitting on a rope chair, wrapped in blankets and drinking a cup of hot water. Suddenly, with the most brittle and terrible sound he had ever heard, the grenades began to bounce across the stone floor. With no place to flee and not enough time to open the shutter and throw them out, he waited for the explosion that would paper the walls with his flesh and paint them the color of his blood. In that moment, he looked at the cup of hot water, thinking it would be the last thing he would ever see, and he felt so many regrets, that the tin cup looked like the saddest thing in the world. The grenades remained intact. From then on, he kept them in a neat row on the floor.

  He soon tired of the sexual adventures of the Prince of Wales. After half a dozen readings, the goings on in the Parisian brothel were no more exciting than the daily routine of a hardware store. After three days, he opened the package marked Surprise: Do not open for three days. It was a fresh lemon. Perhaps because it had been repeatedly thawed and frozen, it had a strange taste, but he used it to flavor half his supply of salmon and two cups of tea.

  He hadn't the energy to read the Vita Nuova more than a few lines at a time. These took on a magical quality, and he could see them floating in the dark under the rock ceiling, singing and turning in the air like strange fish in the depths of the sea.

  During the day he sat for hours in the rope chair, wrapped in blankets and listening to the slow thunder of his heart. When his pulse dropped below forty and his extremities were numb with cold, he would force himself to move. It was painful to rise from the chair and throw off the blankets, but he would do it, and begin to walk slowly around the room. At first he staggered. Then he would run, and bend. When he felt alive again, he did calisthenics for several hours, working up slowly until he was breathing hard, sweating, hot, flushed, and on fire. In these sessions he reclaimed his physical strength. The altitude, the meager rations, and the hardening of his body exercised his spirit. He stopped reading, but the lines kept on coming, circling in the deep, aglow, a phrase or a word at a time. For example, one word, "bellezza," after rotating like a sparkling pinwheel, stopped and drew back like a woman who brazenly asks to be admired. Then it smiled ghoulishly, pulsed in sickening green light, and exploded into silver shards that vanished into the black. Other words had their own repertoires. Sometimes they met before him in the air, in battle or in seduction.

  In the evenings after dinner he watched the flame of the lamp. When the wind howled with great strength, it moved as if the abyss were trying to pull it away. Wind and darkness seemed to say that if only the flame would surrender and be extinguished, leaving behind a trace of white smoke, it would be taken at unimaginable speeds and in unimaginable cold, whistling like a million flutes, high over the mountains of ice, rocketing into the darkness of space in distances that had no limit and for a time without end—but the flame kept burning, wavering perilously behind a thin shell of brittle glass, and it lit the room, turning everything to gold.

  THE AUSTRIANS could neither mass for an attack nor enjoy the open air as long as Alessandro was able to see them from his chamber in the roc
k and guide shells directly to the entrances of their tunnels and trenches, working away at particular points like a miner until he could open up a bunker or excavate a tunnel, and watch the men scatter after he hit the hollow places. It was natural that they would resent this.

  At four in the morning the ringing of the telephone pulled Alessandro from a deep sleep. He rolled out of bed, found the table in the dark, and picked up the receiver.

  All kinds of static came over the line. "Yes," he said.

  "Alessandro?" queried an unfamiliar voice, bathed in noise.

  In the dark, with the blankets heavy on his shoulders as he leaned over the table and clutched the phone, Alessandro could not get his bearings, and he felt as if he were drifting in space. "What?" he answered.

  "Is that you?"

  "It's the king."

  "I wanted to make sure they hadn't gotten to you yet."

  "Who?"

  "It cleared tonight, about a half an hour ago, and we saw lights above you."

  "Above me?"

  "Yes. They must have come up the other face."

  "At night?" Alessandro asked incredulously.

  "We were watching them, but then it clouded over. You might want to prepare yourself."

  "Thank you," said Alessandro. "How many?"

  "Four."

  Alessandro thought for a moment, listening over the wind and the static on the line for footsteps or clinking metal. "Thank you," he said again, and hung up.

  As the wind whistled through the cracks between the stone and the iron shutters, he stared up into the dark and saw nothing but the inexplicable flashes that were made in his own eyes.

  He lit the lamp, moved a wooden ammunition box near his bed, and put the lamp on it. He placed the Vita Nuova, face open, on the floor near the head of the bed. Then he threw off his blankets, tucked in his shirt, buckled his belt, put on his heaviest sweater, and sat down on the floor to lace up his boots. His fingers moved like the parts of a spinning jenny. Never had he worked faster, and then he was up in one motion, leaning over the bed to take the pistol and the bayonet from the wall. As he strapped on the pistol, he felt disturbed because he had never fired it. He used precious seconds to unholster the weapon and swing it open. The six round ends of cartridges in the chambers made a brass-colored circle comforting to behold. Upon this metal his survival would rest, just as it had so often depended upon even smaller pieces of steel driven into the rock.

  He threw the empty knapsacks across the room to his bed. Moving with incredible speed, he used the sacks to sculpt a man lying on his side, facing the wall. The legs had to be far lower than the hips and shoulders. He covered this with two of his blankets, and it looked real, but nothing in the chamber, save his own head, was even vaguely spherical. He settled for stuffing some clothes into a sock and arranging the end as if it were the ornamental part of a night cap. He would have found this amusing had he time to be amused.

  Then he heard the sharp, high-velocity click of tiny pebbles striking the stone roof and the frame of the trap-door, and he froze. Whoever was coming had dislodged some stones while descending, and he hoped that they had not realized it.

  As quickly as he could, his heart beating at twice its normal rate, he rested some heavy timbers against the wall and moved the table, in three parts, from its pedestal, arranging the table top against the timbers like the sides of a lean-to. He used a metal plate, which had been hauled up at great cost and for no apparent reason, to armor the wood. Then he hung all the rope and other loose equipment he could find over the side of this construction, grabbed his first-aid kit and the remaining blanket, and crawled between the lean-to and the wall.

  As he was stuffing cotton into his ears he remembered that he had left the trap-door bolted. Cursing quietly, he backed out of the redoubt, leapt to the center of the floor, and silently pulled back the bolt. As he stood, with his neck bent, staring at the bolt, he heard the thump of a boot above him.

  Teeth clenched, heart racing, Alessandro pushed quietly into his armored sanctuary. He rammed the cotton firmly into his ears and held it between his teeth. Then he unholstered the pistol and laid it before him, and unsheathed the bayonet. Six shots, he thought, and four men. Either he would be calm and unshaken, or he would find himself flailing in the dark with the bayonet.

  They waited for what seemed like hours before they lifted the door, and when they did, they did it ever so slowly. Trying desperately not to breathe audibly, Alessandro watched long crusts of snow fall inward and break apart in the air before making little piles on the floor. He saw a man's face slowly descend partway through the trap. He, too, was breathing quietly. He looked at the lamp and the bed, and then pulled back.

  At first, nothing happened. Then, after two heavy metallic clunks, the trap-door was slammed shut. Alessandro grit his teeth and bunched the blanket around his head, holding as much of its bulk as he could near his ears.

  He counted. One ... two ... three ... four ... Even though he had been deliberately slow, he had been counting so fast that the explosions came at twenty. One immediately followed the other. They pushed him against the rock wall and threw the metal plate up to the ceiling, but the table top hardly budged. Alessandro's jaw closed on the cotton, and he received a blow to his solar plexus that stopped his breathing. Despite the cotton, the blankets, and his hands, his ears rang, and the nerves in his eyes gave him a fireworks show.

  He threw down the blanket, spat out the cotton, yanked the ear plugs, and picked up the pistol, but his hand was shaking so hard that he had to put the gun down. He wondered if he would be able to stop trembling in time, and tried to talk himself into it as if he were trying to talk a horse out of a gallop. While they were dropping down from the hatch, which had been blown open in the blast, he would have to lie with the pistol before him, hoping that at the last moment his hand would be still and strong enough to grasp it and aim.

  Before they came in they shone their miner's lights around the room, and one of them shot the blanket-covered knapsacks five times in rapid succession with a semi-automatic pistol.

  The first man dropped down. The minute his feet touched the floor he raised the pistol he had just fired and emptied it into what he thought was Alessandro's head. Still holding the gun in his hand, he looked about, the beam from his light sweeping over the rubble, and then he relaxed. The room was filled with smoke.

  With a voice that sounded relieved and triumphant, the first man called the others in. They dropped down one by one, and they spoke with animation, for they thought they had succeeded.

  The beams of their lights stopped tentatively at the dead soldier in the bed, and then quickly moved on. One of the raiders discovered the telephone. It was in pieces, but the body was still connected to the wire that fell from the ceiling.

  "Look, a telephone. Let's call the Italians on the telephone!"

  They gathered around the telephone and turned the crank. They were laughing like little boys, with their lights shining upon the semi-dismembered instrument they were trying to revive, when Alessandro's hand stopped trembling.

  He placed it around the pistol. It was uncannily steady, far steadier than it had been before the blast, steadier than it had ever been in pistol practice.

  Taking aim at the one who had the empty pistol in his hand, which was not the best tactic, he pulled back the hammer.

  When they heard the hammer click they turned to stare. Unable to place the sound in the darkness and smoke, they froze. Even after the first fell dead, the other three were more surprised than indignant, and they hardly moved. Alessandro cocked the hammer again and shot one of them through the heart. As this one collapsed, the other two lurched to opposite sides of the chamber. They were easy targets because they hadn't had time to discard their lights, and Alessandro put two casually aimed shots in the body of the one on his left just as he was drawing a pistol.

  Before Alessandro could turn, the last of them had begun to spray the room with bullets. He was so frightened th
at he fired wildly, sometimes not even in Alessandro's direction. Alessandro dropped to his knees and crawled along the floor behind the bulwark of table tops. The enemy soldier fired at them and bullets splintered through the wood ahead of Alessandro, walking from right to left in a design so even and at a rate so steady that he knew if he were to stand he would have time to get off a shot before the pattern broke. Trembling with fear, he took a breath and stood up straight. He raised his gun and fired two shots at the miner's light. The light went out and the room was suddenly quiet. Now three miner's lights lay on the floor, their beams pointing at strange and unlikely angles, as the smoke slowly cleared. The air smelled of gunpowder and blood. Alessandro reloaded the Colt and listened very closely, because someone was breathing.

  THOUGH THE explosion had not wounded him, Alessandro was suddenly taken ill. A pain centered in his forehead and eyes made him bend double, and, as he did so, he retched. He could hardly move, and thought he was going to die of suffocation. As the smoke dissipated, he blacked out.

  He awoke an hour after dawn, in air that was pristine and cold. Sunlight came through the cracks and was reflected through the hatch. After a while, he heard the breathing. It was so faint he couldn't be sure he wasn't merely remembering it.

  One of the Austrians was still alive. Lying on his back with his arms bowed, he clutched a wound on the right side of his chest. He was tall and strong, his face brutal and pale, with fleshy lips, hooded eyes, and a close-cropped blond beard. He looked like a mountain guide. They had probably all been mountain guides.

  "Does it hurt?" Alessandro asked in Italian, too sick to speak in another language even though he had intended to.