A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

When Rafi reached the ledge Alessandro was unable to maneuver him onto it. The body dangled half on and half off and would move from place to place as the wind pushed the rope and spun him on his delicate pivot. That meant that the rope would have to take the weight both of Rafi and Alessandro, and that it would be stiff and inflexible as it passed through the rappel gate that Alessandro had fashioned of four of his carabiners.

  He attached the light cord and tossed it down. It unfurled like a stream of water that dashes off a cliff, in waves that overtook waves ahead of them and then were overtaken. After he set the rappel gate he stepped backward over the drop.

  The tension that Rafi put on the rope, which was really three ropes tied together, and the weight of the rope itself, had an effect that Alessandro had not anticipated. Not only did it stiffen, but it was held against the rock, so that he was able to use his feet not just to push off, but to push back and put tension on the rappel gate. He walked slowly down the rock face, toward the shell-bursts beneath him.

  When he arrived at the ledge he took Rafi in, untied him, disengaged the rappel gate from the rope, and pulled on the retrieval line. Though he had to pull at first with all his strength, and hang on the light cord, it worked.

  He then had to endure two hundred meters of rope cascading down upon him and striking in rapid unavoidable blows. The sensation was like that of being beaten by a crowd of people. The second half of the rope fell beyond the ledge and down the cliff. When the end passed him, Alessandro's relief turned to panic. The rope was heavy, it was falling fast, and he had neglected to belay himself. If it pulled too strongly it would take him with it. If he let go, he would have no rope. He wound the end around his forearm, and waited for the pull.

  When it came, it jerked him from where he was sitting, with his back against the wall, into a full standing position. He almost tumbled headlong over the edge, but he pulled up and straightened himself explosively, neutralizing the downward force.

  Now he set up quickly. He was moving so fast and he had so little time that he actually kicked Rafi's body over the ledge. He was sweating, the artillery concussions were vastly louder, and the shells broke a hundred meters below him on both sides of the rope. The smell of gunpowder, lignite, and phosphorus rose in moist clouds. Ten thousand bagpipes could not have done more to lift his spirits than the sounds of the instruments that sought his death. He trembled as he set the rappel gate and backed off the edge, and he trembled as he descended toward the bursting shells, but he was not trembling from fear. In firing their cannons at him the enemy had done him a great service, and he floated down between the shell-bursts like a man on fire.

  The louder the concussions the greater his satisfaction and the easier it was to drop toward them. His natural instinct, it seemed, was to fight. The cannoneers stopped for a moment as they adjusted their aim, and he went as fast as he could, and as unevenly, to make their problems with elevation triply complex.

  The first newly aimed shell came in on the left. When it burst, the concussion deafened him and the rush of air pushed him away from the explosion. He scraped against the cliff and twirled on the rope. As if he were in a close fight, he screamed as he twisted himself to face the wall. They had the elevation just right. All they needed was a tiny adjustment in bearing.

  He loosened the rappel gate and dropped twenty meters at a time. His feet and knees pounded against the wall. As his hands slid down the rope, the deerskin gloves were smoking. The rope burned through them and took the skin off his palms. Droplets of blood, like warm water, fell from where he had been an instant before. Shell fragments and rock rained down. To keep up the speed, he pushed out from the wall whenever he slowed, and the carabiners in the rappel gate grew so hot that they made the rope smoke as it ran through them. Despite the shells bursting above him, and the fire in his hands, he reached the second ledge, crashing down in a heap next to Rafi's body, and despite the pain and shock of the fall, the first thing he did was remove the rappel gate from the rope.

  For a quarter of an hour he lay on the ledge as the Austrians threw shells against the wall above to bombard him with rock fragments and falling shrapnel. It was already past noon, and actually hot, even though the shadowed crevices all around his resting place were filled with snow and ice.

  As soon as he set up his rope and tossed over the cord, they began to fire. As he was lowering Rafi he could see the flashes of the cannon at the bore. With his hands opened up, for every flash of the cannon he had stars of light from pain. When Rafi was down, Alessandro followed, falling more than rappelling. The shells tracked his descent but the gunners could not spin their wheels fast enough to catch him.

  As he sailed onto the third ledge he felt as if all his organs had burst inside him and as if his ankles, legs, and arms had been broken, too. Blood issued from his mouth. But he was determined to finish. Every few seconds, he spat to clear his throat. He retrieved the rope and took its blows. Then he set up again, noticing with hardly a thought that one of the shells had blown Rafi's feet off, and that a sticky pool of blood and lymph had oozed from the legs.

  "Over you go," he said as he pushed Rafi over, as if he and Rafi would later be able to discuss what had happened, and, perhaps, argue about it. Lowering him, he waited for the artillery, but the Austrians had seen enough detail through their telescopes to hold their fire as Alessandro struggled to bring himself and his charge to the base.

  His hands caused him so much pain that he could think of nothing better than to have them removed when he got down. His clothes were caked in sweat, blood, and dirt, his face blackened, and his hair matted. He moved as if in a daze, and fell through the last twenty meters of rope only semi-conscious.

  He finally came to rest against Rafi, who was with him at the end, four or five meters above the river, dangling beneath an overhang. There they slowly turned, cooled by breezes that glanced off the ice-cold water below.

  A hundred Austrians in coats, caps, sheepskins, and tunics stared silently at the half-dead, half-living mass dangling a short distance above them. Alessandro's head hung back limply at first, as if he, too, were dead, but then he lifted it, and looked at them. They were standing on the bank of the river, their rifles resting on the ground or slung across their backs.

  Alessandro lost control of his bladder, and as he twisted on the rope blood still issued from his mouth.

  "Can you bury him?" he asked, but they couldn't hear over the white water. They put their hands to their ears, and some leaned forward. "Can you bury him?" Alessandro asked again. They nodded in affirmation.

  He reached into his pocket. The knife was still there. He knew the water would be freezing cold, and just before he cut the rope, he closed his eyes.

  VIII. THE WINTER PALACE

  IN THE first week of June, 1918, Alessandro was awakened every morning at dawn by fierce and unintelligible arguments among Bulgarian soldiers unfit for anything but guarding prisoners of war. These former laborers, peasants, and bandits wore sheepskin vests, baggy pantaloons, and fezzes or gray mouton caps, all entirely inappropriate to the wild heat that blew across the Hungarian plain.

  On June the second they had halted on the shore of an opalescent blue lake. The land was so flat that the opposite shore failed to show itself unless you climbed into a tree. Standing in the crux, surrounded by apple or cherry blossoms, you could see the plain beyond the water, and silent sheep-like rolls of cloud smoothly skating over oceans of still-green wheat.

  The Bulgarians seemed to have rooster in the blood, and to Alessandro, who knew no Slavic languages, every strange syllable was bliss. Dangerous, promising, and horrible, the tongue of his captors was a thrill that he likened to watching a tiger devour the rope with which one is bound hand and foot. It sounded to him like this: Blit scaratch mi shpolgah. Trastritch minoya dravitz nazhkoldy aprazhga. Zharga mazhlovny booreetz.

  On arising they punched, kicked, and slapped each other. Some drew knives but, after much screaming, abandoned them in favor of the long wh
ips they used on mules. As they dueled ceremoniously with these whips, standing beyond the range of harm, they spat, they clenched their teeth, and the veins and arteries in their necks and faces bulged like vines on a house in the Cotswolds.

  They were distraught because they, even they, who could not read newspapers and were eight hundred miles from the nearest front, knew that their cause was lost, Austria-Hungary doomed, and the world in collapse. And then, they themselves, literally, were lost. They knew they were in Hungary, but were unable to narrow their position down further. Four factions had developed among them, with each certain that their destination lay in a different direction. The more educated knew what south and east were, and asked of the illiterates who wanted to go north or west how Bulgaria could be north or west of Hungary. The north and west factions couldn't understand the concept and simply pointed to the horizon beyond which, they believed more and more each day, Bulgaria lay. Fixed by the perfect balance of four outwardly exploding desires, they remained immobile by the shore of the exquisitely beautiful lake, starving to death in gorgeous summer weather.

  Alessandro and several hundred other prisoners—Italian, Russian, Greek, French, English, and Sudanese, some who were tall enough to see over the lake—had been delivered to the custody of the Bulgarians for the purpose of making earthworks on the Bulgarian front opposite the Greeks, French, and English.

  At the end of March, the seventy sheepskin-clad Bulgarians and five hundred prisoners had set out from Klagenfurt in a cold rain, on foot, bound for Sofia. The supply train was inadequate and by May the only thing left for the 570 men was to live off the land. They made desperate zigzags into Hungary, driven by neither the compass nor the sun but by the need to reach a field where they had seen a sheep, or a barn where they thought they might find chickens.

  The lake had some fish, and the farms along its length were rich. Still, they had very little to eat, because, after several thousand years of rapacious tax collectors and alien armies, the local peasants were expert at hiding food. Starving may be more pleasant in summer than in winter, especially in tremendous heat, when it is possible to pretend that to be thin is to be cold, but it was difficult nonetheless.

  Prisoners and guards alike swam in the lake, opening their eyes beneath the surface in the hope of seeing a fish. The Sudanese made round nets and tossed them mightily over the water, where they landed with a hiss, but European fish were too cagey for this technique, although now and then a fish was caught purely by accident, and thrown almost whole into a consummately dilute fish-and-potato stew.

  In March and early April, with the column in striking distance of the Italian lines and the Adriatic, escape was popular. The Bulgarians did not try hard to prevent it, but when a prisoner, as often was the case, was returned after a few days' starvation in the cold rain, they grew implacably angry and shot him in the head.

  Alessandro had not even thought to try. He was still recovering from his wounds, he had difficulty walking, and was covered with fresh scars that he did not wish to torment by running through the brush or diving onto rocky ground. He wondered what he looked like, for he hadn't seen a mirror for many months. When he asked others to describe him, they would say, "You have a scar that runs from your cheek to your ear." It stopped there. They could not describe his face, especially since they didn't know how he had changed. One of the Sudanese had told him, in English, that he looked like a small animal that had barely escaped a lion after being mauled in its claws, and the scars, the Sudanese said, were pink like the sunset after a dust storm.

  Not far from where they camped was a church, where the Bulgarians took groups of prisoners to lie on the cool stone floor. For an hour or so they would rest on their backs, staring at a vault high above them that was tinted red and lost in the darkness, or turning their heads to see the dazzling portraits in stained glass. In these lovely hours not even the Bulgarians spoke, not even the Sudanese, who were Muslims. Instead, they managed, by lying on their backs and moving their eyes, to float about as if they were underwater side by side with luminous saints and infants swaddled in brilliant white.

  The saints and children, though fixed in glass, moved as freely as the light that shone through them. That they had in their stillness the most lively animation made Alessandro take heart. Here he heard Guariglia say, "God protect my children." The memory of his fathers hand, grasping his for the last time, made him tighten his fist in imitation. And Ariane floated in a circle of silver as fluid as the nets tossed by the Sudanese.

  THE BULGARIANS ate rose petals with goat cheese, onion, olive oil, pepper, and salt. Though it was too early for berries, it was just the right time for roses, which made impenetrable barriers between sun-drenched fields, surrounded every house and barn, and grew without inhibition from the heart of broken stone walls.

  The olive oil and cheese were strictly for the Bulgarians, and the captives ate their flowers unseasoned. Such a delicate flower with so subtle a scent has nonetheless a taste stronger than that of escarole, and far less pleasant, and it can make you very sick. Because the prisoners had to eat something, the Bulgarians allowed them to forage away from camp, but if they returned after dark they were shot. Two who were unfortunate enough to have thought that dusk was daylight ended their lives with bitter smiles as the other prisoners watched, and from that time forward few dared return when the sun was not still high in the sky.

  Alessandro had wandered to the western side of the lake in search of something to eat. Though he was weak from starvation, he enjoyed walking alone, surrounded by fields, orchards, and blue water. Sometimes he would throw himself down on the grass and sleep for an hour or two to cure the giddiness of hunger.

  At noon he was four hours from camp and had not found anything to eat. He lay down, deciding to awaken at two or three so as to make his way back by six or seven, which was perfectly safe because the sun was in the sky until nine, but he slept and dreamed so deeply that he awakened at six. He was so disoriented that he didn't realize what had happened. As sunburnt as if he had been in a desert, he went to the lake. The water lapped against the shore in quick waves no higher than the breadth of a finger. He put his hands on two fiat rocks just under the surface, and submerged his head. After drinking his fill, he sat on the shore trying to come fully awake, and realized what he had done.

  Even if he ran, and he hadn't the strength to run, he would have no guarantee of getting back to camp before dusk. He would make his way through a thousand kilometers of enemy territory and reach the Serbs, or he would proceed more directly to the Adriatic, either of which would be a remarkable accomplishment. He began to walk toward Italy.

  After twenty minutes of walking with the sun in his eyes he came to a wave in the prairie, and at the crest a group of six Bulgarian horsemen appeared.

  The leader, a familiar guard, told Alessandro that he was going in the wrong direction.

  "Oh," Alessandro said.

  "Even if you went in the right direction, you'd get to camp too late," the leader said, pulling a service pistol from his holster and aiming at Alessandro's head.

  "If you give me a ride, I'll get to camp on time."

  "If I don't, you won't, and I'll have to shoot you."

  "That's true, but if you do you won't have to shoot me."

  "I'm going to have to shoot you, because I wasn't going to give you a ride."

  "You weren't going to shoot me, either, so you'll have to give me a ride."

  As they galloped down the road they turned away from the lake, and Alessandro asked why they weren't proceeding directly to camp.

  "There may be food in this direction," the horseman shouted over the wind.

  "What if we don't get back in time?"

  "You know exactly."

  "Are you going to take that into consideration?"

  "No."

  The carbine on the back of the horseman nearly hit Alessandro's face each time the horse took a step. If Alessandro yanked it and slid off the back of the horse,
he would take one Bulgarian down and have the rifle for the other five. If he could do it fast enough at an advantageous moment, near cover, he might succeed. Then again, they might get back to camp on time, and cover was scarce.

  As he struggled with this question the sun did not slow in its descent, but he never had to decide one way or another, for they veered toward a peasant farm in a grove of small trees off the road.

  A young farmer came from his house, took a few steps forward, and greeted them as if he knew that they had come to steal his food.

  "Where's your food?" one of the Bulgarians asked straight out.

  "Have none."

  "You're lying. You're not thin enough not to be lying."

  "I'm heavy boned."

  "Shoot the bastard," the leader said.

  The farmer was shocked. These were friendly troops. He hadn't understood that the leader wasn't serious, but neither had one of the horsemen, who, as the others were laughing, lifted his rifle and shot the farmer through the head.

  A woman rushed from inside and bent over her husband. Her screams were not only pathetic but, unfortunately for her, very ugly and frightening. The man who had killed her husband lifted his rifle again. Alessandro felt as if time had stopped, and his distress was immeasurable as the woman was quickly knocked over with two shots.

  A child, a little girl of about three, walked quickly through the doorway and started toward her parents.

  Alessandro had no time to see what would happen. Perhaps they would shoot the child, and perhaps not, but if Alessandro had not moved before he knew the outcome, he would have been too late. He didn't want to do it, because he was sure that if he did they would kill him, but even as he tried to hold himself in check his hand seized the carbine and he pulled the Bulgarian from the horse, choking him with the sling. The horse reared, the Bulgarian had the wind knocked out of him, and in the confusion Alessandro had time to get a round in the chamber and let off a shot that slammed into the foreleg of a horse.