A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Trying to control their mounts, the Bulgarians were unable to reach their weapons, and as the horses bucked, went rampant, sidled, and bumped, a shooting gallery appeared before Alessandro.

  Slewing the carbine, he fired and knocked one of the Bulgarians forever off his horse. He took a half step forward and fired again, but the chance movement of a horse deprived the bullet of its target.

  Two Bulgarians had dismounted and were running toward Alessandro, one with a sword and the other with a bayonet. He dropped one, but as he did he was knocked down by the one he had pulled from the saddle. The swordsman kicked the carbine from his hands, pivoted around, and went for the child.

  Alessandro crawled in her direction as he was beaten by rifle butts and the hooves of disturbed horses. Through the chestnut-colored legs and risen dust, he saw the swordsman approach the little girl and raise the sword above his head. The child was impas sive. She had dark little eyes, like raisins, and a bowl-shaped haircut. Only her eyes moved as the sword was raised, and then it came down, faster than the eye could see.

  Alessandro closed his eyes, thinking that they would kill him immediately. He was wrong.

  They left him on the ground while they calmed the horses, about whom they were genuinely upset, and attended to their dead and wounded. The wounded man rested against a small tree, apparently not too badly hurt, and the dead man looked like a rolled-up rug.

  Two Bulgarians went inside the house and came out with several wooden cages. "What's in the cages?" the wounded man called out, thinking that if the cages held rabbits or chickens the wound would have been worthwhile. The cages held four big rats.

  The Bulgarians looted everything they could. They pulled quilts and blankets from a huge pine chest and scattered them in the dust. They took the farmer's clothes and his wife's jewelry. A photograph of the child was tossed to the ground, and landed face down.

  As the horses calmed and the Bulgarians stared at the rats, trying to decide whether or not to eat them, Alessandro was told to dig two graves. One was shallow, the other deep.

  Many thoughts raced through Alessandro's mind, and when the Bulgarians lowered the pine chest into the earth, he assumed it was going to be a coffin for their friend, but then they buried their friend in the other grave.

  Since the Bulgarians evinced no interest in the family they had murdered, and didn't even look their way, Alessandro concluded that they had prepared it for him, but it didn't make sense that the Bulgarian would be buried in raw earth and Alessandro given a coffin.

  Then he saw one of his captors coming from the house, with a hammer and a handful of homemade nails. Alessandro looked at the Bulgarians, who were laughing, and he looked at the rats. Then he bolted.

  It was almost dark. He tore through some brambles, running as fast as he could. Though he was clearing a path for the Bulgarians, they were going slower, as their reward for getting through the brambles was so much less than his.

  Alessandro thought he might escape if the darkness would protect him, and he ran until long after the Bulgarians' few rifle shots had stopped. After an hour he threw himself deep into the brush and stayed absolutely still. He listened all through the night, and he heard only the sound of nightingales and a stream.

  AT DUSK the next day, after wandering through the heat-filled plain without having had a single bite to eat, he came to a small hill upon which a profusion of flowers was blooming untouched, uneaten, and in colors as rich as the panels of saints and swaddled infants that he had left to the Bulgarians and Sudanese. As he was eating, he thought he saw a soldier, but the man standing stock still behind a clump of foxglove was dressed in red pants the color of poppies, a royal-blue jacket with white trim, and a golden helmet. He was festooned so with buttons, braids, and colorful bars, and his boots and mustache were so black and so heavily waxed that Alessandro assumed he was either a hallucination or a toy.

  "Remarkable thing about foxglove," the hallucination said, in German. "They stay colorful for months after they're cut. It's because they're poison that they last. I had some on my estate and we cut them to make way for a tennis court. Three months later I knocked a ball over the fence, and when I went to get it I saw the foxglove stacked in a huge pile, with gnats buzzing above it in a beam of light, and its colors had not faded."

  Alessandro addressed this vision. "Where is your estate?" he asked in faltering German.

  "Just outside Vienna."

  "I didn't realize," Alessandro said, continuing to graze upon flower petals, "that German was the language of my subconscious."

  "German is the language of my subconscious," the hallucination replied.

  "Don't you speak Italian?" Alessandro asked, looking up at him.

  "Yes, certainly. Would you prefer to speak Italian?"

  "It would be easier."

  "Much delighted," the hallucination replied in Italian with a heavy German accent.

  "Can't you speak without an accent?"

  "I'm afraid not, but, then again, your German is not exactly sublime."

  "Yes, but you're from my mind, and you should be equipped with perfect Italian."

  "Do you imagine that you are imagining me?" the hallucination asked.

  "I know for a fact that I'm imagining you."

  "That's very interesting. I've never met anyone who believed that he was imagining me as we spoke. From your costume as well, it's clear that you're a lunatic. Am I correct? Where is your asylum? Have you escaped, or do they let you out to eat flowers?"

  "Disappear, toy," Alessandro said, dismissively waving his left hand.

  "I refuse."

  "Vanish!" Alessandro commanded, snapping his fingers. The hallucination smiled and stood fast. Alessandro suddenly straightened and stepped back, admiring a rose bush as tall as he was, with a score of vigorous yellow blooms. "I think everyone in the world misunderstands roses," he said.

  "Not you, of course. You eat them."

  "Be quiet. It has nothing to do with that. They talk about the thorns and the blooms. Forget about the thorns: only idiots get stuck, anyway. The remarkable thing about roses—luxuriant feminine blooms that attract you with their scent, their softness, and their blush, almost as if they actually were a woman—is not that they come from a bush that has thorns, but that they come from a bush that is so awkward: imbalanced, gangly, and skinny, like a young girl who's terribly clumsy in her adolescence and then becomes the most beautiful woman in the world. It has nothing to do with thorns. On that account, the canons of metaphor, poetic and visual, should be revised."

  "What did you do before you became a lunatic?"

  Alessandro explained, and went back to eating flowers.

  "Then all you are is an escaped Italian prisoner of war who, because he has been starving, is eating roses, and thinks that I am a dream."

  "That's right," Alessandro said sarcastically. "That's all I am."

  "And if you wander about you'll be returned to the Bulgarians, who will shoot you."

  "For sure."

  "I'm going to ask you a question," the hallucination said, "and your answer will determine whether you live or die. So many times in life, it gets that simple."

  Alessandro looked up at the hallucination, which had come closer, and was uncannily real, even in that its teeth were so imperfectly human.

  "You must answer with complete truthfulness, for the truth will be found out quickly whether you do or you don't."

  "The truth is the only thing I have left," Alessandro said.

  "Can you ride?"

  "As well as a cavalryman."

  "Then you live. We leave at dawn."

  TWO BURLY troopers dressed almost like the hallucination found Alessandro, face in the dirt, his right hand clutching a rose bush. They pulled him up and helped him mount the hill. "You're a lucky wop," one of them said. "You've been saved by Strassnitzky, and you have a great road ahead of you."

  From the top of a small rise Alessandro looked down at a grassy cup of ground next to the r
iver that issued from the blue lake. The scene that lay before him in the most extraordinary color was more like something from Orlando Furioso than from the war he knew, and like one of the images men have before they go to war and are disillusioned.

  In a perfectly straight line, hundreds of chestnut-and-black horses, each an Arabian and all of uniform size, grazed between the river and the camp. A hundred white tents, their canvas stretched tight enough to bounce coins, formed a U, with the open part facing the river. Saddles, rifles, and swords were arranged in constructions that looked like miniature towers, and from the center of each projected a lance with a pennant. Sentries marched stiffly at the perimeter and among the saddlery and weapons, which shone in the light of the setting sun. Water boilers and stoves of chrome and brass were puffing and glinting, their interiors filled with fire.

  Between the wagons and the horses were long camp tables set with china, stemware, and cutlery. Sides of venison turned on spits rotating over dunes of red coals, and by the side of an ice-making machine a huge zinc tub was filled with crushed ice and jeroboams of champagne.

  Officers and cavalrymen were dressed in the red-and-blue uniforms that Alessandro had disbelieved. Some were not dressed at all, still in the river or trudging toward the beach after their evening swim. Others were reading, writing, playing chess.

  Alessandro passed his hand in front of his eyes and closed them. When he reopened them, nothing had changed.

  "The First Hussars of the Belvedere," the trooper said, "the emperor's own."

  SOON ALESSANDRO found himself in a tub of painfully hot water. After he scrubbed with soap, a barber bent over the wooden rim and shaved him without a nick. The barber cut his hair, Alessandro washed it three times, and he emerged from the tub as if he had been groomed to appear before God.

  They fitted him quickly in gray twill pants with blue side stripes, brown riding boots that came up almost to the knee, a navy-blue shirt of Egyptian cotton, a brown leather belt with a brass buckle, and brass spurs. They gave him a pewter comb and directed him to comb his hair and roll up his sleeves.

  Alessandro's intelligence, bearing, and self-possession made him stand out not only among the prisoners but among the troopers and their officers as well. "What am I?" he asked.

  The barber asked an officer, who replied that he would have to ask Strassnitzky. At dinner, prisoners and auxiliaries sat at the same tables as troopers and officers. Alessandro himself sat at Strassnitzky's table, though Strassnitzky was far away.

  The oysters were from a jar rather than the shell, but they were fresh, and Alessandro was too stunned to ask how a cavalry unit in the depths of Hungary had come by iced shellfish in summer. After the oysters came Sevruga caviar with lemon quarters, chopped egg, and diced onion. A subaltern next to Alessandro apologized because they were going to skip the regular fish course. "Don't mention it," Alessandro said.

  "Why should I not mention it?"

  Alessandro looked at the young officer and said, "It's an expression. It means, Everything's splendid nonetheless."

  The subaltern made amends by refilling Alessandro's champagne glass. The main course was venison that had been roasting over the ruby-colored pits of charcoal. With it came an excellent decanted claret, a salad of endive and tomato, and new potatoes roasted in olive oil and paprika. For dessert, Sacher torte and Darjeeling tea.

  "Do you eat like this all the time?" Alessandro asked his neighbor.

  The subaltern, a Czech, blushed in embarrassment. "Some times we eat more simply—consommé, a salad, smoked fish with quail eggs and lemon, and then tea, fruit, and schnapps."

  "What about a meal in the field?"

  "This is a meal in the field."

  "What about battle rations, then?"

  The subaltern, who seemed a little bit too fleshy, even if the flesh were generously colored by his well circulating blood, was beginning to dislike the interrogation. His reply was defensive. "In battle we eat just like everyone else: pâté sandwiches, truffle tarts, Turkish apricots, and brandy from a flask."

  "When you return to barracks? What then?"

  "I'm not answering."

  "Oh please."

  "In the barracks," the subaltern said, "the chef and the sous-chefs go crazy. They're very happy when they get back to their pastry squeezers, their marble blocks, and their walk-in ice chests. When we're in the barracks, after the privations of the field, we all overdo it—especially when the emperor honors our mess with his presence. You may even meet him."

  "What a strange thing."

  The troopers didn't linger over dessert, but Alessandro, not knowing what to do, remained at table. A high-ranking officer whose insignia were as mystifying as his accent approached Alessandro. "The field marshal would like to see you."

  "Field marshal?" Alessandro answered.

  "Count Blasius Strassnitzky. Have you heard of him?"

  Alessandro shook his head from side to side.

  "Don't worry. The less impressed you are with him, the more he'll like you. He's that way."

  Thinking very fast of motives for summoning a new prisoner to the tent of a field marshal, Alessandro decided to bring up the issue before he might be obligated to land himself in front of a firing squad. "This Strassnitzky, he's not, uh..."

  "Who do you think we are? Greeks?"

  ***

  STRASSNITZKY WAS sitting on a camp chair in his tent, his tunic off and shirtsleeves rolled up. He was dressed almost exactly like Alessandro but for the fact that his pants were red and his boots black. He sat amid low tables covered with maps, dispatch pads, books, newspapers, magazines, and hardwood cases for telescopes, pens, and the like.

  "Do you play chess?" he asked, showing Alessandro to a chair facing him.

  "Not well," Alessandro told him. "Should I not salute you?"

  "You're not in our army, are you."

  "We used to have to salute our Bulgarian guards—they were privates—and you're a field marshal."

  "As long as my men are willing to die for me," Strassnitzky said, "as long as they follow my orders with alacrity and do their jobs with the skill I expect of them, I don't stand on ceremony—except where people would misunderstand.

  "I'm a field marshal because these are the Emperor's Own Hussars. I would ordinarily be a colonel, but, as no one is allowed to issue a command to the commander of the emperor's own unit but the emperor himself, the colonel becomes a field marshal."

  "With a field marshal's privileges?"

  "You've had dinner?"

  Alessandro smiled.

  "The emperor protects his prerogatives by protecting his own."

  "Won't his own become terribly overweight?"

  "Wait until tomorrow. If you ride hard for twelve hours each day you can eat anything you want and still be as thin as a greyhound."

  "How do the wagons keep up?"

  "The wagons go straight. We sweep the countryside in zigzags. Whereas the wagons may travel fifteen or twenty kilometers a day, we go no less than seventy-five, and when you throw in all the fighting, you've expended much energy that needs to be replenished."

  "When did you last fight?" Alessandro asked.

  "Today."

  Alessandro's face twisted in disbelief. War had not yet come to the puszta, the plains of eastern Hungary. "The Greeks are stuck in Salonika, the Italians in the Veneto, the Russians collapsed, the Serbs thrown into the sea. Whom did you fight?"

  Strassnitzky sighed. "Two days ago we engaged a column of enemy partisans: Serbs, Rumanians, Greeks, Bosnians, who the hell knows what, all mounted as csikosok. In a battle lasting two hours and stretching over twenty kilometers of plain, we completely wiped them out, with the loss of many of our own men. Today we fought again, and of our remaining six hundred and eighty-four men, we lost forty-three. Now we are six hundred and forty-one."

  "Their demeanor and condition are extraordinary after such a batde," Alessandro said.

  "Medals all around," Strassnitzky declared. "My men a
re the very best."

  "Sir?" Alessandro suddenly asked. "Where is your other group?"

  "What other group?"

  "The other three hundred and forty-one. I counted your horses—thirty groups of ten."

  "Numbers in war—what is your name?"

  "Giuliani, Alessandro."

  "Numbers in war, Giuliani, are not like numbers in peace."

  "They're not?"

  "Surely you know that. How many years of service have you?"

  "Three."

  Strassnitzky shrugged. "Well, then you know. You must know. War acts upon arithmetic much like a gravitational lens upon light. This is a highly arcane concept that I do not imagine Italians have fully absorbed."

  "I am familiar with it," Alessandro declared.

  "Come now," Strassnitzky shot back contemptuously. "How can that be?"

  "It can be," Alessandro told him, "because I read the paper on the theory of general relativity when I was in the trenches on the Isonzo, in nineteen fifteen. My father sent it to me. It was the last thing that got through. The behavior of light is to aesthetics what physics is to engineering. And, as for the behavior of light, I'm familiar with Eddington's work, because British journals get through to us rather easily. More easily than they get to you, I imagine. They just come in the mail, whereas your spies in London have to stuff them into false-bottomed suitcases or copy them in tiny writing so they can be strapped onto the feet of carrier pigeons."

  "You're a physicist?" Strassnitzky asked, like a man who thinks he may have just hit the bull's-eye. "I'm a physicist. Well, I'm not really a physicist, but I was trained in physics. I started with ballistics—"

  "My work includes as much of physics and cosmology as I can take in," Alessandro said, "but that hardly makes me a physicist."

  "Your field is aesthetics?"

  "It was."

  "Croce?"

  "Croce, yes, among others."

  "I hadn't imagined that our professions were linked enough for you to be cognizant of what I must know."

  "In a sense, they are one and the same. You can't understand science without art, or art without science. Only the idiots in the two disciplines think that they are anything but two different expressions of the same thing." Alessandro leaned forward. "But what about numbers in war? I'm not sure I follow you."