A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "Is that it?" Alessandro asked.

  "No," Strassnitzky said, continuing.

  "Our ranks are steadily thinning from almost daily contact with strong enemy forces spilling over the mountains to the west. In this regard, our intelligence apparatus has proved invaluable, in that the local population directs us to an enemy who would prefer to avoid a strong opponent."

  "Now I understand where your other unit is," Alessandro said. "It's in your head. You draw it down bit by bit in fictional battles until, by the time you return to the Belvedere, you will have sustained enormous casualties—every other man killed—and yet all of you, unscathed, untouched by battle, will ride in as a group. What a system! The war will end, and you'll be a great hero, having marched successfully through the deepest valleys of death."

  Strassnitzky pulled his pistol from its elaborate holster. "Prepare to die."

  "Look here," Alessandro said. "I told you that the only thing I had left was the truth. And the truth will carry me through death. I've been prepared to die since I first went into the line. What I've said is true. You can shoot me a thousand times, and the truth will not be altered."

  "Is the truth really worth dying?" Strassnitzky asked, pulling back the hammer of the pistol. Alessandro could see that the safety was off. He thought that now his life was going to end, and he felt a sense of tremendous elation and purity.

  "It is," he said. "Yes, it is."

  Strassnitzky aimed at Alessandro's heart, and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked, but no shot was fired. Alessandro had remained calm throughout. He was almost getting used to such things. He felt that he was about to be pulled up on lines hanging from above, but that he was supposed to swing through history before his dizzying elevation.

  "It's not loaded," Strassnitzky announced. "You did well. In having come to terms with death, you'll have a marvelous life, no matter what happens to you."

  "Why isn't it loaded? Are you afraid that you'll shoot yourself as you ride?"

  "Of course not. These weapons don't go off accidentally. You have to do five things in a row before they'll fire, and accident can seldom count higher than three—which is a mystery of probability that my intuition tells me is rooted at the very base of physics.

  "No, it's never loaded. I'm a pacifist."

  "A pacifist!"

  "When I was in school," Strassnitzky said, "I went out one morning in my riding clothes and shod in heavy boots, and as I left the last step I came down on a young bird that had been resting at the foot of the stairs, having been savaged by a hawk. My weight on it pushed the air out of its lungs, and when I turned to see what had made that unearthly noise, the bird looked at me in such a way that I knew that even animals have souls. Only a creature with a soul could have had eyes so expressive and so understanding, and I had crushed it as it lay dying. It took a full day to die, and since then I have been what is called a pacifist. The term is inexact and demeaning, for a pacifist has no peace in his soul, and he knows rage as much as anyone else, but he simply will not kill."

  "What about defenseless people in your charge? Wouldn't you kill, if you had to, to save them?"

  "I would hold them in my arms, and we would go together."

  "Forgive me," Alessandro said, "but even though I'm Italian, and religious, and find your principles intriguing, I'd like to turn the conversation to something more practical."

  "What?"

  "How did a pacifist become a field marshal?"

  "If the emperor knew, he would have me shot."

  "Naturally. To someone in authority, inconsistency is betrayal, and you are certainly the only field marshal in the world, in history, to live according to the principles of nonviolence. How did you advance?"

  "Marriage. I never thought we'd have a real war, no one did. I was an excellent rider, my family is of the high nobility, and we have a great deal of money. It was only natural that I join the Hussars, but the Hussars were a circus troupe. The long and the short of it was parades, beautiful horses, dazzling bayonets, a magnificent laundry, and a corps of tailors. We dressed to kill, but no one in the entire regiment had ever fired a shot in anger. That's what war should be, I think.

  "When I wasn't riding in parades I was dancing at royal receptions. In the summer of 'eight I danced with a princess, a favorite of the emperor, and by Christmas we were married. The promotions came rapidly thereafter. When the war started, I was already a colonel, and then the general in command died of compounded gout.

  "I was put in charge, made a general, and sent into Serbia, where, by dint of my own ingenuity, we served honorably but did not kill a soul. And that, believe me, is very hard with the Serbs, because they are very ingenious themselves, and they have a passion for martyrdom.

  "I've been a field marshal for two years. I have so many medals that when I wear them I look like a window in a junk shop."

  "And not a single one earned," Alessandro interjected.

  "Au contraire," Strassnitzky shot back. "Every single one. Of my three hundred men who really exist, I have not lost one. We have not deprived a single child of its father, or a mother of her son, or a wife of her husband or brother. We have not burned a single town or trampled a single field. When we encounter starving peasants, we use our considerable resources to feed them. We liberate prisoners, we heal the sick, we do not kill."

  "How have you avoided detection? How can you exist without being thrown into battle? I don't understand."

  "It was more difficult when I was just a general," Strassnitzky said, staring past the rust-colored trunks of the evergreens at mountains that glowed in the blue air, "but with this field marshal stuff it's very easy. A field marshal normally commands one or more armies. The post is semi-political, and normally I would command an entire front.

  "But as I have only three hundred men, it's out of the question. Instead, I go where I want and I do what I want, trying not to step on anyone's toes. If I enter another field marshal's sphere of operations my presence challenges his authority, so it is considered political finesse for me to disappear. Everyone is grateful. In this way, we travel, we go anywhere except where there's a fight, and we fight imaginary battles that no one else can either confirm or deny.

  "I created the other three hundred men, requisitioned the money for their training and supply, took three hundred real cavalrymen from the Russian front, sent them home to their families, changed their names slightly, and, voila, my ghost unit, integrated platoon by platoon, man by man, with the one that really exists. In the battles, only they are killed.

  "The real soldier might have been Hartmut Dankhauser. He was decommissioned even before we set out, and a Hartmut Dinkhauser came with us. When Dinkhauser dies, it's published in the paper, but who cares? Do you think that anyone actually keeps track of such things?"

  "Entire bureaucracies exist to do just that," Alessandro protested.

  "Exactly. A field marshal has his own staff! In an industrial state or a conscript army, if you get control of the paperwork you can do anything. War begins with a declaration on paper, and ends with a paper treaty. Paper also keeps alive the middle. Battles are secondary. They last only a short time, the results are often inconclusive, and they are remembered ... on paper.

  "I might have fought had the Mongols or Turks been at the gates of Vienna, had I not been a pacifist, but now we are all fighting for absolutely nothing. No one knows what he's preserving, and nothing is being preserved. A million men die attacking and defending a piece of ground that was inconsequential before the war and will be inconsequential afterward. When they look back on this age, they will look through the eyes of the defeated. You've seen battlefields littered with the dead, haven't you? Of course you have. The first that I surveyed shattered my faith in everything but love and peace. I looked at it and I thought, it has taken several billion people several thousand years to perfect this and the expresso machine. We are fighting neither for an idea nor for survival. The governments on either side are the same. We enjoyed
each other's company before the war, and will do so after.

  "True, you attacked us opportunistically in the Südtirol, but after what we had done in the Balkans we more than deserved it. Modern times are too quick for empires, which can form and hold together only in a world of slow pace. The faster things go, the less likely that one can rule many, because stirrings and changes in relative positions will be too frequent. Austria-Hungary cannot fail to dissolve.

  "In the Hofburg, they don't want to let go. Why should they? Just like everyone else, they know what will happen if Austria sheds its nationalities, that on the map it will look like a mouse turd. But shrink it will. In view of this, and all the rest, our conduct, the conduct of my unit in this war, is exemplary."

  "How, in good conscience," Alessandro asked, "can you ride across the countryside in perfect safety, as if you were on holiday, stopping mainly to swim and eat oysters, while men are crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches?"

  "Because the object of war is peace, and I have merely thrown out the middle. If everyone did the same, no one would be crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches."

  "Everyone doesn't have the privilege. You do because you're a field marshal in command of a microscopic unit."

  "I realize that," Strassnitzky answered, "and, given such a rare opportunity, of which most men cannot even dream, I would be unforgivably remiss if I failed to seize it, would I not? I exploit it to the full."

  Alessandro was amazed. He thought that no one would ever know the war for what it really was, for it was as various as life itself. To depict it merely as combat would be a great mistake. "You didn't destroy the column of prisoners?"

  "We gave them a wagon-load of tinned meats and baked goods, but they'll never get to Bulgaria no matter what shape they're in. Tell me something."

  "What?"

  "Some officers have opera singers whom they've captured. It's quite a coup for me to have an Italian intellectual, especially since, in the Viennese view, anyway, so few exist. But, still, can you sing?"

  "No."

  "Really?"

  "I can't sing any better than most people who can't sing."

  "Ah, but you're Italian."

  "Therefore I should be able to sing?"

  "Yes."

  "You're Austrian."

  "Yes?"

  "Yodel."

  Strassnitzky smiled. "Let's do the report for today's battle," he said, "and, if we have time, for tomorrow's."

  IN JULY and August, Strassnitzky's column moved furiously from one border of the empire to another. The three hundred heavily armed cavalrymen, on horses the color of chestnut and mahogany, looked their part. "When they galloped en masse in a long double or triple row, or in squadrons and groups that broke apart and blended together on the run as smoothly as if they had been on a greased track, they made thunder and dust, and their weapons clattered. They were always headed either toward a battlefront ... or away from it, and thus everyone assumed that they were either going to fight or had just finished. Although no one had ever asked at what point they turned around, it was usually when Strassnitzky heard the sound of guns or saw the flash of cannon fire. Then he would call the column to a halt, and listen. Rising in his saddle and pointing away from the sound, he would say "Forward!" and they would turn and ride as hard as they could for at least five hours.

  They traveled for two weeks to reach the Russian front, though the fighting there had ceased, and to make sure that the Russians were not up to some sort of trick they patrolled the area for most of August, going for periods of rest and recuperation by the shores of untouched lakes and in mountain pastures where they played soccer and quoits.

  The towns and villages of the interior, untouched by the war except for the absence and death of so many of their men, were quiet and summerlike, and they reminded Alessandro of Italy before 1911. In these silent places where nothing ever happened, Strassnitzky's column would arrive at a station to receive provisions from Vienna, and wait ten hours before the station master came down from the mountainside where he had been tending his goats. Trains came through once a week, and after a rainstorm the rails would develop a light coat of rust.

  They finally came to rest in a little town somewhere in the mountains of Slovakia, where Strassnitzky stopped writing his reports. "Let them wonder a while before we ride into Vienna," he said. "Let them forget the last battles, so they don't ask too many questions. We'll appear generally weary, and, besides, we're through with fighting. All those who do not exist have now been killed."

  Alessandro had nothing to do. They were only four days' ride from the Belvedere, and would requisition no more supplies. The typewriter was stored in one of the wagons, the dispatch cases stacked alongside it. During the first week in September, with the tents pitched in a meadow above a church, the column waited for the war to end and the weather to change.

  The weather did change. At night the horses shivered and in the day the sun was brilliant and the air cool. Alessandro swam in the river that ran through the town, and could stay in the water only long enough to reach some boulders in midstream, where he stretched himself out in the sun. For a week he did this every day at lunchtime, because lunch had been abolished.

  Strassnitzky had decided that everyone was too fat, and that to return to the capital like well fed geese would stimulate inquiries about the life they had been living. The wagons were sent home, guards were set to watch over the small stockpile of food, and the field marshal declared the death penalty for anyone who supplemented the regimental diet with stores obtained elsewhere. The two meals were entirely uniform. In the morning they had an egg, a cracker, and a bowl of clear beef broth. In the evening they had an egg, a cracker, and a bowl of clear beef broth. On special days they were allowed a carrot.

  Everyone ate slowly and went around in a trance. Because of all their riding and swimming they had not been obese to begin with, but Strassnitzky wanted them to look gaunt. He also wanted them to be sunburnt and strong, so he made them do calisthenics and stay in the sun from dawn to dusk. This was not unpleasant, because the shade was cold.

  Alessandro's day began at six, as he awakened from hunger. Breakfast was at eight. From eight-thirty until noon he would do calisthenics with the rest of the men. Then, too exhausted to continue, many of them would go down to the river and swim out to the rocks, where they would lie motionless for hours, like lizards. Alessandro's rock was the best positioned and the most comfortable, his because he was the only one capable of getting up onto it. On this rock, above the water but close enough to be nearly overcome by the sound of the flow, Alessandro realized that he had survived the war.

  Even without newspapers the men of Strassnitzky's battalions could feel that the war was almost over. Soldiers at the front had the peculiar anxiety that comes only near the very end, and feared that they would be killed a month, a week, an hour, or even a minute before the armistice. When everyone knew that the firing was going to stop on a given day, and that the lag between action and intention was only a matter of bureaucracy and communication, the day before that day was the most difficult.

  For Alessandro and the strange formation to which he had been attached, the feeling was different, for they were safe. Civilian life and its pleasures lay close ahead. The weather was changing as it does in every electrifying autumn; soon the air would be cold and the winds would drive the crows from the steppes of Russia to the comparative warmth of Vienna. Everything would begin, from the new school year, to the opera, to new governments, and a new world. The troops would return and they would find new women, who would dress in new clothes, and new children would be born.

  Here and there, scholars would begin histories. Somehow, Alessandro would return to Rome, even though he had no one to whom to return. He wondered if, in the exhausted world of the clear Roman autumn, acquaintances would now be more important than once they had been. Perhaps he would merely start all over, as if from the beginning.

  Strassnitzk
y disappeared on the seventh and returned on the tenth. He had gone alone to Prague, where he had discovered that the war, as he had thought, was close to its end. To be safe, he would keep his men in the meadow above the church until the first of October.

  They had had a week of frost. At night, until they retreated to their bedding, they stayed inside the church. It was warmed by a huge white-and-gold stove in which pine and fir blazed and crackled like the meeting of two armies. Alessandro could no longer swim out to the rock: the stream had swollen and it was too cold.

  On the twenty-ninth of September they had a meal of roast chicken, and on the thirtieth they realized that, because the wagons had already returned, they would not be able to take the tents that had been standing in the meadow for a month, and on the first of October they had tea, bread, butter, and jam for breakfast. They packed up their saddlebags and went into formation at nine in the morning. Leaving the tents behind, they rode from the meadow and slowly wound through the town, and when they reached the main road they galloped. After four days' hard ride during which they ate little, slept little, and did not shave or change their clothes, they found themselves on the plains that led to the Danube.

  Early in the afternoon, they saw the Kahlenberg. Soon they could make out the city itself. After all the little towns and mountain villages, it seemed to radiate energy like a fire. The tiled roofs and black domes shone crisply, and the cavalrymen could see the long and immense shadows of the great steeples and spires. The road was full of traffic, which, though grim and sedate, was traffic nonetheless. Alessandro was excited beyond measure at the prospect of seeing sunlight on a tea cup, a family in the park, a beautiful girl walking down a staircase—those things for which all the great battles had been fought, and against which they paled.