A Soldier of the Great War (36 page)

Another two dozen shells came in, scattering the sandy soil. "Perfect aim," Alessandro reported, "but it didn't do anything."

The Guitarist relayed the message. "They say to continue observation and supply rifle fire when necessary."

Alessandro elevated the rear sight of his rifle, positioned himself, and fired a round at the corner of the trench where he had seen the helmets. As he ejected the first cartridge and moved the bolt to load and lock, his ears rang with the concussion of the last shot and he smelled burnt powder blown inward through the gun port. He placed five more shots in the same area and reloaded the rifle.

Hardly able to hear himself, trembling slightly from the concussions, he said, "Now they've got their rifle fire. I like to aerate the soil. It's like gardening."

"I don't understand," Euridice proclaimed as he ate. "Why don't the Austrians concentrate their artillery fire on this post and obliterate it?"

"That's what they'll do in the offensive," the Guitarist answered.

Euridice stopped eating. "Why?"

"How can you ask why, when you've just asked why not?"

"I also want to know why, that's why, and why is different from why not."

"In this case," the Guitarist said, "if you know why not, you also know why."

"How?" Euridice asked.

"Subtract the not," Alessandro added, still using the telescope, "and eat, will you?"

Euridice hurriedly finished his soup, depressing the cat. "You mean that in the offensive they'll level the Bell Tower?"

"They have to," the Guitarist said. "It's too good an observation point and firing position, even if it isn't supposed to hold in a full scale assault."

"What will we do?"

"When the bunkers are about to collapse, those of us who still can will run back to the line."

"And those who can't?"

"They'll stay."

"To die."

"Euridice, by the time the bunkers start to go, the communications trench will already have been filled in. We'll have to go back on the surface, over our own mines, in the open. Probably both sides will be firing at us. What's the difference?"

"Everyone is going to die," Euridice said, realizing it for the first time.

"That's right," Alessandro confirmed, turning from the gun port.

"Let me ask one question," Euridice continued.

"Soon you're going to have to pay us," the Guitarist said.

"When's the offensive?"

"When the river gets shallow enough."

"And when is that?"

"A week, two weeks. It depends on the rain."

"There is no rain."

"Right."

"But we're not sure they'd mount an offensive even if the river dried up completely," Euridice stated.

"Why wouldn't they?"

"Pressing business in other places."

"What other places?"

"Herzegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro..."

"Euridice," the Guitarist said, "this is the place where they have pressing business. In the war between Italy and Austria, the Austrian army is over there, and here—you, me, him—is the Italian army."

"I'm in the navy."

"So are we."

"Why don't they send us back to sea?"

"Why don't you ask them?"

Euridice was discontent until evening. Then the sunset made the mountains pink and gold, and, as the others had done long before, he resigned himself to the fact that he was going to die.

 

T
HOUGH THE
men of the Bell Tower considered the regular army a sub-species, they held them in awe for making suicidal attacks, as on the Western and Russian fronts, in which they climbed out of their trenches and into a wall of machine-gun fire. On occasion, along a stretch of less than a kilometer, five thousand men might go over the top, and within a few minutes suffer a thousand instantly dead, a thousand wounded who would die slowly on the ground, a thousand grievously wounded, a thousand lightly wounded, and a thousand who were physically untouched but spiritually shattered for the rest of their lives, which, in some cases, was merely a matter of weeks.

Only certain portions of the line had to undergo carnage in the French style, but knowledge of it was all-pervasive. Everything the 19th River Guard knew came from quiet meetings in the communications trenches, conversations with sleepless, bitter infantrymen who had been transferred up from the fiercer fighting in the south.
If some of the River Guard were on the edge, many of the regular infantry had gone over it long before. Especially disturbing to the naval contingent were reports from down below that Italian troops now were shot quite casually for disciplinary reasons, and that the Italian generals, like their French counterparts, were executing men in decimations for crimes they had not committed. Men with families were pulled from the ranks along with equally mystified adolescents and put to death for acts attributed to others whom they had never seen.

One very clear day, a major in the Medical Corps, a man with no military bearing whatsoever, arrived at the Bell Tower and spoke to the assembled troops, who thought it was going to be yet another useless lesson about venereal disease—they never had leave—but, instead, the major asked for volunteers.

Of course, no one dared, but Alessandro, who bet that the army would not execute volunteers, stepped forward almost without thinking. Guariglia followed, out of friendship and perhaps because he had had the same thoughts. "All I need is two," the doctor said, and off they went, not knowing where, as the other soldiers, who had had more time to project, made mosquito sounds to suggest that the two would be the subjects of a malaria experiment.

"Is there any danger of death?" Alessandro asked as the three men trotted through the communications trench.

"No, but there's cheese and tomatoes."

"Sir?"

"Lunch."

"It's a dietary experiment?"

"Who said anything about an experiment? Just follow me."

At the end of the tunnel they climbed into a truck that then drove toward the mountains. Two hours later, the twenty soldiers inside, all of whom had been anxious and silent, climbed out into a sunny mountain meadow covered with blue flowers. A cold breeze was blowing, but if you dropped close to the ground the temperature was perfect.

The doctor and the truck driver spread checkered table cloths and brought bread, cheese, bottles of wine, and chocolate from a cabinet on the side of the truck. When the food was laid out, the doctor told them to eat, but no one touched it for fear that it was poisoned.

So he took a little of everything from everywhere, and after they saw that he didn't die the soldiers began to put away vast amounts of it, their eyes shifting to and fro, wondering what was going to happen.

"They're going to shoot us and dissect our brains," said a Sicilian who wore a hair net.

"That isn't plausible," Alessandro stated.

"Why does it have to be plausible? What does plausible mean anyway? I suppose you think they just wanted us to go on a picnic."

"We'll find out what they want."

After lunch the doctor had them return their utensils and wine bottles. They shook out the table cloths, but then they laid them down again.

"You see this little blue flower," the doctor said, spinning a tiny flower between his right thumb and index finger. They nodded. They thought he was crazy. "For the next five hours, I want you to pick them, leaving the full stem, and pile them on the table cloths."

"They're going to shoot us," the Sicilian said.

"Shut up," Guariglia told him.

"Sir?" Alessandro asked. "May I ask why?"

"No. Just do as you're told."

For five hours, they picked flowers. Gradually, very gradually, the piles of petals and stems grew into fat humps, and the soldiers' anxiety vanished. The driver picked, too, while the doctor slept in the sun, a newspaper folded over his face, his head resting on a loaf of bread.

"Why?" they asked the driver.

"I don't know. We've done this every day since spring. We take volunteers all up and down the line."

"What happens to the flowers?"

"They're shipped in crates in boxcars, to Milano."

"The son of a bitch has a perfume factory!" the Sicilian exclaimed.

"I don't think so," Guariglia told him. "Smell them."

The Sicilian smelled the flowers in his hand, and recoiled. "These are stinky flowers!"

"Yeah," the driver said.

"Is it always the same flower?" he was asked.

"Always the same."

They spoke as they picked. The Sicilian, who worked in a dry goods store, told them his dream, which had consumed him so intensely that it had followed him from the store in Messina to a sunny meadow in the mountains where the air was fresh and the light clear. He spoke for two hours, ceaselessly repeating and enumerating the objects of his desire, as if that would reserve them for him in later life. His ambition was to own a villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian, a Bugatti automobile, a Caravaggio, a mahogany-and-teak yacht, and an apartment in Seville, Spain. The villa would be a thousand square meters, the Bugatti green, the Caravaggio a crucifixion scene, the yacht a ketch, and the apartment close to the cathedral. His further descriptions of every detail and statistic pertaining to those items were extremely irritating, because he intoned them like a parrot.

"So what?" Alessandro asked.

"If I could have these, if I could have them..."

"Yes?"

"They'll take all my life to get."

"And?"

"When I have them, I'll be happy."

"What if you had them now, and you went back to your unit and got killed," Alessandro speculated.

"I don't know, but I want them."

"You'll spend your whole life getting them, and it won't make any difference whatsoever."

"You're just jealous."

"I'm not jealous. You've turned to the material as comfort in the face of death, but the more you rely upon it the more you'll suffer."

"Oh go fuck yourself," the Sicilian said, tossing a handful of flowers onto one of the piles. "I'm not suffering. Are you? I'm fine. I'm perfectly fine. I know what I want. Life is simple. I don't think about death."

"Of course you don't."

"Why should I bother?"

"You'll see," Alessandro told him. "Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way."

"Someday," the Sicilian told him, "I'll lie in my marble bathtub, looking up through the skylight, a pizza within reach, a real Victrola playing
Carmen,
and I'll think of you." Pleased with himself, he laughed.

"In a way," Alessandro said, "I do envy you," and then he went back to picking flowers.

They were never told what exactly they had been doing, and they would never forget that they had done it.

 

T
HE BEGINNING
of October was cloudy, the sky looked like slate, and the air was dry and cool. Summer was over and they would have to learn once again to live in darkness. A heavy rainfall was necessary to stop the offensive, but the days passed without rain.

The mood of the infantry changed. Small irritations that had been burned away by the heat and light of summer now came to the fore. The ceilings of the bunkers seemed to be much lower. Aching teeth tormented their owners and only got worse, for all the dentists in the army were in places a half-day-pass away. An appointment could be had with three months' advance warning, but no one wanted to tempt fate with the arrogance of assuming that he would be able to keep it.

The food became unbearable even though few soldiers ever had enough. Laundry took longer to dry, a shower meant trembling for two hours afterward, and except when occasional sunshine broke through the clouds (which drove-in the fact that no rain had fallen), only the lice were happy.

During this time the army on the other side of the Isonzo was quiet. They fired hardly a shot, but wagons arrived at night with men and materiel. Though the Italians harassed the nocturnal resupply and reinforcement with constant artillery fire, it neither stopped nor slackened.

Still, with each day that passed, hopes grew stronger that in being so meticulous about preparing the offensive the enemy was trading a chance to walk across the river for the delay that would accommodate one days murderously heavy rain.

"It doesn't matter," Guariglia said. "The day that it rains is the day they'll attack. They're waiting until then; the river will be at its lowest and they will have brought up the greatest number of men."

"The artillery barrage will start immediately," Microscopico added from his cot, making a diagram with his hands. "For six hours, constant shelling. Then many thousands of men will appear from the trenches all at once. They'll start off slowly, but in a few seconds they'll be up on their feet and running. When they cross the river many will fall, but thousands will get to the hill. How many will get to our trenches is another story. Some will, however, and you'll meet them face to face. At that point they'll be rather overstimulated and a few will think they're God. They'll be firing as fast as hell and using their bayonets."

"Austrians are better with bayonets than we are," said Biondo, a taciturn machinist from Torino, who had enlisted in the navy because of his belief that he would be most valuable in the engine rooms of stricken and damaged ships.

"Why is that?" Euridice asked meekly.

The explanation was obvious, but no one could put it into
words. Finally, someone said, "They're taller," and for a brief moment not a man among them did not feel seasick with foreboding.

At night, now, because of the cold wind that came down from alps marvelously clad in ice and snow, they had a fire in an oil drum stove. Though most of the wood they burned was what remained of the lumber used in constructing trenches and fortifications, a large pile of apple wood had somehow found its way to the Bell Tower, and two or three apple logs were put on every blaze.

It was a shame, for they could tell by its sprouts and shoots that the tree was still bearing fruit when it had been cut, and would have continued for another twenty years, and all they had now was the scent.