A Soldier of the Great War (38 page)

I want to tell you now how much I love you, all of you, and I've always neglected Luciana but now I'm so proud that she has become the beautiful and impressive woman that she has become. Don't worry about me, no matter what happens. We're nervous here, but not afraid. We have all looked into our souls, one way or another, and are content to die if need be. The only thing left to say is that I love you.

 

Alessandro

 

At the end of the month summer had been pushed back, winter was beginning to flood the Veneto with high clouds that had begun their relaxed flight to Africa, and the mountains were covered in white. When far to the north a blue lake in the clouds enlarged to the size of a principality and the sun came through, the Alps would glare in their entirety like flash powder, and the great white image would roll over the north of Italy, hanging in the azure air for all to see.

Thirty more men arrived in the Bell Tower, army conscripts who had been in the lower trenches taking the brunt of the fighting since the beginning. Cynical, violent, and mutinous, they com
pletely destroyed the civilized equilibrium of the naval contingent, made a great deal of noise, fouled the latrine, and fought among themselves. They played cards, drank, vomited, and whacked at each other with sheathed bayonets.

The River Guard was at their mercy because they had brought a sergeant with them who rearranged everything and told everyone what to do. With their raucous laughter, their unshavenness, their skin diseases, their syphilis, and their apparent delight in killing, they seemed as overpowering as the war itself.

They sent out nightly patrols of men who could see in the dark and who brought back with them a boar, a feral pig, and once even a foolish buck that had followed the nearly dry riverbed far from his home in the mountains. Huge feasts of meat and wine followed each patrol, and even these did their part in setting everyone on edge and convincing the River Guard that they were doomed.

In a week the clouds broke apart in cool sunshine, and hopes were raised, but shortly after the sun reappeared so did thousands of enemy cavalry. They were visible in the rear of their lines, beyond artillery range, raising dust as they came into formation or deployed from one sector to another. It was possible to tell where they were even without a telescope. Wagons and caissons made dust clouds that looked like smoldering grass fires. Cavalry raised dust like a train. It moved evenly and smoothly across the landscape in an unmistakable indication of swift well fed warhorses.

"I wish I were in the cavalry," Alessandro said to Guariglia. "I was raised to it. I studied riding and swordsmanship all my life."

"Don't be crazy," Guariglia told him. "Our machine guns are waiting for those bastards and their poor horses. They won't last a minute."

The soldiers knew exactly what was coming, as if it had been in their blood. "They're here for the break," they said of the distant cavalry, "to make a hole in our lines in several places and then pour through like grain that spills from a torn sack. Horses are not like
men. They don't have the patience to sit around waiting. They only bring up horses just before the attack. The river's low. They'll be knocking at our door in two or three days."

The whole line came alive and was packed with men, but not as much as the Austrian lines, which nearly burst with new uniforms and bobbing bayonets. So much ammunition was carried into the Bell Tower that each bunker was greatly reduced in size. The army men cut new firing ports, laid new mines, and put up new wire.

"You naval cocksuckers don't know how to landfight. Why don't you go back to the sea, where you came from?" asked an infantryman who had a disc-like scar in place of much of his chin.

"Give me a ticket," said Biondo.

They persecuted Microscopico until he told them why he was in the navy. He was conscripted to sweep chimneys and clean boilers. "Because I'm so small," he said, "I can crawl through the pipes. And don't tell me you're brave until you've crawled through the guts of a boiler and out the stack. If you get stuck, you're through. They don't dismantle warships on account of chimney sweeps, and you
can
get stuck. Keep the ticket, thanks: I'd much rather be here." It was totally a lie: he had been a baker's helper on a supply ship.

Huge rain clouds were visible over the mountains on the day when the artillery bombardment started. The clouds looked like wine-colored rock walls, and they moved slowly southward, feeling their way with tendrils of yellow and white lightning.

The Italian artillery had been active for weeks in harassing the Austrian build-up. Shells sped overhead several times a minute, and the Austrians compressed their answer into the period between dusk and dawn. They had no need of observation, because nothing failed to come under their fire.

When Alessandro had stood at the edge of the testing ground in Munich he was shaken and awed. Now the line of a hundred guns was ten deep, and it fired continuously, a hundred at a time,
without let-up, allowing not a second for breathing at ease. When a shell actually hit the Bell Tower, which happened scores of times that night, everyone would be thrown to the floor, hoping that the roof would not collapse.

"I wonder if we're going to be ordered out on a charge," the army man between Alessandro and Guariglia kept saying. "I see no sign, but they may decide to send us on a charge." Then he would laugh. He did this all night. At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone was deaf and trembling from artillery, he came to Guariglia and said, "You won't tell them who I am, will you?"

"Who are you?"

With obvious pain and dread, the soldier replied, "The king's son."

"What are you doing here?" Guariglia asked.

"My father sent me here to die."

"Who's your father?" Alessandro asked, not having heard.

"The king."

"The king of what?"

"Of Italy."

"I want to talk to him after the war," Guariglia said. "I have a few things I'd like to say to him."

"Everyone says that," the soldier answered, "but when they come into his presence they find that they can hardly speak."

"You'll be there, won't you?"

The mad soldier shook his head from side to side. "I'll be dead."

"You have a point," Alessandro said. The prince was suffering so from fear that he turned to run for the latrine. "All right, all right," Alessandro called out after him. "You'll go to heaven. The king's son always goes to heaven."

At five o'clock, just before the light, the artillery stopped. Though as soon as the enemy formations rose from the trenches the Italian artillery would throw everything it could onto the advancing tide, it was quiet. For a while no one knew. Their senses
had been so disrupted by exploding shells that it took them fifteen minutes to understand silence.

The rain had begun, and at night the river had risen because of storms in the mountains. The wind lashed the Bell Tower and droplets flew through the gun ports. Every few seconds bolts of lightning were followed by a deep forest of thunder, but after the barrage these thundercracks seemed gentle. The air was full with the smell of whiskey as the besieged 19th River Guard listened to the reassuring sound of rain pattering lightly against the roof, and they all were thinking of home.

 

T
HE
G
UITARIST
was in the communications room, and at five-fifteen he screamed that his lines had been cut. An infiltrator was in the trench.

The River Guard looked anxiously at the infantry, who looked back with contempt. "Its not our redoubt," one of them said.

"Go ahead," another added nonchalantly. "Someone's knocking."

Everyone looked at Guariglia, who was the toughest, and the biggest, but it wasn't fair, and they knew it. They knew his children as if they had met them, and they understood the love that had moved him to describe them again and again. Besides that, he had done more than his share of difficult and dangerous things. Then they looked at the Guitarist, who had not done his share, but he was a musician, he was soft, he had a family, and he stared at the ground. Microscopico was too small. Biondo was at the gun port. The others were in other bunkers.

With his heart fluttering, Alessandro threw the sheath off his bayonet. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor. In an instant he had picked up the rifle and was running through the doorway, then across the
cortile,
then past the machine-gunner and into the communications trench.

When he started out he had been afraid, but with each step his anger rose, until, as he rounded the slight bends in the trench, he
was ferocious and electrified. He flipped the safety catch on the rifle and steered the raised bayonet adroitly through the turns. He felt bodiless, as if he were only two strong arms, a well oiled rifle, and a flashing bayonet gliding through the trench at top speed. He wanted only to kill the interlopers who had dared cut the lines.

It would be too dangerous for them to go back. They would be there, waiting. They were.

As he came around a sharp corner a shot was fired at him. It missed and drove into the wall of the trench. The Austrian soldier who had fired it shrank back in panic and worked the bolt on his rifle.

Alessandro kept running. Just as the enemy soldier, a young boy with a delicate face, a stranger, had expressed another round into the chamber and was about to raise his rifle, Alessandro plunged the bayonet into his chest, doubling him up as if his body were a clenched fist, killing him. Two shots sounded from ahead.

The two companions of the boy Alessandro had just killed were firing at him. One shot missed. The other struck Alessandro at the top of his shoulder, throwing him backward into the sandy wall of the trench. He hadn't let go of his rifle, and it pulled out of the dead soldier and righted itself in his hands.

The Austrians dropped to their knees and worked their bolts. Alessandro was in no condition to aim. He pointed the rifle in their direction and fired. One of them rolled onto the ground. The other fired and missed again. Seeing that his friend was now still, that Alessandro was reloading, and that he himself could not reload faster, he threw down his weapon and struggled over the top of the trench.

Alessandro saw that the man he had shot had stopped moving. The other had not even jerked. They lay immobile in pools of blood. His face tightened as he slung his bloody rifle. Pressing his right hand against the wound, he stumbled back to the Bell Tower.

Light-headed, he pushed into the map room and stood before
the others. The ones who were sitting, stood up. They looked at his bloodied hand covering the wound, and at his devastated eyes.

Even the infantrymen did not make light of it. One guided Alessandro to a cot. Another took the rifle and went to clean the bayonet. This was their métier. It wasn't something with which you were born, you learned it, and it wasn't even that difficult to learn. They used bandage shears to cut open Alessandro's shirt quickly, the way it would be done if he had been going to die, but then they stepped back. "Nothing," an infantryman said.

"It cut a little channel in the top of your shoulder, that's all," Guariglia stated before he dropped an alcohol-soaked rag on what looked like a sabre cut. The alcohol made Alessandro scream at the top of his lungs.

"Here they come!" one of the infantrymen shouted, as a chilling sound rolled through the Bell Tower—the cry of twenty thousand men beginning a charge.

 

A
LONG THE
entire length of the line thousands of Austrians and Germans appeared to rise out of the ground, slowly at first as they went over the top, and then faster as they ran toward the river, shielded by ragged banks of smoke. By the thousands and the ten thousands, they shouted. The Italians mounted the firesteps, looked over the tops of their trenches, and fired. Trench mortars on both sides were continually stoked. They could, at random, level a line of attackers as they began to wade the river, or kill the defenders exposed above their dugouts, and they did. The heavy artillery ceased except for a ten-minute barrage against the Bell Tower, which was hit by hundreds of shells.

The cat Serafina, who had suffered before from artillery fire, was crouched in terror in the deepest corner of the communications bunker. Alessandro lay on a cot, bandaged and throbbing.

At first no one could move, but the concussions of the shells
became so great that everything shook, and people were knocked around the room like dice in a cup.

Then, as if pushing through waves in stormy surf, shouting things that no one could really hear but that were obscenities of anger and determination, the infantrymen and the River Guard struggled to the firing ports. They were knocked down. They were pinned under parts of the ceiling as it fell, choked with dust, thrown against each other, but some made it to the outer wall. There, they screamed and they cursed, and they took their weapons.

Hardly able to see or hear, blinded by the smoke and choking on the powder, they fired toward the river, sweeping to and fro with the machine guns, their teeth clenched as if they were using swords and pikes. A man at the center was blown inward and made unrecognizable when a shell exploded just outside his gun port. Another man rushed to his position, but could not find a weapon.

As Alessandro got up to replace a man who fell, one of the other bunkers exploded. After a terrible cry, everyone who was left alive began to run, because the firing ports had been closed and the Austrians, who had lost several thousand men in the river, were now at the shattered wire. Alessandro was last out.

Biondo lay dead in the
cortile.
The Guitarist was climbing over the rubble to get away. The machine-gunner was dead and his machine gun at the entrance to the trench smashed apart. Guariglia had been right. The trench was filled in.

As Alessandro struggled through the craters and began to run toward the Italian line, he saw only about a dozen others from the Bell Tower. The cat ran so fast that she disappeared almost immediately, leaping right over the Italian trench that was everyone else's goal, running like a rocket toward the fields of the Veneto.