A Soldier of the Great War (85 page)

They had nothing but warm water from their felt-covered containers, and some miniature peaches as hard as rock. Then they set out again with hardly a pause, into three valleys that, according to the map, converged upon a town called Janostelek. At six in the evening, Alessandro's battalion, the Second, rode into Janostelek after having swept the middle valley, and he found the main square packed with tables and chairs upon which were sitting the men of the other battalions, with Strassnitzky off to the edge at a table with three beautiful and intoxicated strumpets.

Waiters ran back and forth from the restaurants that fronted the square. The braziers in front were going full blast as sweating children turned the cranks while their fathers and mothers basted and cut the meat. Each of two orchestras was playing a different Csardas, one that sounded Turkish and one that sounded right, until Strassnitzky got up from his table and unified them, physically and musically, so they might play the beguiling waltzes of which his capital and his kind were so profoundly fond.

The cavalrymen were fully armed, their shirts white with salt, their faces and hands absolutely filthy. They ate under wisteria and grape vines, and put away anything the waiters could bring. The horses were busy, too, in long even lines facing the square, eating oats and drinking from a trough through which flowed a stream of cold water.

Alessandro watched the stolid forms of the buildings and trees take new life at the behest of the music. Strassnitzky had paid in gold and the town was wide open. Even in the stores, each man was allowed to take more or less what he wanted, and in Janostelek the stores sold newspapers, groceries, hardware, candy, books, in short, all the things soldiers hardly ever see.

Though most of the decent women had been herded indoors, the strumpets were out in full force, even if the town was big enough to field only eight. The three at Strassnitzky's table drank too much, giggled, and stroked his hair in the fascinated and proprietary way in which strumpets stroke and play with hair, as if they have never seen it before.

"When Alessandro had provided for his horse, he went to Strassnitzky.

"I think I'll be making my report rather late tonight," Strassnitzky said, "and I think I won't report everything." The strumpets burst into a shower of giggles.

"I watched you ride. I thought that perhaps you would ride like a gentleman or a portillion—at a level that would enable you merely to keep up and stay mounted. And then," he said, "I thought..." He took a long drink of champagne. "I thought, well, this fellow rides like a fox hunter. And then I watched some more, and I realized that you're as good as any of my men. You ride like somebody—like me—who was trained in dressage and the hunt before he was ten, and who, on his own horse, pushed himself to the limit thereafter, with the countryside as his academy."

"My horse was named Enrico," Alessandro said, "and my father bought him for me in England."

"Are you Italian?" one of the strumpets asked. "I have a book in my room over the bakery. It's in Italian. I was never able to read it. Perhaps you can tell me what it says."

"Why don't you?" Strassnitzky asked.

"Come," said the strumpet, abandoning Strassnitzky to her two
companions. "I also have a toy steam engine you might like. My brother gave it to me before he joined the army."

"Is your brother alive?" Alessandro asked as they walked through the square.

"Yes. He's a baker and he's always beyond range of the shells. I took his room."

"What about your parents?"

"My mother was a singer. We never knew our father, and she didn't, either. She gave us to our aunt, who gave us to our grandmother, who died, and then our mother didn't want us back—she's still a singer; she goes around from place to place. By that time my brother was old enough to be apprenticed, and I became a housemaid.

"When he left for the army he wanted me to keep his room for him, and, because I'm his sister, I get some money from the state." She looked at Alessandro and smiled. "I'm very free," she said. "I do what I want. What about you?"

"I never do what I want," Alessandro said.

"I don't mean that. I mean about your family."

"Everyone is dead except my sister."

"That makes us close, doesn't it."

"Why?"

"You have only your sister, I have only my brother."

"I don't think that makes us close."

"Then maybe we should try something else."

"You talk like a woman I once knew in Toulon," Alessandro told her. "She was an admiral's daughter, and she looked a lot like you—tall, blonde, sunburnt, perhaps not quite as athletic looking. We happened to be in the same compartment of a train. She said she loved to speak Italian, and as we were speaking, she rather haltingly, she said that something had happened to her brassiere. I thought she was going to excuse herself, but she asked me to fix it."

"That sounds so lovely."

"I couldn't fix it. I didn't even know what was wrong, but the more I tried and the more she struggled, the more everything ripped and came apart, until the brassiere was hanging by a thread. Then she took a deep breath, and broke the thread."

The woman's teeth were partly clenched, and, as she breathed, the taste of champagne welled up from her lungs. Her eyes narrowed and were slightly out of focus. They hurried through the streets to her room above the bakery.

 

A
LESSANDRO MADE
his way to Strassnitzky's camp beyond the town. The galleries around the square were empty and the streets were so silent that he could hear several fountains, and a river that had been channeled between stone walls. He crossed this river by one of several small bridges that spanned it, and looked down at the water passing below. In the blackest parts were the brightest reflections of the stars.

The camp of the Hussars lay in a huge field bordered on four sides by tall trees swaying lightly in the wind. The proportions of the field made it seem particularly spacious and tranquil.

Bending down to enter Strassnitzky's tent, where the field marshal was sitting in a camp chair, feet up, staring at the lantern, Alessandro looked deeply contented.

"Mine were more demanding, I fear," Strassnitzky said.

"They were?"

"Maybe you should have taken mine and I yours. They were ravenous, almost violent. Perhaps they think that soldiers require such treatment. They, of all people, should know that certain parts of the body, no matter how exercised, cannot be toughened."

Alessandro sat down at the typewriter and cracked his knuckles to limber them up. "We didn't get past the bakery. The baker gave us fresh bread and tea, and now I won't be able to sleep tonight."

"It doesn't matter," Strassnitzky said. "By the time we finish it
will almost be time to set out. Tell me, why are Italians always so unpredictable in regard to women?"

"How do you mean?"

"She wanted you. She was aching. I saw it."

"I didn't want to."

"Why?" Strassnitzky sat up.

"When we were sitting in the bakery, at the marble table where the baker kneads his dough, my desire for her, which had been strong, vanished. Death does not weaken loyalty, it strengthens it."

"Who's dead?" Strassnitzky asked.

"The woman I love."

"I see."

"Only after all opportunity is forsaken does devotion come alive."

"Like Dante and Beatrice."

"Maybe."

"I know how Italians think," Strassnitzky said. He was under no obligation to be polite to his prisoner. "Lose yourself in the spirit world now, and you'll be ready for it when it comes later. Devote yourself to the conditions of eternity, and suffer, but suffer no surprise. You're a Romano, are you not?"

Alessandro nodded.

"Naturally. Rome is a training school for the heavenly city, a jumping-off place. You take earthly pleasures and gracefully translate them to the language of the Divine."

"That's called art," Alessandro said.

"But what if death is only a void?"

"Even if heaven doesn't exist, I will have experienced it beforehand, because I will have created it."

"What about pleasure and light-heartedness?"

"You can be as light-hearted as you want, and still be devoted."

"Like Aquinas and Augustine?"

"They had fun."

"They did, did they."

"Yes," Alessandro replied. "Augustine in particular."

"I think you'll regret that you didn't take that girl upstairs, spread her legs, and ram her as deep as you could get. She would have loved it. You would have loved it."

"I'm sure you're right," Alessandro answered, "but I see a high window that shines through the darkness surrounding it. It's full of light, as if the sun were nearby, and in that window, although I'm not able to look straight at her, is Ariane, just as if she were alive. As time passes, she brightens, and I love her more and more."

"In the end, Dante finds Beatrice."

"Yes," said Alessandro. "He does, one way or another."

"How did she die?"

"Your planes. The building they bombed, that she was in, collapsed. The heat was so intense that nothing remained but ash."

"War is war," Strassnitzky said.

"War is war," Alessandro answered, "and I'll find the pilot."

"How? Surely you didn't see him."

"I saw him. I saw his face, but because of his aviator's goggles and helmet I couldn't really make him out."

"Then you'll never find him."

"Even the most Latin Germans," Alessandro said, looking at Strassnitzky as if through a tunnel, "the most relaxed, and the most humane, keep and preserve meticulous records."

"So?"

"The plane had a number."

"You saw it?"

"I saw it."

Somewhat unnerved by what he felt were Germanic currents in a man whom he had taken to be just an Italian intellectual who ate flowers, Strassnitzky cautiously argued that "the records are secret, part of the War Office. How do you expect to match the number with the man?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Alessandro said, almost arrogantly, "but God is directly in charge of all things relating to life and death. That I've learned in the war."

"You think God is going to get you the operations records of the Austrian army?"

"I don't know, but if He were, wouldn't you imagine that the first thing He'd do would be to have me conveyed to Vienna?"

 

S
TRASSNITZKY WAS
capable of great variation. The day after neither he nor most of his men had slept for one second in their brightly illuminated camp outside the town, he galloped them toward a range of mountains that were purple between starlight and dawn, and then blood red, rose, pink, and, finally, as white as chalk, with a mist of light that hung like a curtain from the speckled golden cliffs.

Seeking a place he had known before the war, he led his cavalry columns through oak forests at the base of the hills, trampling a path, jumping logs, passing striped wild boar that watched in horror as three hundred horsemen charitably ignored them.

Then they rose beyond the line of oaks to a region of red-hued rocks, short evergreens, pastures, and marshes, and came to a beautiful lake surrounded by clean granite outcroppings between which were beaches of sand as fine and white as the stuff in an hourglass.

They wanted to stop everywhere, but Strassnitzky led them to the western end of the lake, where the river that fed it came down from the mountains. A great flat tongue of granite, like a river itself, formed a ramp that descended to the water, and the river flowed over it in half a dozen warming streams, circling and idling in pools, cascading into waterfalls, and spreading thin over pans of rock as gray as an elephant's back. The sun heated the water as it flowed over the shallows, so that by the time it regained its depth in a pothole it was oxygenated and pleasantly warm.

Here they spent the day. They stood their weapons and slept on their saddles. They circled in the currents that led into and out of pools in the rock, lay on the shallow warming rushes of water, and jumped with the ten-meter fall that filled the lake, climbing up again on the granite by means of ladder-like holds and resinous pine boughs rooted firmly in the cliff.

They ate nothing, and drank a lot of water. After several hours in which most soldiers slept, Alessandro was summoned by Strassnitzky, who was sitting on a flat rock, staring out over the tops of the pines and smoking a pipe that smelled as sweet as the evergreens. He turned to Alessandro.

"Surprise," he said, gesturing at the little typewriter standing by itself on a boulder nearby, with a sheet of paper already in it waving gently to and fro in the wind. "The engrosser. Bernard, who can do anything with machines, took it apart so he could carry the rolling pin in one of his saddlebags and the dentures and piano keys in the other. What a setting for clerical work! We'll do two days' reports in these pleasant surroundings, maybe three or four."

"How can we do that?" Alessandro asked. "Today isn't even › over.

"Matrices," Strassnitzky answered. "Matrices and sets."

Not about to argue, Alessandro put the typewriter on his lap and cracked his knuckles. With the machine so close, he thought, he might injure his elbows.

"Ready with the engrosser?" Strassnitzky asked, shielding his eyes from intense sunlight.

"Yes."

"All right. Here we go. I'm going to dispense with the times and all that, and inform them that I've written long after the fact."

Strassnitzky began to dictate, and Alessandro to type.

"Due to events I will now describe, I write this report upon some reflection, a day after the actions. Leaving camp at the usual hour, we broke into six columns and went west-southwest for
about twenty kilometers before turning north, as has been our practice. Because the mountains and their foothills extend into the
puszta,
we were no longer sweeping across flat and boundless ground.

"Eventually, we faced three small valleys that led to a common juncture at the town of Janostelek. Intelligence gathered from the local population led us to believe that the Serbs controlled one or more of the valleys and perhaps the town. The first to encounter the Serbs was Second Battalion, in the center."