A Soldier of the Great War (35 page)

"Why do we have to whisper?" Euridice whispered. "The water is loud enough to drown out everything."

"For us," Alessandro answered. "We can't hear anything because we're next to it, but if you're far away, you can hear. One of their patrols made that very mistake, and we fired a bunch of flares in a flat trajectory onto the riverbed. The phosphorus exploded into daylight. Even though it was only a short burn, there were no shadows, and we hit every one of them."

The cool white light of the flare got brighter and closer as the wind carried its gay parachute south and the mass of the earth called it in. "Are they still here?" Euridice asked.

"Who?" Alessandro asked in return.

"The Austrian patrol."

"They're dead," Guariglia answered.

"But are they still here?"

"No," Alessandro whispered. "It was a while ago. The water rose and carried them away."

Euridice asked how many there were.

"Six that we got," Guariglia answered, "a plate." He spoke with maddening assurance. Then he said, "Shut up until the flare passes," and they waited among the rocks until it did.

 

E
XCEPT PERHAPS
in the sandy deltas that usher them into the Adriatic, the Isonzo and its spurs are seldom warm, especially in the north, where the water still carries a feeling for its origins in mountain snows, but September holds the heat of summer as surely as March preserves the ice on lakes. The great heat, a nearby shallow run, the time in the sun, and the pools and shoals where it had been trapped made the water warm.

In quiet pools and still water where they couldn't afford to break the surface, they swam silently and smoothly, as if in oil, in unexpectedly feminine breast strokes, or underwater in complete darkness. In what was left of the rapids, where the boulders fractured the water into surf, they swam vigorously, leaping, kicking, doing all they could just to stay in the same place and not be swept downriver.

After a while they came to a white log that had lodged in the rocks and become a spill over which the river poured in a perfect silver roll. They hung on to the smooth wood and placed their faces against the steady crest of the wave. It pushed them back until their muscles ached; the water thundered over them and gave them a scouring, and they could hardly breathe, but they stayed, staring at the moon and stars faintly wavering in the cool scroll that swept past them. Alessandro looked up. Apart from a few shards of cloud, the sky was open and still. The stars blazed.

"It cleared," he said to Euridice and Guariglia. "Look. It's clear."

"What are we going to do?" Guariglia asked.

"Maybe it'll cloud over again," Alessandro said, but the sky tended to the kind of clarity that rules the south of Italy in summer and for which the summer nights there are justly famous.

Guariglia moved his head from side to side. "No."

"I must have been insane to come down here," Euridice said.

"Why do you say that?"

"They'll see us," Euridice shouted angrily. "They'll kill us."

"So?" Guariglia asked. "Is death beneath you or something?"

"Oh Christ!" Euridice said, almost letting go of the log.

"Wait a minute," said Alessandro. "So what if there's a full moon? We're going to move in a scale. There are three of us. What's the problem?"

"Oh Christ!" Euridice said again, and kept on repeating it into the roll of silver water.

"You shut up, you fucking little tick," Guariglia told him.

"Wait," Alessandro whispered. "You're getting excited for nothing. They haven't seen us. Let's just go back. Until they start to shoot, there isn't any point in worrying."

"Tell me you're not nervous," Euridice commanded.

"He didn't say he wasn't nervous, did he," Guariglia asked. "He said he wasn't worried. That's different. We're always nervous, but we don't worry...."

"That's right," Alessandro added.

"Until they start shooting. And don't be so scared of getting killed, you little asshole, or you'll get us all killed."

"Is that how it works?" Euridice asked, nasty and mocking.

"Yes!" Guariglia said. "You haven't been here for ten minutes, you goddamned fucking little chipped-tooth tick. You don't know a thing. I've been on the line a year." Guariglia's face tightened. "That's how it works."

"Nobody knows how it works," Alessandro said. "Come on."

They moved left in a graceful line against the current, swimming powerfully and with purpose. In the rapids they burst forth
like athletes, making good progress against the white water as it churned around them, slapping it down with their strokes, moving always intently, surprised at their own strength. At a large stretch of black water that merely drifted and swirled, no one said anything, but they all knew they could not disturb it. With their arms and legs tight from the previous exertion, they submerged and swam underwater, surfacing with great control to take a deep breath, slowly sinking down, and starting off again. Alessandro led them silently through the darkness. They could follow him because in their utter weightlessness they could feel the turbulence of his strokes, and, sometimes, when they were near the surface, they could see the moonlight flash against his feet. Then they crawled up a shallow watercourse to the place in the dry river where they had come in.

"Why don't we just run?" Guariglia asked. "By the time they know what's happening we'll be halfway up the hill, and by the time they fire a star shell we'll be home."

"They don't have to fire a star shell. That's the point. Anyway, if we run they'll definitely see us. Maybe we Can run the last half of the hill, but now let's go quietly."

"Are we going to crawl?" Euridice wanted to know.

"What for?" Alessandro asked. "They're looking down on us. It wouldn't make any difference. Move away from the rocks, all crouched down, as if you're a rock. Stay still most of the time. You know, pretend you're an Indian."

As soon as Alessandro said "Indian," they heard the launch of a mortar shell.

"Go!" Alessandro screamed, contradicting everything he had just said. They ran forward over the rocks, smashing their feet, listening to the whistle of the shell as it climbed. "Keep on until just after it bursts!" he yelled. "It blinds them at first."

Euridice did what he was told. The star shell burst into eerie daylight.

"Now!" Alessandro shouted. He and Guariglia found places behind boulders at the beginning of the slope. Euridice followed, but a little late. They heard gunfire to the north and south—unintelligible bursts that signified neither pattern nor event.

"They see us," Euridice exclaimed.

"No they don't."

Another mortar shell was launched, and another, and another, right toward them.

"They see us," Alessandro said.

"Why don't we just stay behind the rocks?" Euridice asked in a pathetic high voice. "We're protected."

"That's what you think, you goddamned little tick," Guariglia said so rapidly that it came out almost as one syllable. "If they drop an explosive round in front of us, that's it."

"Run," Alessandro said.

They started to sprint as the three mortar shells were still whistling above them. First one burst, then the next, and the next. The light was so blinding that for a moment they were slowed, but the four star shells burned so brilliantly that it was like daylight, and they could do nothing but regain their speed.

The soldiers in the Bell Tower refrained from firing, not wanting to alert or stimulate the Austrians into doing more than they were inclined to do, but the enemy had seen the figures on the exposed slope. Ten meters from the wire the hillside was raked by machine-gun fire. They had to stop. They hid behind rocks, but the rocks weren't big enough. Bullet fragments and boulder chips were flying everywhere.

Something hit Alessandro in the throat directly under his Adam's apple. He was bleeding, but he could still breathe. Euridice screamed.

"Don't scream, you're out of breath," Guariglia said, hardly able to get the words out.

Alessandro looked up and saw things flying over the Bell
Tower, tumbling through the air, blocking out the stars. At first he didn't know what they were, but then he recognized them.

"Genius!" he shouted. "Genius! They're going to be blinded with phosphorus. Get ready...."

From the Bell Tower twenty phosphorus grenades had sailed over the parapet. They tumbled in the air and exploded, blinding anyone looking in their direction. The Austrian machine-gunners were silenced for ten or fifteen seconds, and when once again they could see, the swimmers had passed the wire and gone into the Bell Tower.

Emerging from the narrow passage that led to the
cortile,
they found that Alessandro had been cut deeply in the throat. He bled profusely over his chest. Guariglia had a bullet hole in his calf. He feared that the bullet was still in him, and frantically examined his leg. When he saw a second hole on the other side, the expression on his face was like that of a man who has just won money in a horse race.

Euridice was proud of himself. "I didn't die," he declared. "I didn't die, again."

"Now they know we swim," Alessandro said as one of the many men crowding around them pressed a bandage to his throat.

"Maybe not," said Microscopico. "Maybe they think we walk around at night half naked."

"I hope they do," Guariglia said, doubled up in pain. "I hope they do think that, those fucking tick-assed Austrians."

"No more swimming," the Guitarist commanded.

"It doesn't matter," Alessandro announced. "It's getting too cold to swim."

 

I
N DIRECT
sunlight, out of the wind, it was hot, but in the shade the infantrymen wore their tunics. Though a half dozen men were sitting shirtless in the
cortile
taking in the last of the summer sun,
Alessandro, Euridice, and the Guitarist were in the map room, in wool sweaters. The shade was as cool as the dark purple in the distant mountains, which they could see as if through a block of clear crystal.

The map room faced north. Until a bend in the river, both banks were open to view for many more kilometers than the maximum range of Alessandro's captured Mauser 98, which was more accurate and better built than the Italian Martinis, with a bayonet that was shorter and more maneuverable. He had never used the bayonet, and hoped never to have to, but the order of the day was always to keep it fixed and sheathed, which made for a lot of trouble when moving around in the redoubt.

Though Alessandro would have preferred to have been in the sun, his duty was to observe the northern sector from six in the morning until several hours after dark. He sat on a cane chair near the center firing port, squinting outward. The bottom of the port was narrower than the top. Here his rifle rested, a round in the chamber, sights elevated for two hundred meters, the bayonet detached and leaning against the wall. A telescope on a tripod that straddled the rifle was set at eye level, its barrel, like that of the rifle, tilted down in the slope of the port. With twenty-power magnification and a spacious eighty-millimeter lens, this instrument from the naval stores gave Alessandro an unparalleled view of the mountains.

Far to the north was the pure white rim of the Tyrol, the heart of Austria. That even enemy country should be so pristine, beautiful, and high, frozen white through summers of heat and blood, seemed to Alessandro an unambiguous promise. Hardly a clear day passed when he did not go to the map room and sight this rim until he felt light and pure enough to float.

Euridice sat on the edge of a cot underneath the sector map. No one could peer through a telescope all day long. An alternate was necessary even if, as in the case of Euridice, he had not been on the line long enough to know exactly what he was seeing and
became so entranced with the colorful terrain moving effortlessly in the sweep of the telescope that he forgot to concentrate on the enemy. It amazed Alessandro that the men of the Bell Tower were entrusted, without training, as spotters for a large portion of the Italian artillery in that section. An artilleryman arrived periodically to check coordinates, writing everything down in a book, explaining that his profession was now practiced mainly at night by men who didn't need to see for themselves but who took in numbers insatiably.

In the middle of the afternoon, the mountains were blinding across their white rim. The cook brought three mess tins of
pasta in brodo.
Although this time they had much
brodo
and very little
pasta,
at other times they had much
pasta
and very little
brodo.
The cat Serafina came in behind the cook, sat at attention, and looked earnestly at the three containers of food on the map table.

"
Pasta in brodo,
" the cook said before he left, deeply offended that no one had turned to look at him, except the cat, for he was doing the best he could with what he was given.

Anxious, earnest, eager, proud, and pathetic all at the same time, the cat moved not a muscle, refrained from blinking, and sat as perfectly still as a diplomat transformed into an owl.

"Eat fast, Euridice," Alessandro said, scanning the northern Austrian trench line. "I'm hungry."

Euridice didn't have to be told to eat fast. Still plump, he took comfort in the little food he could get. As he and the Guitarist ate, occasionally feeding pieces of macaroni to the cat, Alessandro grew more and more intent.

"Put in a call," he said to the Guitarist. "I see a lot going on in the near trench at the border of three-sector." The Guitarist turned the crank on the telephone to raise the headquarters. "Brigade-sized unit pouring into first trench just south of three-sector," Alessandro reported. The Guitarist repeated it.

"Can you tell which units?" the Guitarist asked Alessandro for the officer on the other end of the line.

"Spiky helmets," Alessandro answered.

"Feathers?"

"I don't think so, but they're too far away to tell with certainty."

"Hold on...."

Alessandro watched occasional helmets bob up when a tall soldier or one who had a sprightly step rounded an elbow in the faraway trench, and he waited for the Italian comment. In about a minute and a half, he heard it. Thunder came from cannon behind the lines, and because it was a clear day with the light streaming down, Alessandro actually saw the shells as they descended. Huge blasts, tinny and bright, shook the earth on both sides of the trench.