A Soldier of the Great War (46 page)

A warship came to pick up the prisoners. Manacled and in chains, they were ferried in motor launches out to a camouflaged destroyer that lingered offshore, its stacks smoking.

By August the River Guard missed the north with a passion unique to those who have been confined in a stone fortress in Sicily for most of the summer, with long and strenuous hill patrols their prime diversion, and only half a dozen moments of unexpected excitement. In June a bomb had been thrown over the wall. It made a big noise and killed some chickens. Two blonde women appeared inexplicably at the beach behind the north wall and bathed in the nude. Suspecting a trap, the colonel ordered his men off the ramparts, but not before serious injuries had resulted from fights for possession of an insufficient number of binoculars. The women were Scandinavian academics who thought that Italians were sexually repressed, and who thought they were alone. In the confusion of 150 men in thrall to two nude women in the surf, no one noticed at first a tiny voice from below the rampart. A soldier they called
Smungere
was screaming out his customary sermon. "Think of all the trouble and impurity in your life, the sin, the suffering, the filth that can be laid at the door of the minor hose and its as
sociated appendages that swing from us, pushing the devilish parts of our nature toward the impulsive and the disgusting. Thank God," he whined in a high-pitched voice, "for the miracles of modern surgery. A simple, painless, almost danger-free procedure can lead us to a purer life. Tension vanishes. A certain restlessness disappears," he squeaked, "in favor of irreversible serenity." No one even turned around. Whoever had converted him must have been a genius, and now he fished for converts in an empty sea. Soon after the Swedish nudes, another bomb was tossed over the wall. It put some metal in the foot of a boy, who screamed, but then quickly recovered. The bomb-thrower was shot dead as he ran, and left unburied. In morbid compulsion, the River Guard observed the steady decomposition of his body—from a distance. They could smell it at night. They were used to such smells, and it was so hot and the birds were so efficient that within a week the only things left where the body had come to rest were shoe leather, bleached bones, and a black stain. In the middle of July, the French fleet passed far offshore. It looked both fancy and powerful. Alessandro told them that Napoleon was a native speaker of Italian and had never mastered French, and this pleased them tremendously, because they had heard of Napoleon and were eager to claim him. Shortly after the passage of the fleet they caught three enormous tuna that they brushed with oil and roasted on fires of herbs and vines. The beginning of August saw a great meteor shower. At night the River Guard lay on their backs, on the ramparts, and watched the sky disintegrate in tracer-like shots of silver and white. The light was silent and the tracks of the stars were as flirtatious as girls in spring. They shined, they smiled, and they disappeared.

One evening early in September the colonel called them out of their beds and made them stand in formation. "No cheering, no oohs, and no aahs," he said. "Were going back north. I don't know what's planned for us after we return. They wouldn't tell me."

A soldier who generally was silent asked for permission to ask a question. "How do you know these things? No messengers come or go."

"I have a little dog," the colonel replied. "His name is Mala-testa. He can speak, he can swim, and he can fly. He is my only link with the outside world, but through him I can know everything and I can make everything known."

Alessandro could not restrain himself. "Sir?" he asked.

"Yes?"

"Have you ever heard of the blessed sap that flows from the cloak of the exalted one, on the eucalyptus throne, in the deep shadow of the whitened airless valley of the moon?"

The colonel ignored his question. "We're leaving tonight," he said. "The cattle boat will be here in an hour. You remember the cattle boat. On our way north we're going on a raid. We'll hit the eastern part of the island, to let them know that we can strike anywhere and at any time. Several bands of deserters are near Catania."

"Are they army?" someone asked.

"Yes. They're not well organized, but they're so strong they collect taxes in Randazzo and Adrano. No one has gone after them, because they operate in the rugged country on and around the volcano, but we'll arrive from nowhere—no planes this time—and break up into small endurance groups. Then we'll track them. They're mountain soldiers, a lot better than you are, but we have the initiative."

"Do we get to go to Catania?"

"Oh yes, you will, but you shouldn't want to. When the operation is finished we'll run the prisoners through the streets. Rome insists that we do so even though we may be shot from the windows."

"Not even time to stop for a sweet?" Fabio asked.

The cattle boat had cut its engines and was floating silently to
shore on the steady current that lapped the cape. Though they hadn't seen it, it was moving deftly toward them.

 

O
NCE AGAIN
they passed the whitened coasts of Tunisia and drifted so far south that they were cut off from almost everything in the world. As if they were in orbit around the sun of Sicily they fell in a curve through the hot empty spaces, and then ceased their relaxed floating to steam north. The prow of the cattle boat cut through the sea and rolled it into chattering foam that said the same thing over and over before it fell asleep in the waves.

They skirted the islands and drifted onto a deserted beach on the south coast a few hours after dark. They waded ashore, this time taking neither heavy equipment nor supplies but only rifles and packs. Far to the left, a single bonfire burned on a hill blue with darkness.

The lieutenant and the colonel studied a map. They had been landed a kilometer distant from the target, and they would have to ford a river, but it was almost certainly dry at this time of year. After the cattle boat had begun to drift away they crossed the dunes into an immense citrus grove through which they walked in the dark for miles. They had time to eat oranges and to stand in the open spaces between the trees, listening to the birds upwind that had not yet been silenced either by the approach of the River Guard or by the night. It was a pleasant walk, though the rows were not exactly straight and in the dark the soldiers sometimes bumped head-on into tree trunks.

They regrouped at a raised trackbed, far from any village or town, and waited while eating oranges and lying against the gravel bank that supported the rails. A corridor of stars in a moon-whitened sky brightened as far as the eye could see down the track.

"When we get to Catania," Fabio said, "I'm going to go to a cafe and have five cups of cappuccino."

"No you're not, feather," Guariglia told him. "You're going to run through the streets just like the rest of us, pointing your rifle at your prisoners and hoping you don't get shot in the back of the head."

"No," Fabio said. "Cappuccino, five cups."

"You'll be so lean when you get off the volcano," Alessandro said, "if you get off the volcano, that your body won't need or recognize cappuccino. You won't need food or cafes, Fabio. You'll be as hard as steel and no more hungry than a bayonet."

Fabio blinked. "I'm already as hard as steel," he responded. "We all are."

"The mountain soldiers know what they're doing," Alessandro continued, clutching a handful of stones until the softer ones shattered in his fist. "When you get through there, you won't want to go to a cafe."

"What will I want?" Fabio asked.

"You'll drink urine, you'll smash rocks, you'll be a fighter."

"I was in the line for two years," Fabio protested. "I
am
a fighter."

"You never ate dirt."

"That's right," Guariglia said. "You never ate rocks."

"Oh fuck off," Fabio told them, and bit into an orange.

Far down the line, to the west, a light appeared. At first it was just a splinter of white, like a star lost in the orchards, but then it grew and overflowed until it was a bright blinding yellow that moved slowly up the track. The lieutenants ordered everyone except Guariglia into the trees, and they ordered him to stand between the rails and light a cigar.

Though Guariglia was apprehensive, he didn't protest, so great was his love of Cuban tobacco. He stood puffing contentedly, and inquired of the officers, who now were crouched invisibly under an orange bough, "What for?"

"The train was supposed to have been here when we arrived," the colonel whispered, although he had no need to whisper.

"I see," Guariglia said.

"If they see the glow of your cigar, they'll stop."

"That's nice," Guariglia stated, blocking out the stars with a huge cloud of fragrant smoke. "If..."

The light approached, slewing back and forth as the engine swayed over small inconsistencies in the otherwise perfectly parallel steel rails. The train crept along as if it were ashamed of being late and running flat into a company of soldiers waiting for it amid the trees.

When it got so close that the petulant and neurotic motion of the rods and cams was audible, and when the steam escaping from half a hundred pre-war gaskets sounded like a menagerie of snakes, Guariglia stepped off the tracks and waved the cigar.

"Don't wave your cigar," he heard the colonel say from the darkness. "We're not beggars. These people are under orders."

Even though the engine was relatively small and pulled only three gondola cars, when it came to Guariglia it seemed like a huge tower of iron.

"I'm supposed to pick up some people," the engineer said. "Where are they?"

"Let me look inside your cars," Guariglia demanded.

"Go ahead."

They were all empty. "Come forward," Guariglia called into the darkness, with undisguised triumph. "No one's on board."

From both sides of the dark orchard the soldiers appeared, and climbed into the cars. In no time they were all in and the officers had entered the cab. After a few minutes the colonel mounted a platform at the rear of the engine. Over the steam, the roar of the fires, and the dripping of water from condensers and leaky tanks, he addressed his men.

"The engineer says he's sorry to be late. His daughter was married today and he couldn't tear himself away from the celebration. Besides, it would have looked suspicious. At least he didn't lie,
didn't tell us some filth about track repairs or broken wheels.... He says that the volcano is a long way from here, as we know, but he says that he can get us there by daylight, because he assures us that, no matter what his train looks like, it can go very fast."

"Bravo!" some soldiers cried out.

The engineer appeared unbidden on the platform, next to the colonel. "Soldiers," he said, "my train goes very fast. It's dangerous to go at top speed." He smiled at the rows of heavily armed young men. "But this is war."

 

T
HEY LAY
against the sides of the gondola cars, their rifles leaning with them, sheathed bayonets extending above the steel bulkheads and whistling in the wind. Guariglia had the only seat, on a crate in the first car. He had lit another cigar, and was enjoying it as the wind flew past and occasionally flicked the ashes off the tip, making it flame. Even the last soldier in the last car could smell the smoke, and Guariglia's head was turned up to the stars as if he were on the porch of a summer resort.

Lower down, on Guariglia's right, Alessandro was also looking up at the night sky. He was hungry. They had had nothing for dinner but oranges, and they felt bodiless and giddy. As the train picked up speed it was as if they were high in the air, running with the constellations. Alessandro loved the stars for being unassailable, and believed that each and every one of them was his ally. As if they were jewels that he possessed, and he were a different man altogether, they gave him tremendous satisfaction. Though war might make a soldier inconsequential, a soldier in turn could delight that they would always put war in its place.

The engineer had been telling the truth. To judge from the speed and jostling of the train, he had had two bottles of whiskey and was beating at the throttle with a hammer. Metal things popped and snapped. The cars wanted to separate one from an
other, and yanked at their couplings if one lurched left and the other right. The wind got stronger and stronger as they left the lowlands and ascended to plains with not a single tree to stop it.

When they came to a grade, they slowed, and everyone was relieved that the engineer had come to his senses, but as they crested the top and started down, they grew dizzy with acceleration. Neither prudence nor restraint, but just gravity, had slowed the train, and the driver had been cursing it until, when it began to throw him forward, he blessed it.

In the middle of the night they broke out at white-hot speed onto a vast plain that could hardly hold the onslaught of the broad sky and its blazing, three-dimensional, phosphorescent cargo. A meteor shower shot through the clear, like tracer bullets, and enhanced the depth of the sky by shining so close to earth. With no lights and no fires, only the animals were up, and in the open. Their masters were barricaded in bedchambers, but they were under a shower of stars, and, even though they were lowly and suffering and mute, the light spoke to them so clearly that even they could understand, promising an end to their burdens, promising them souls, and tongues, and perfected spirits. The soldiers in the gondola cars, under the same stars, racing through the same fields, breathing the same scented air, were included in the pact. They too were promised redemption, love, and a ride out.

 

T
HEY WERE
dropped in several groups around the base of Aetna. While the officers struggled with their maps, many of the River Guard went to sleep in the fields. "I thought it would be like the mountains around Rome, but its as big as a province. How do we know where to find them?" Fabio asked Valtorta.

"We don't," the lieutenant answered. "We have a sector to comb. If they're in it, we'll find them. If they're not, we won't. We'll start here, and walk around in zigzags until we get to the top."