A Soldier of the Great War (34 page)

"What is it?"

"It used to be
oil can,
but now it's
Vittorio Emanuele, Re d'ltalia,
but that's too much, so we say, you know,
Verdi.
"

"What if I forget?"

"You won't."

"What if I do? Words can be knocked out of your head."

"Tell them who you are, speak Italian as fast as you can, and pray."

They started up the communications trench that led to the Bell Tower. The lieutenant had cocked his pistol as if he expected the enemy to confront him somewhere ahead.

A few minutes later they arrived at the entrance of the Bell Tower and found themselves staring into the barrel of a machine gun.

"Password!" they heard before they could see who was saying it.

"
Verdi!
" they said, perhaps more clearly than any words they had ever spoken, and then they went inside.

You could hear the wind in the Bell Tower as if it had been, in fact, a bell tower—not in the city but, rather, on the seacoast, because the steady breezes that came down from the mountains whistled through the beams, the corrugated metal, and the firing slits. They whistled past the mouths of the guns, in turbulent eddies that turned the gun barrels into otherworldly flutes. Despite the wind, the Bell Tower was hot, because the cool air that came through the ports was not enough to relieve the pressure of the sun on the open areas or to refresh the hidden bunkers.

"I brought a new man," the lieutenant said to some soldiers at the entrance. Then he turned around and left without saying anything or looking at the cadet, who feared that the lieutenant had
disliked him. The lieutenant had not even decocked his, pistol, and he sped through the trench like a strange kind of rabbit that was afraid to lift its head. Then he rounded the corner and disappeared.

"He's done his work for the day," one of the soldiers said. "Now he'll eat some
rostissana Piacenza,
and sleep until nightfall."

"So what? We'll go swimming," another soldier said. "Who is this?" he asked about the cadet.

The cadet felt short and overwhelmed, because he was short and overwhelmed, but he wanted to hold his own with soldiers who seemed inured to war, so he said, "I was on the
Euridice.
" Because they seldom saw newspapers they had never heard of the
Euridice,
and from then on they called him by that name, even though it was a woman's name, even after he died.

 

T
HE
B
ELL
Tower was a round concrete fortification about the size of the arena in a provincial bull ring. Around an open
cortile
eight meters in diameter were nine bunkers, each of the same size. The
cortile
was used mainly for taking the sun and air. Shells had fallen directly in the center and would have killed everyone had it not been for a heavy wall of sandbags in a concentric ring between the
cortile
and the bunkers. The Austrians seemed to have discovered this somehow, and had stopped aiming for direct hits.

The nine bunkers might have been of different sizes had the fortification been designed by those who were to use it. Twenty men lived in the Bell Tower, and with Euridice, twenty-one. The three rooms for sleeping were jammed with cots. Binoculars, coats, weapons, and haversacks hung from rifle-shell casings pegged into planks and beams. A lantern was on a table in the middle. Against the outside walls and under the firing ports were chairs, rifles, and boxes of ammunition. Seven men slept in each room. At least seven men were always on duty, peering through firing ports in the seven bunkers facing the Austrian line. At times fourteen men, at times
all twenty-one, fired, loaded, and shifted from one side of the emplacement to another, desperately hauling their three machine guns. In the assault that they feared would come, their number was to be doubled, so that two soldiers would man each firing port, one to fire and one to load, or simply to take the place of the other if he were tired or if he fell. The maps and telephones were in one of the rooms, the kitchen in another, stored ammunition and food in three others. The Bell Tower had no hospital because it had no doctor: stretchers, medical instruments, and material for treating wounds were stockpiled in the map room. Of all the rooms, however, the most remarkable was the latrine.

This surely was the end of the world, these two rows of filthy planks suspended above overbrimming cesspools. One would almost rather die than either breathe, hear, or see in this place. No animal defecating in the open field, whether a horse whose tail lifted deftly on the run, or a solemn and indifferent cow, had less dignity than the two lines of grimacing, twisting, groaning creatures with shaved heads and bad teeth, who struggled not to fall into the horrible soup they strained to augment. Alessandro learned to survive there, but slowly. He took wet mortar flannels with him to clean the wooden bar upon which he had to balance on his thighs, feet precariously off the ground, leaning forward so as not to topple backward into the trench—a fate visited upon two Neapolitans who had been playing with one another's parts. He wrapped his head in a blanket so as not to see, hear, smell, or be seen. Soon, everyone followed suit. When Alessandro was suffering upon the bar, desperately keeping in balance, head turbaned-up in a mass of filthy wool, he dreamed of walking through the Villa Borghese on a cool clear day in the fall, in his finest clothes, with the leaves and the fresh air blowing by him like an express train. Some of the other soldiers sang, while others screamed in pain, muffled in the wool helmets that Alessandro had invented. Being blind in this place was desirable, but risky, for if one were involved
in a vendetta one could easily and anonymously be flipped backward, like the Neapolitans.

Euridice put down his duffel on the cot next to Alessandro's. "What's the book?" Euridice asked, assuming that since he himself was a graduate of the
liceo
and had been a naval cadet, he was the only one on the river who really knew how to read. He looked closely. "It's Greek," he said, drawing back in wonder. Alessandro, after a year and a half on the line, was gaunt, muscular, and sunburned. To Euridice, he looked experienced, and besides that, he was six or seven years older. "Can you read Greek?"

Alessandro nodded.

"That's wonderful, really stupendous!" Euridice said, pointing to the open page. "In the
liceo
I learned only Latin and German, not Greek."

"I know," Alessandro said, and went back to his book.

"How do you know?" Euridice asked.

Alessandro looked up. "Because this is Arabic."

Euridice opened his duffel and started to unpack. "No one's fat," he said, having noticed that all the soldiers were lean.

"Except you," someone said, cruelly.

"No one's fat," Alessandro repeated without taking his eyes from the book.

"Why?"

Alessandro turned his head. "We're nervous."

"I look forward to losing weight. In the navy, the food was too delicious."

"Don't get bullet holes. You wouldn't be waterproof."

"Waterproof?"

"I keep my ammunition under your bed," Alessandro said, still not looking up. "When it rains it leaks there."

A cat slinked into the room, gliding along on its belly as flat as it could get. It took a look around, jumped onto Alessandro's cot, and began to lick itself.

"What's that?" Euridice asked, looking at the cat.

"That's a cat."

"Yes I know, but what's it wearing?" The cat was encased in leather and metal, in a harness that looked like a cross between a medical appliance and a military apparatus.

"She was hit by a shell fragment," Alessandro said. "It tore a big patch off her back. It took six months to heal, and without the harness she opens it with her teeth." At this, as if on command, the cat turned to try to lick her back. She couldn't get to it, and, instead, she licked the air.

"What's her name?"

"Serafina."

"What does she eat?"

"Macaroni and rats."

Alessandro put down his book and pulled the cat, a blur of brown, orange, and blond, into his arms.

"What's sad about her," he said, "is not that she was wounded but that, if she wanted, she could bound out of here—you know how quick cats are, how fast they can run, and how high they can jump—and she could go anywhere she wanted, away from the battle. She could go to a little town in the Apennines and catch mice under an olive tree, and she'd never hear a gunshot again in all her life except when the farmers went out after birds." He looked at Euridice. "But she doesn't know. She stays with us."

 

T
WO NIGHTS
later, when the moon was hardly visible behind a thick blanket of hot gray cloud, they went swimming. The soldiers of the Bell Tower believed that although it was obviously dangerous to swim in the branch of the Isonzo that ran below them, it was perfectly all right, even rational, if the swimming party numbered no more and no less than three men.

No one had ever been killed on such an excursion, or even detected. The first time they crawled down the slope and through the
mine fields they had been three, and in every subsequent three-man expedition nothing had gone awry. More than three men, it was said, would be too large a block. Their movement, whether simultaneous or serial, would attract the attention of that part of the eye that is irritated by sequences. Two men, or even just one, would not move 'scale-like' enough across the landscape. A tiny Ligurian had postulated that movement across nocturnal terrain occurred in three categories: points, scales, and plates. Plates, in being more than three men, were large enough to disturb the eye. Points, in being less than three men, were small enough to disturb the eye. Scales, however (and everyone knew that a scale comprised three men), were moderate and soothing, nearly invisible to sentries and observers, part of the landscape, and not so big that their apparent movement would appear unusual. Everyone believed this, even Alessandro, who didn't really believe it but refused to disbelieve it. The Ligurian, whom they called
Microscopico,
asserted that he had proof. He himself was a point, and when once he had had to crawl to the brink of the Austrian lines to retrieve a wounded comrade (Microscopico had been chosen on the assumption that his small size would allow him to go unnoticed) the night had failed to protect him, and a thousand shots had been fired in his direction. He had escaped only because a feral pig that had been feeding on the dead had been startled by the firing and had run through no-man's-land, usurping the Austrian aim while he himself dragged the dead body of his friend through the muddy depressions. The pig had been felled, because the pig, too, was a point, which all went to show that scales were the only way to move about between armies.

A soldier called the Guitarist, an affable Florentine who, with his classical songs, made the long nights tolerable, had refused to believe the scale theory. They ostracized him. When he entered the latrine, they would exit. When he spoke, they would pay him no heed. He tried to retaliate by putting his guitar up on the wall, but the absence of music hurt him more than it did anyone else, and in
a week their tyranny had beaten him down and, allowing that the theory of scales was correct, he had resumed his playing.

Alessandro told him that, of course, the theory was nonsense, but that it held things together. Everything would be all right as long as everyone else believed it. Within a day or two, everyone, even Microscopico, had sought out the Guitarist and said precisely the same thing.

It was so hot that in the daytime the infantrymen doffed their shirts and rolled their pants up above the knee. Summers fat and successful flies could hardly move: when they alighted on something they wanted it to be forever, and often died in the cause. The cat lay stretched on her back and didn't mind if she were wetted down with cold water. Even the machine guns seemed to fire much more slowly, though that was just an illusion.

After midnight, Alessandro, Euridice, and a Roman harness-maker named Guariglia set out for the river. They carried no weapons and wore only light khaki shorts. In that state of undress it was likely that if an enemy patrol discovered them they would be captured rather than killed, and as everyone knew, captivity was safe. Guariglia was tall, balding, dark, and heavily bearded. His eyebrows merged into a single moss-covered bough.

The three soldiers slid down the once-grassy slope that led from the Bell Tower to the river, freezing motionless or ducking behind boulders whenever the clouds brightened with the moon. A wide strip that ran from the fortification to the riverbank was open to Italian fire and had not been mined. They had exited by a small steel door at the base of the tower and rolled back three fronts of wire just enough to squeeze through: the wire at the riverbank had been washed away long before.

The ground was soft, with neither thorns nor nettles. Even pressing up against a boulder at the cue of the moon and clouds was a pleasant sensation, for the rock was cool, and the blue-green lichen on the north side smelled sweet when it was crushed. Their
timing was keyed to the moon, the boulders, and gravity, and they descended as silently as if they were part of the hill itself.

The heavily armed enemy was dug in on the opposite bank, and the three naked soldiers in cloud-muffled moonlight were in range of five hundred rifles and half a dozen machine guns. Waiting for them as well were mortars, star shells, flame throwers, and grenades. Back from the line, the heavy guns were silent but ready, and would magnetize to whatever pre-set spot their observers directed.

This arsenal, however, was not the real danger, which was, rather, a keyed-up enemy infiltration party armed to kill in silence with tomahawks, bayonets, and maces. If the swimmers' nakedness did not disarm such an enemy, they would simply be lost.

Just as they reached the river's edge the Austrians sent up a flare a few hundred meters to the north. "Don't move," Alessandro whispered, and they froze and bent among the whitened rocks in the dry part of the riverbed so that even the mothers of the rocks would not have been able to tell them apart.