A Soldier of the Great War (41 page)

"Tell me," he said. "Tell me."

"Alessandro..." said Signor Foa, leaning forward.

"Do you have a letter for me?" Alessandro interjected. "I asked them to send my mail here because I wasn't getting it in the north. How is Rafi?"

"Rafi's fine, as far as we know," Signora added anxiously. "He's in the Alpini."

"I know."

"I do have a letter for you, Alessandro," Signor Foa said. "It's from your father. We thought you knew. Alessandro, your mother died in December."

 

O
NE MORNING
in the early part of May the River Guard were awakened in their barracks at 3:oo A.M. As they shaved and dressed in the cold night air, they speculated—a raid on the Dalmatian Coast, combat against the Germans in East Africa, taking an island
in the Adriatic. One of the more imaginative and least intelligent of them said they would go by submarine up the Danube to seize Vienna. No one, not even the officers, knew where they were bound or why they had neither insignia nor a unit name.

By four they had assembled on the parade ground, under full packs, their rifles on their shoulders, bandoliers and pouches of ammunition hung from pistol belts, bayonets fixed and sheathed. Twenty-one wheeled caissons were interspersed among the ranks. These contained field kitchens, tents, three water-cooled machine guns, signaling equipment, and ammunition.

They were a sharp and elite unit, and had been in the trenches long enough to have been blooded a hundred times. Lean and fit, they were so accustomed to drill that they found it comforting, and took pride in the clipped and powerful sound of their heels snapping to attention.

Their early morning thoughts were stimulated by the confluence of great energy and minds freshly drawn from oblivion. They had no light, nothing against which to measure the difference between wake and sleep, no harsh mid-morning sun to assault their dreams and regulate the beating of their hearts.

After they were called to attention they were counted in the most formal military manner and checked against a list. Then a lieutenant sealed the list, put it in a pouch, and gave it to a mounted divisional courier, who took it and galloped away. The lieutenant produced another list and went through the exercise once again, but this time he called only first names.

"You will notice," he said when he had finished, "that in each platoon only a few men have the same first name. Whoever shares names will decide upon nicknames or some other way to tell one from another.

"From now on, you'll never mention the cities and towns where you lived, you'll forget the last names and home towns of your friends, you'll be known only by your first name, and you'll
address your fellow soldiers and officers only by first name or rank. Understood?"

The lieutenant looked up. He was tall and thin, with an aquiline nose, and a mustache that made him look both very old-fashioned and very up-to-date. In civilian life he had been a chemist. His name was Giovanni Valtorta, but no one ever called him anything other than Lieutenant. Two sub-lieutenants acted as if they had understood the reason for the orders, and were embarrassed when the lieutenant responded to the dazed and contemptuous expressions of his men by saying, "Evidently these orders are legitimate, and we're to follow them. Don't ask me why, because I don't know why." He stepped back two paces, surveyed his men, looked about, and said, "You may laugh and curse for one minute."

The soldiers were angry. They hadn't seen their families, and it seemed especially cruel that not only did they have no opportunity to be with their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, and to return, if only for a short time, to their wives and their precious and holy children, but for a month they had had no news, and now they were told to forget their names. As the curses and the laughter died down, someone asked, "What is to become of us?"

This question cleared the air and brought total silence.

"I don't know," the lieutenant answered. "We shall see."

Then he called them to attention, and they snapped to as if the last that was gentle about them was fleeing along their rifles and shining bayonets straight into the dark sky above Mestre.

They went southwest along dirt roads, across railroad tracks, through fields, and past factories for an hour and a half at double time in the dark. As the sky lightened they came to an arm of the lagoon that surrounds Venice. They marched along the edge of this until they stopped at a wooden pier that pointed to the rising sun. Three large steam launches, boilers fired, were lined up to receive them. Usually military units take a long time to load, but the River Guard were so light and so practiced at being together that they were in the boats, caissons and all, in five minutes.

Guariglia turned to the sailor who manned the tiller of the boat in which he and Alessandro sat aft and to the starboard. "Are we going to a battleship?" he asked.

"No," the sailor answered. "You're going to a bucket of shit."

"I don't understand," Guariglia said, thinking that perhaps the sailor merely disliked his ship.

"Neither do I," the sailor said, "and I'm not supposed to talk to you."

The three launches cast off, sidled into the currentless estuary, and moved forward. Though the River Guard didn't know where they were going, at least they didn't have to walk. The land and its tangles were replaced by the blank slate of the waves, but the seaward journey did not take the infantrymen into the clear. By some perversity the sailors directed the launches straight for the silhouetted spires of Venice. They drew closer and closer as the sun pushed through the slots and cuts in the dark mass of the city and blinded them with its pale bright light. Trapped in the glare, Venice looked threatening and enormous, until they came to it and entered the Grand Canal.

Except for Alessandro, no one had been near a city for many months, and with their weary eyes they looted it in its every detail. Young soldiers who hadn't the slightest idea of form (other than in a woman) took in the lines of Venice as if they were architects on their way to being executed. When a waiter in a black dinner jacket and starched apron stepped to the side of the canal and tossed a bucket-full of soapy water into the air, they watched intently the motion of his arms and back. As nearby gondoliers strained forward, the River Guard passed a house at the end of the canal and heard a piano, and as they rode by with their rifles on their shoulders they wished that they could stay.

As quickly as they had entered Venice and steamed through the Grand Canal, they exited. The sun caught San Giorgio Maggiore in a warm flare of orange, ochre, and white, as the hesitant blue dawn over the Adriatic was cleared of all but the most tentative
clouds. These had red underbellies, or gold, and were grouped together in long luminous strings like golden willow branches.

The waves picked up as the sun strengthened, and the River Guard headed out to the roads, where many ships lay at anchor. The prows of the launches rose up and down vigorously, sometimes slapping the water into spray that was blown back into the boat.

 

A
S THE
hysterical morning bells of Venice rang out six, the three launches looped around a rusty cattle boat that lay between a destroyer and a cruiser. At first the River Guard thought they would board the cruiser, and, then, the destroyer. When they came alongside the cattle boat, they groaned.

"It doesn't even have a name," someone said. "Don't ships always have names?"

"Why should it? We don't."

"What will they write if we get torpedoed?"

"Don't worry. Torpedoes are too expensive to waste. What do they care about a load of cattle, sheep, and goats?"

"But what if they see
us?
"

"That's what I'm talking about."

"You know what I say," Guariglia shouted to all the launches. "I say, I don't have a name, I'm not from anywhere, I have no family, I don't know where I'm going, what I'm doing, or when I'll be back. So you know what I say? I say ... fuck it!"

"I know where we're going," a normally quiet soldier said. "We're going south."

"Perhaps that's because ships don't go on land."

"We're going to conquer Turkey."

"I'd rather fight them than the Germans."

Then they thought back to the War of 1911, and someone said, "I wouldn't."

When they embarked they were in high spirits, hauling caissons over the sides two at a time with hoists that usually lifted terrified horses and cows. The launches cast off, the caissons were stowed below, and the cattle boat began to move. A hatch popped up in the bow and two sailors emerged to winch up the anchor. Soon, they were underway in the wind, gulls maneuvered around them, and whitecaps appeared in the water.

The two sailors, who wore decrepit uniforms without insignia, brought up a large metal container with sides that were fogged and covered with droplets. It was a bucket of vanilla ice cream and strawberries. "This is a gift from the cruiser," they said, "and it's the last of it. We have no refrigeration."

"Where are we going?" they were asked.

"We don't know. The captain doesn't know either. They give him an envelope with the name of the next port, the course, and the speed. When we arrive, he gets another envelope. It's been like that since the beginning of the war."

The lieutenant came down from the bridge. He knew. "First we're sailing for the naval base at Brindisi, where a colonel will embark and tell us what we're going to do."

"Sir?"

"Yes?"

"A colonel?"

"That's what I said."

"For three platoons? Colonels are for brigades."

"Find places to sleep on deck," the lieutenant commanded.

"At sea the dew is impossible," a soldier said. "We'll get soaking wet.

"No. This boat has a shallow draught, because it was built to skim the reefs of out-islands where it transported animals. The captain says we're going to follow the coast. The wind comes off the land at night, and it will be dry. We'll be so close to shore you'll think you're on a train."

After the ice cream, Alessandro and Guariglia settled on the upper deck amidships on the starboard side. They washed their bowls by lowering them over the rails and allowing the sea to batter them clean, and they lay down on the beds they had made of their blankets and packs. They were so comfortable and tired that they slept through intense heat, and only awoke now and then to look at the gulls vibrating on the wind as they held position over the ship.

 

B
Y LATE
afternoon their uniforms were stiff and white with salt. "I saw a man's ashes once," Guariglia said. "They're grayish white, just like those lines on your shirt."

"That's not so bad," Alessandro stated. "When you realize that everyone is not much different from the stuff that's listed on the sides of bottles of mineral water, death takes on an air of tranquillity."

"Why don't they do it on wine bottles?" Guariglia asked.

"Because there's too much crap in wine, and if the stuff in water takes up the whole side of a bottle, in microscopic print, every liter of wine would have to come with a manual."

"When my brother was a kid," Guariglia said, "he tried to make wine from chicken shit."

"Did it work?"

"Yes and no. He put what he got in a Chianti bottle and took it around to the cafes. No one liked it, but a lot of people bought a glass or two."

"Or
two?
"

"They wanted to be nice to a kid. Most of them were pretty old, anyway."

The soldiers lined up at the water casks and drank deeply of the warm and tainted water that would not have tasted better had it been from a numbing alpine spring. They let it pour over their heads and soak their shirts.

When the sun, still white and yellow, was hovering over the mountaintops, one of the sailors staggered from the hold under a quarter of beef. So many flies were around him that at first they thought he was carrying a huge cluster of grapes.

"Are we supposed to eat that?" someone asked.

"You'll love it," the sailor said. "It's good meat and it's been curing."

"Since before or after the birth of Christ?"

"It's safe. We live on it."

A small circle of men including Alessandro and Guariglia gathered around the sailor as he opened a locker and dragged out a long rope and a steel grappling hook. He pushed the hook through the quarter of beef, attached the rope to a cleat on deck, and threw the beef into the sea. It crashed into the brine and skidded across the surface, turning and bouncing violently on the waves in an enormous amount of froth and foam. The flies disappeared and the meat took on a good color.

As the meat was pulled through the sea the cook used a short bayonet to cut up several sacks of carrots, potatoes, and onions that he threw into a huge cauldron. The cauldron was carried to a hatch cover upon which a barefooted soldier had burned himself earlier in the day. The cook opened the hatch with the receiver on the bayonet. "Main steam pipe," he said, lowering the cauldron into a recess for which it had been designed. "Bring me two buckets of sea water."

They pulled in the beef, which now looked like the meat in the windows of expensive butcher shops on the Via del Corso. The cook set upon it with the bayonet until blood flowed off the deck into the sea, and dumped the pieces into the cauldron to boil with the sea water and vegetables.

While the soldiers washed down the deck, he disappeared, and bobbed up again carrying two enormous straw-covered wine bottles, and a string of garlic that he put on the deck and crushed
under his boots. He threw the garlic, a box of ground pepper, two liters of olive oil, and five liters of wine into the boiling brine.

"One hour," he said. "The other bottle is for you, two long drinks each—not too long."

After the bottle was passed around and each soldier had drunk as much as he could, they went to sit on their improvised beds and watch the sun go down over the mountains. Cool and dry, ravenously hungry, lost, perplexed, and safe, they leaned back against their packs and blankets as they listened to the engines and the sea and watched the shore go by.