A Soldier of the Great War (59 page)

"That may be so, but you probably can't know it until you're condemned to die."

"You're always condemned to die. It's just a matter of timing."

"There's something about having only a week or two left, though, isn't there," Ludovico asked. "It's too bad they don't shoot women here, because then we could have women in our cells and we'd all be warm, happy, and modest."

"They wouldn't have to shoot them. They could just bring them in."

"Good," Ludovico said, smiling as madly as the Cheshire Cat. "Why don't you tell them about it at your trial?"

"I'm not altruistic, like you."

"That's because you're not a communist."

"How old are you, Ludovico?"

"Twenty-two."

"You're forgiven."

"How old are
you?
"

"Twenty-seven."

"It's not your place to forgive me. I'll die a communist."

"I know."

"What do you do, anyway?"

"Why?"

"I think you're probably a social parasite."

"I was about to become a professor of aesthetics."

"Ahhh! See! You don't make anything, you don't do anything. No wonder."

At first, words flew through Alessandro's head like machine-gun bullets clearing the air over the trenches. His education, still intact, was suddenly fired up. Just the names—all the Greeks, of course, and Descartes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Leibniz, Vico, Eber
hard, Herder, Schiller, Kant, Rilke, Keats, Schelling, and a hundred others, loaded all the cannon and made them ready to fire. And he was ready to marshal the principles of intuition, analogy, sympathy, historicism, intellectualism, spiritualism, the relation of physics to aesthetics, various schools of theology.... But in the end, he realized, it was all talk, lovely talk, with no power. In the end, beauty was inexplicable, a matter of grace rather than of the intellect, like a song.

"You're right, Ludovico," he said, and it hurt.

For ten minutes the sea wind pumped wet mist through the window, and they shivered.

"Wait until the morning," Ludovico warned, "when they start the executions. It'll shake you up. You'll lose your bearings. I've seen it many times now."

"I saw men die in the line," Alessandro answered.

"It's not the same."

 

B
REAKFAST ARRIVED
before dawn, just as the candles in the long corridors between the rows of cells were burning down. Dazed prisoners under the watch of several guards handed out small cups of milk and unequal sections of bread.

"Don't eat too slowly, and don't eat too fast," Ludovico warned.

Alessandro asked why.

"If you eat too slowly, the shooting will start before you're finished, and your stomach will turn. If you eat too fast, your stomach turns when they start to shoot."

"What's the right speed?"

"Follow me," Ludovico commanded. He ate faster than Alessandro had ever seen anyone eat, and, after he finished, the gates to the courtyard were unlocked and pushed open.

A squad of soldiers with good military bearing marched into the execution yard. Their boots were shining, their uniforms pressed,
and they looked straight ahead and turned their rifles in the kind of drill accomplished by elite units that never fight.

"They do nothing else," Ludovico said. "Its the same group. They'll never be able to live with what they've done, but they can't mutiny."

At the window, Alessandro saw that their buttons glinted and sparkled even though little light fell on them. "They know better than anyone exactly what would happen to them if they did," he said.

"They should run away."

"Everyone they shoot tried to run away."

Alessandro gripped the bars as the ten men were brought out, accompanied by three priests with open Bibles. A dozen guards stood by. The manacles and chains of the condemned would not be removed until after the execution. Grave-diggers waited on the left, with two-wheeled carts that some of the prisoners eyed painfully.

The priests began to read from the Bibles. Sometimes they would look up into the faces of the men. They were soldiers in uniform, and it was hard to distinguish one from another. Some stood impassively. Some swayed back and forth. One was sobbing, bent over as if he had cramps.

"You smell that?" Ludovico said to Alessandro. "That's shit. They shit in their pants. You will too."

"Like hell I will," Alessandro answered. "I'm not going before God with shit all over me."

"Someone else said that," Ludovico added. "He said it, then he thought about it, and he looked up at me and said, it doesn't matter. God will have me washed clean before I'm brought to Him."

Two officers carrying papers solemnly entered the execution yard. They quietly read each man his sentence, and stepped back. One of them issued a command, and the prisoners were marched along the wall until they were lined up at the stakes. They moved slowly, dragging their feet, shuffling, crying.

Alessandro was mesmerized by the uneven and halting gait of the condemned men. Seventeen or eighteen years ago, their parents had held them up and guided them in their first steps. And now it had come to this. Stumbling, tentative, and afraid, they were walking once again like very young children.

They took their positions in front of the stakes. They didn't need to be tied, because they had nowhere to go and they knew it. One dropped to his knees. The two priests nearest him went to lift him up, but he had lost his courage and two guards moved forward to hook his manacles over a bolt in the post. The posts were not to hold them in place, but to hold them up.

How can they do this? Alessandro asked himself. These men did nothing more than fail to be in a particular place at a particular time. Given another chance, they would fight like Gurkhas, but, then again, if all the soldiers in the line knew that the only penalty for desertion was simply to be returned to the line, the line would evaporate.

Though Alessandro found it nearly impossible to believe that habit, custom, and civilization could be so strong as to compel the ten men below to walk to their deaths, he knew that when civilization, habit, and custom do not exist, executions proceed apace, even if with less formality and less warning.

The priests wore black cassocks dripping with beads that some of the prisoners tried to clutch. They circulated among the men who were going to die, and comforted them as best they could. By the time they withdrew from the line of fire most of the men were staring at the clouds and sky, over which the dawn light was vaulting and could not be turned back.

Half the firing squad knelt down. An officer drew his sword and lifted it. Orders were shouted, but Alessandro was in a fog and could not hear them. The soldiers raised their rifles in unison. As they worked the bolts to place rounds in the chambers the sound echoed from wall to wall. Alessandro had always liked that noise. It
had signified protection and preparedness. Even when it had drifted up en masse to the Bell Tower as a thousand Austrian soldiers made ready to attack, it had been comforting and it had dispelled his fear, but now it was the sound of despair.

The soldiers aimed. They were standing far enough away so that it was unlikely that they would place the bullets directly in the hearts of the men facing them, as they were supposed to do—as if they could know exactly where the hearts of these men lay.

"Now it comes!" Ludovico cried out.

The officer lowered his sword.

 

A
FTER
A
LESSANDRO
had witnessed a number of dawn executions he had more detail than he wanted. When the prisoners were led into the courtyard, the sun was touching only the top of the west wall. By the time they had marched along the north wall to the stakes, it had lit the tops of the stakes themselves. And when the priests had left those who were about to die to their last moments, the sun was tracking toward the firing squad and taking up the cream-colored dust in its powerful beam. It looked as if the firing squad were shooting at the advancing light, to keep from their eyes what the prisoners, who were blinking and squinting, had just seen. When the bodies were unshackled and loaded on the carts, the shirts of the men who did this work were quickly blackened with blood.

On cloudy days, when the prisoners had no glare in their eyes, the lack of confusion and the even temper of the light seemed to make them suffer even more. Alessandro was repeatedly enraged at the grave-diggers, who loaded the bodies on the carts with little care. From their lack of respect came the movement, far too free, of loose and relaxed limbs, heads that rolled back, and mouths that fell open. He hated it when a mans arm hung down from the
charrette,
and the fingers, slightly curled, tripped in the dust.

In the afternoons of clear days when the sea was so blue and open that it was too painful to look at, Alessandro stared straight into the glare. He wondered why he hadn't taken any of the many chances he had had to put a little boat on the sea and leave the land behind. Better to die in the waves than between walls. To be pounded to death in the cold surf was preferable to being shot by a row of illiterate marksmen who had not yet picked their teeth clean of the previous night's
scungili.

Stella Maris had been built to hold four hundred men. It now held eight hundred, and soon it would bulge with twelve hundred souls. The mere ten executions a day were due not to a dearth of candidates but to the necessity of trying them, and to the difficulty of transporting paperwork and documentation to and from Rome. Firing squads in the north were more efficient; it was said that some used machine guns, and the paperwork was nonexistent, but in Rome the populace could not be affronted. They had been spared proximity to the executions, very few of which were carried out in the city itself, the seat of government, where agitation was unwanted. A guard had told Alessandro and Ludovico that if Stella Maris had been close to the bureaucracy the toll would have been sixty a day. That they were alive was due to slow couriers and the fact that officials did not like to be trapped at the seaside in autumn.

Nonetheless, the loss of ten men a day, after two weeks, meant that, for Stella Maris to keep its business-like air, new prisoners had to arrive. Empty cells, like empty rooms in a resort or empty shelves in a store, spoke of failure. When the Italian armies regrouped in November and held their ground, the prisoners had hoped that the army, relieved of fatal pressure, would show mercy, but at the same time they despaired as they realized that their executioners would not be overthrown. The passage from hope to despair was, as always, more painful than the despair and more powerful than hope itself, but the whipsawing ceased as the days
passed and they saw that the Italian victory meant nothing to Stella Maris, that the executions had actually accelerated.

A hundred new men, breathing hard from their walk across the sand, were left in the execution yard for an hour as small groups proceeded to the cells. Though Ludovico did not in principle allow himself pleasure from the misfortunes of others, he could not suppress his amusement at the expressions of the newcomers as they filed in and saw the posts and the pockmarked wall. "You ought to look at their faces, Alessandro," Ludovico said. "I don't know why it's funny, but it is. Their innocence is so offended that you'd think they're all here by mistake. Look at them."

Alessandro studied the new prisoners. Their expressions were familiar and their uniforms black with sweat. It was the army, where everyone looks the same, but in the southwest corner was a soldier who was using a cane and leaning on a friend. Alessandro pressed against the bars. Then someone called to them. They had been given nicknames on the walk by the sea, or perhaps in the holding pens on the road from Rome. The one who limped and the one who helped him were called
Bruto
and
Bello.

As soon as Alessandro heard the names he remembered Guariglia's children, and the beneficial effects of Stella Maris and the sea, which had begun to spare him from pain and prepare him for death, immediately vanished.

 

A
LESSANDRO CALLED
out to Guariglia, but not to Fabio, because he thought he would sound like a bird if he said, "Fabio, Guariglia, Fabio, Guariglia," and that the prisoners would mock him.

The two turned their heads immediately, and walked across the execution yard until they stood directly beneath Alessandro's window. Alessandro and Fabio smiled in embarrassment, while Guariglia, who looked as if he were going to fall apart, tried to keep up a solid front.

"It didn't work," he said, his head tilted up, his hands shielding his eyes from the glare. "The catacombs. I got to them, and I was soon lost in the dark. "When the soldiers who were following me turned back, I thought I was safe, but a few hours later a trolley went overhead and the roof caved in. Luckily, the earth was light and dry. I dug my way through and came out a little hole into another tunnel, where I walked for a few minutes, feeling my way in the dark, and then sat down. I was there for an hour or two, spitting out dirt and trying to breathe, when I saw a lantern coming at me. I bolted in the other direction, right into a squad of military police. I knocked a few down when I collided with them, so they beat me with their rifle butts. I thought I was going to die right there, but they wanted to get into the air and the light, so they stopped."

Fabio said, "Three plainclothesmen came into the cafe and sat down. It was only a few days ago. They asked for me. I should have run out the back, but I thought they were going to leave a big tip, so I served them. Can you believe that? They had expresso and the kind of cookies that we called bracket cakes, the ones with the little chocolate ends." He smiled. "They stayed for half an hour, and then arrested me. I was stupid, huh."

"You weren't smart," Alessandro said.

"They had maps of the catacombs," Guariglia told Alessandro. "They sent surveying parties down there and made maps! Only then did they clear the place out. Why don't they fight the fucking war that well?"

"It doesn't matter now."