A Soldier of the Great War (78 page)

In the evenings after dinner he watched the flame of the lamp. When the wind howled with great strength, it moved as if the abyss were trying to pull it away. Wind and darkness seemed to say that if only the flame would surrender and be extinguished, leaving behind a trace of white smoke, it would be taken at unimaginable speeds and in unimaginable cold, whistling like a million flutes, high over the mountains of ice, rocketing into the darkness of space in distances that had no limit and for a time without end—but the flame kept burning, wavering perilously behind a thin shell of brittle glass, and it lit the room, turning everything to gold.

 

T
HE
A
USTRIANS
could neither mass for an attack nor enjoy the open air as long as Alessandro was able to see them from his chamber in the rock and guide shells directly to the entrances of their tunnels and trenches, working away at particular points like a miner until he could open up a bunker or excavate a tunnel, and watch the men scatter after he hit the hollow places. It was natural that they would resent this.

At four in the morning the ringing of the telephone pulled Alessandro from a deep sleep. He rolled out of bed, found the table in the dark, and picked up the receiver.

All kinds of static came over the line. "Yes," he said.

"Alessandro?" queried an unfamiliar voice, bathed in noise.

In the dark, with the blankets heavy on his shoulders as he leaned over the table and clutched the phone, Alessandro could not get his bearings, and he felt as if he were drifting in space. "What?" he answered.

"Is that you?"

"It's the king."

"I wanted to make sure they hadn't gotten to you yet."

"Who?"

"It cleared tonight, about a half an hour ago, and we saw lights above you."

"Above me?"

"Yes. They must have come up the other face."

"At night?" Alessandro asked incredulously.

"We were watching them, but then it clouded over. You might want to prepare yourself."

"Thank you," said Alessandro. "How many?"

"Four."

Alessandro thought for a moment, listening over the wind and the static on the line for footsteps or clinking metal. "Thank you," he said again, and hung up.

As the wind whistled through the cracks between the stone and the iron shutters, he stared up into the dark and saw nothing but the inexplicable flashes that were made in his own eyes.

He lit the lamp, moved a wooden ammunition box near his bed, and put the lamp on it. He placed the
Vita Nuova,
face open, on the floor near the head of the bed. Then he threw off his blankets, tucked in his shirt, buckled his belt, put on his heaviest sweater, and sat down on the floor to lace up his boots. His fingers moved like the parts of a spinning jenny. Never had he worked faster, and then he was up in one motion, leaning over the bed to take the pistol and the bayonet from the wall. As he strapped on the pistol, he felt disturbed because he had never fired it. He used precious seconds to unholster the weapon and swing it open. The six round ends of cartridges in the chambers made a brass-colored circle comforting to behold. Upon this metal his survival would rest, just as it had so often depended upon even smaller pieces of steel driven into the rock.

He threw the empty knapsacks across the room to his bed. Moving with incredible speed, he used the sacks to sculpt a man lying on his side, facing the wall. The legs had to be far lower than the hips and shoulders. He covered this with two of his blankets, and it looked real, but nothing in the chamber, save his own head, was even vaguely spherical. He settled for stuffing some clothes into a sock and arranging the end as if it were the ornamental part of a night cap. He would have found this amusing had he time to be amused.

Then he heard the sharp, high-velocity click of tiny pebbles striking the stone roof and the frame of the trap-door, and he froze. Whoever was coming had dislodged some stones while descending, and he hoped that they had not realized it.

As quickly as he could, his heart beating at twice its normal rate, he rested some heavy timbers against the wall and moved the table, in three parts, from its pedestal, arranging the table top
against the timbers like the sides of a lean-to. He used a metal plate, which had been hauled up at great cost and for no apparent reason, to armor the wood. Then he hung all the rope and other loose equipment he could find over the side of this construction, grabbed his first-aid kit and the remaining blanket, and crawled between the lean-to and the wall.

As he was stuffing cotton into his ears he remembered that he had left the trap-door bolted. Cursing quietly, he backed out of the redoubt, leapt to the center of the floor, and silently pulled back the bolt. As he stood, with his neck bent, staring at the bolt, he heard the thump of a boot above him.

Teeth clenched, heart racing, Alessandro pushed quietly into his armored sanctuary. He rammed the cotton firmly into his ears and held it between his teeth. Then he unholstered the pistol and laid it before him, and unsheathed the bayonet. Six shots, he thought, and four men. Either he would be calm and unshaken, or he would find himself flailing in the dark with the bayonet.

They waited for what seemed like hours before they lifted the door, and when they did, they did it ever so slowly. Trying desperately not to breathe audibly, Alessandro watched long crusts of snow fall inward and break apart in the air before making little piles on the floor. He saw a man's face slowly descend partway through the trap. He, too, was breathing quietly. He looked at the lamp and the bed, and then pulled back.

At first, nothing happened. Then, after two heavy metallic clunks, the trap-door was slammed shut. Alessandro grit his teeth and bunched the blanket around his head, holding as much of its bulk as he could near his ears.

He counted. One ... two ... three ... four ... Even though he had been deliberately slow, he had been counting so fast that the explosions came at twenty. One immediately followed the other. They pushed him against the rock wall and threw the metal plate up to the ceiling, but the table top hardly budged. Alessandro's jaw closed on the cotton, and he received a blow to his solar plexus that
stopped his breathing. Despite the cotton, the blankets, and his hands, his ears rang, and the nerves in his eyes gave him a fireworks show.

He threw down the blanket, spat out the cotton, yanked the ear plugs, and picked up the pistol, but his hand was shaking so hard that he had to put the gun down. He wondered if he would be able to stop trembling in time, and tried to talk himself into it as if he were trying to talk a horse out of a gallop. While they were dropping down from the hatch, which had been blown open in the blast, he would have to lie with the pistol before him, hoping that at the last moment his hand would be still and strong enough to grasp it and aim.

Before they came in they shone their miner's lights around the room, and one of them shot the blanket-covered knapsacks five times in rapid succession with a semi-automatic pistol.

The first man dropped down. The minute his feet touched the floor he raised the pistol he had just fired and emptied it into what he thought was Alessandro's head. Still holding the gun in his hand, he looked about, the beam from his light sweeping over the rubble, and then he relaxed. The room was filled with smoke.

With a voice that sounded relieved and triumphant, the first man called the others in. They dropped down one by one, and they spoke with animation, for they thought they had succeeded.

The beams of their lights stopped tentatively at the dead soldier in the bed, and then quickly moved on. One of the raiders discovered the telephone. It was in pieces, but the body was still connected to the wire that fell from the ceiling.

"Look, a telephone. Let's call the Italians on the telephone!"

They gathered around the telephone and turned the crank. They were laughing like little boys, with their lights shining upon the semi-dismembered instrument they were trying to revive, when Alessandro's hand stopped trembling.

He placed it around the pistol. It was uncannily steady, far
steadier than it had been before the blast, steadier than it had ever been in pistol practice.

Taking aim at the one who had the empty pistol in his hand, which was not the best tactic, he pulled back the hammer.

When they heard the hammer click they turned to stare. Unable to place the sound in the darkness and smoke, they froze. Even after the first fell dead, the other three were more surprised than indignant, and they hardly moved. Alessandro cocked the hammer again and shot one of them through the heart. As this one collapsed, the other two lurched to opposite sides of the chamber. They were easy targets because they hadn't had time to discard their lights, and Alessandro put two casually aimed shots in the body of the one on his left just as he was drawing a pistol.

Before Alessandro could turn, the last of them had begun to spray the room with bullets. He was so frightened that he fired wildly, sometimes not even in Alessandro's direction. Alessandro dropped to his knees and crawled along the floor behind the bulwark of table tops. The enemy soldier fired at them and bullets splintered through the wood ahead of Alessandro, walking from right to left in a design so even and at a rate so steady that he knew if he were to stand he would have time to get off a shot before the pattern broke. Trembling with fear, he took a breath and stood up straight. He raised his gun and fired two shots at the miner's light. The light went out and the room was suddenly quiet. Now three miner's lights lay on the floor, their beams pointing at strange and unlikely angles, as the smoke slowly cleared. The air smelled of gunpowder and blood. Alessandro reloaded the Colt and listened very closely, because someone was breathing.

 

T
HOUGH THE
explosion had not wounded him, Alessandro was suddenly taken ill. A pain centered in his forehead and eyes made him bend double, and, as he did so, he retched. He could hardly
move, and thought he was going to die of suffocation. As the smoke dissipated, he blacked out.

He awoke an hour after dawn, in air that was pristine and cold. Sunlight came through the cracks and was reflected through the hatch. After a while, he heard the breathing. It was so faint he couldn't be sure he wasn't merely remembering it.

One of the Austrians was still alive. Lying on his back with his arms bowed, he clutched a wound on the right side of his chest. He was tall and strong, his face brutal and pale, with fleshy lips, hooded eyes, and a close-cropped blond beard. He looked like a mountain guide. They had probably all been mountain guides.

"Does it hurt?" Alessandro asked in Italian, too sick to speak in another language even though he had intended to.

The Austrian nodded.

"Are you going to die?"

"
Nein,
" was the answer, the abruptness of which Alessandro associated not with rudeness but with vigor.

Alessandro looked around the room. Three bodies were beginning to stiffen where they lay, and the floor was covered in sheets of frozen blood. As always, the dead were sprawled in positions of shock and regret.

Everything that Alessandro had arranged on tables and shelves was now rubble. Beans and rice littered the floor like hail and gravel, stuck in the congealed blood and piled up in drifts in the corners. Bandoliers of bullets had blown apart, the shelves were splintered, cans of fish had been compacted until some of them leaked oil. Everything was everywhere—the pages of the
Vita Nuova
scattered like leaflets dropped from an airplane, instruments and metal pieces embedded in wood and strangely bent, half the messages on the wall blackened by fire. Alessandro had no idea how he had survived, but he noticed that rounded things—bullets, grenades, round cans, anything with a roll to it—had fared better than objects with corners and flat surfaces. The telephone
looked mortally wounded; one of its coils had unsprung and popped out to the side like a horizontal jack-in-the-box. "I'll have to take you back," he said to the survivor.

The Austrian grimaced as if to question Alessandro's ability to do it.

"Don't worry," Alessandro assured him. "A line of heavy bolts goes all the way down. You'll be safe. If you stay here you're sure to die."

Alessandro holstered the pistol, strapped down the hammer, and got the first-aid kit. The bullet had not exited, but appeared to have smashed a rib and come to rest. After cutting bandages for making a splint, and laying them out in front of him, Alessandro cleaned the wound, put a gauze pad over it, and had the Austrian hold it as tightly as he could. He then went looking for a piece of wood.

He found some boards, unwound another roll of gauze, and reached for the scissors. They weren't there. He looked near his right hand, where he thought he had left them. He looked to the left. Giving up, he would tear the gauze, and had lifted his elbows in the symmetrical gesture common to those about to rip bandages or tape. Then he hesitated, but it was already too late.

With all his remaining strength, the wounded soldier brought his right arm up from the ground in a powerful arc and drove the scissors into Alessandro's chest. Alessandro fell back, clutching at the blades embedded in the muscle over his heart and crying out with pain. He was so shocked that he hardly understood as the soldier desperately tried to pull the pistol from its tight holster. Alessandro rolled across the bodies on the floor. He ended up on his side, resting on top of a corpse. The pain in his chest was unbearable, and when he pulled out the scissors he nearly fainted again. His shirt and sweater were covered with blood.

The Austrian soldier was trying to reach him, gasping as he crawled over the bodies of his friends, but he stopped short when
he saw the pistol that one of them was holding. It was still loaded. Alessandro shook his head, as if to give him one more chance, but the Austrian didn't believe him, and rushed for the pistol.

Alessandro unstrapped his revolver and jerked it from the holster. This was a race in which he could afford to be careful. He raised the gun and aimed it, and as the other soldier pulled the semi-automatic from the dead man's grip, Alessandro cocked the hammer with his thumb.