A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

When people write violent absurdities on the walls of a city, the city becomes violent and absurd.

Nicolò turned to look in the direction his guide had indicated, and he saw a lightened mass of buildings that, even in the darkness, conveyed a reassuring and uniquely Italian sense of dilapidation. “What’s so great over there?” Nicolò asked. “There aren’t even any lights on.” “I don’t mean there,” Alessandro said, thinking of snow-capped mountains and the electrifying past. “I mean far beyond; if you flew into the night as if in a dream, and rose, the wind tight against your face, the stars drawing you to them, the landscape beneath you blue-black. I have suddenly vaulted into the mountains,” he said, “after never having gone back, ever, for fear of encountering my lost self.” “There aren’t any people up there anymore, fighting wars. Once things happen, they pass, and that’s it.” “No,” Alessandro said. “If they happen once, they stay forever. I never spoke of them, because I have faith that they are everlasting, with or without me. I’m not afraid to die, because I know that what I have seen will not fade, and will someday spring full blown from someone not yet born, who did not know me, or my time, or what I loved. I know for sure.” “How?” “Because that is the soul, and whether you are a soldier, a scholar, a cook, or an apprentice in a factory, your life and your work will eventually teach you that it exists. The difference between your flesh and the animate power within, which can feel, understand, and love, in that very ascending order, will be clear to you in ten thou...

Alessandro made a curt bow, closing his eyes for an instant. “In this and in many other ways, but they are not enough. My symbols, my parallels, my discoveries, cannot even begin to do her justice and cannot bring her back. The most I can do is to make the memory of her shine. So I touch lightly, ever so lightly, seeking after gentle things, for she was gentle.

However, it’s pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously. You never know, the line may be unbroken all the way to the last judgment.

“If I describe what I saw of the war, you’ll know it from the point of view of the living, and that is the smallest part of the truth. The truth itself is what was finally apprehended by those who didn’t come back.”

Alessandro remembered that his father had said, “Of all people on earth, only merchants tell the truth, but only when they are talking to each other, and sometimes not even then.”

he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

Alessandro was bent over half a dozen volumes spread out on a long table. He often read six books at once, not because he enjoyed it, but to check one against the other and to compare arguments and accounts. The truth was often great enough to cover in its self-contradictory expanse at least six points of view, and where one was weak or incomplete the others continued the narrative. Alessandro examined the books as if they were witnesses, and despite having to turn pages back and forth almost continuously to bring various incidents into alignment, he employed this technique to considerable advantage, for the compilation of accounts seemed to yield a product rather than a sum.

“You imagine that you will make a speech.” “No I don’t.” “Yes you do. I can see it in you. At the Campidoglio you’ll step forward and, suddenly, Cicero. But Alessandro, they won’t let you, and even if they did, you would be speaking to a thousand different conceptions. Everyone has a self-made pass for travel through the terror and sadness of the world, and because, in the end, nothing is sufficient, everyone wants to share his own method, hoping for strength in numbers.

“You see,” the attorney Giuliani said, “not only is there no comfort in unanimity, but they cannot even achieve it.” “I could unify them.” “That’s silly, Alessandro. If they supported you, or even listened, it would be because you flattened yourself and your ideas until everything that once was steep and noble was gone.” “What if I speak my mind, forcibly, and carry them along with me? “That would make you a demagogue, a windbag. Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both.”

The world was going to be torn to pieces. In the driving apart of so many families, every family would be driven apart; in the death of so many husbands and sons, every husband and son would die; in the anarchy and gravity of suffering, God’s laws would emerge in all their color, hardness, and injustice.

Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph.

“Music isn’t rational,” the Guitarist said. “It isn’t true. What is it? Why do mechanical variations in rhythm and tone speak the language of the heart? How can a simple song be so beautiful? Why does it steel my resolution to believe—even if I can hardly make a living.”

“And being a soldier?” “The only halfway decent thing about this war, Alessandro, is that it teaches you the relation between risk and hope.”

“If it weren’t for music,” the Guitarist answered, “I would think that love is mortal. If I weren’t a soldier, I might not have learned to stand against all odds.” He took a deep breath.

I’ve also written four articles on this painting.” He rattled off the titles of the articles and the names of the journals in which they had appeared. “I don’t remember the dates, but if you’re doing a paper on Giorgione you’re bound to run into them.” The scholar had already run across the articles and had remembered them. “But if you do,” Alessandro continued, “ignore them. They’re all wrong. I know, intelligent criticism cannot be ‘wrong,’ but I was wrong to submit to the tyranny by which critics of art live, and to follow the road that they follow, because, to maintain their society and vocation, they parse by intellect alone works that are great solely because of the spirit. “You’re visited with penalties if you transgress,” he went on, speaking in a kind of storm, “but I’m no longer afraid of censure by my colleagues or of being without the Academy, for I walked out myself and can never return. “Do you know why?” he asked, stepping closer to the stranger. “The Academy is a mouse house, and to live within it you must be a house mouse. I didn’t want to be a house mouse in a mouse house.”

“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” Alessandro said, “but I’ll tell you, and you can do as you wish. For all I care, you can be the chief of the Academy. I’ll go back to the front. My blood will wash into the Adriatic before the ink on the pages of your fucking article is dry. It doesn’t matter. You’ll join me sooner than you know in a place with no academies and no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound—where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky.” He stepped closer to the painting. Just to be near it seemed to give him satisfaction.

“In history, Guariglia, will is only an illusion and success does not last. You can only do your best in the short time you have. If you decide to remake the world you’ll just end up killing people out of revolutionary impatience and triumphalism.”

In one respect it hardly mattered, for the life of a soldier is an introduction to death,

“As I die I’ll be holding her in my arms when she was close to your age now, Luciana, and the two of you, when you were babies. When you were infants I loved you more than you can imagine. In my flight through darkness I’ll hold to that image: the four of us—your mother in her early twenties, and you at two and a half, or three. “And my own father,” their father said in a suddenly high and weak voice. “When I see him I will have to be a child myself. It wouldn’t do for me to be an old man. Alessandro, can I be a child for the sake of my father, and a father for the sake of my children? Will God grant that?” “I don’t know,” Alessandro said. “How do you know?” his father asked. Rather than disappoint him, Alessandro improvised. “I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but I can’t imagine that God, who is so adept at linking parents with children, would so cruelly separate them. Perhaps it isn’t anywhere near the truth. Perhaps I’m merely self-serving. I don’t know, but I believe against all odds in exactly what you say.” “You don’t care what anyone else thinks, do you?” “No, Papa. I never did.” “That can only be because you believe.” “Yes.” “And how does God speak to you?” “In the language of everything that is beautiful.”

and the waves and jagged edges of the doctor’s pen strokes defeated Alessandro’s eyes.

I didn’t know God until I saw them. Its funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens.”

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, Eberhard, 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.

“All right, then, I’ll have to keep on talking—I like talking to you. When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war. In the painting by Giorgione, the woman and her baby are imperturbable, the center of the universe. The soldier may stray, the waters may rise, but the mother and child save the world, again and again.”

“My conceits will never serve to wake the dead. Art has no limit but that. You may come enchantingly close, and you may wither under the power of its lash, but you cannot bring back the dead. It’s as if God set loose the powers of art so that man could come so close to His precincts as almost to understand how He works, but in the end He closes the door in your face, and says, leave it to me. It’s as if the whole thing were just a lesson. To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.”