A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

“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.”