A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

“We’re no longer soldiers,” Alessandro said quietly. “That was a lifetime ago. Everything has changed.” “Yes,” said the proprietor, “but once, a lifetime ago, we were, and sometimes it all comes back, and moves my heart.”

“But one thing God does not give, something that must be earned, something that a lazy man can never know. Call it understanding, grace, the elevation of the spirit—call it what you will. It comes only of work, sacrifice, and suffering. “You must give everything you have. You must love unto exhaustion, work unto exhaustion, and walk unto exhaustion.

They discovered on their map, among mountains, rivers, empty plains, and settlements too small to have their names shown, four beacon-like towns strung along the road. Alessandro knew that at night these towns would sparkle and shine. Just their few lights in the slate-blue darkness would have, in their simplicity and purity, more of what made up light itself than the accumulated phosphorescence of whole ranks of great cities.

“I don’t understand. Elation in a man condemned to die?” “Elation, mad elation, visions, euphoria.” A long silence had followed, during which the lecture audience had been as motionless as if it had been under the gun, and the professor had been unable to resume the lecture, on account of memories that made him forget momentarily where he was and what he was doing.

“The reason for my hesitation is not my academic manner. I never had much of an academic manner. It’s because, once, these things hit me like a huge wave, an avalanche, and for a long time it was as if I were in a long and emotional dream where I could neither speak nor move, and the world was passing me by.

Perhaps because of the age of his traveling companion, Alessandro himself felt as if he were young, in a different time, and he dreaded the prospect of once again thinking through his youth.

“If you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur.” “But I don’t have them.” “Start to have them.”

“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.

“My granddaughter will know to move me next to my wife. And she and I have a bond strong enough that it hardly matters where we are put, for we have never really parted.”

You live on not by virtue of the things you have amassed, or the work you have done, but through your spirit, in ways and by means that you can neither control nor foresee.

Still, the music was enchanting, if only because of accidental harmonies in its collective dissonance. The clarinet and the glockenspiel, unknowingly, would for a moment or two engage in an apparently random duet that could have put the musicians of La Scala to shame, and then go their separate ludicrous ways.

Alessandro told Nicolò under his breath, “and don’t move.” “Why? What for?” Nicolò protested. “To enrich their folklore.” “You’re crazy!” “Shut up.”

“In a thousand years,” Alessandro said, “this incident will be remembered. By then, of course, we will have become angels, devils, or a dragon that breathes fire—but we have given this rock a story that will be passed on.” “What good is that?” “It isn’t to our advantage, if that’s what you mean. 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. “Which is better, you see, than just living and dying, and being buried in a filing cabinet near a chemical factory. Or do you want merely to tread the mill until you drop off? Nicolò, mischief is important.

Wandering in the many hours of light, the attorney Giuliani and his son learned to crave the cold wind so that the more they were in it, the richer they felt.

Cauldrons bubbled over with boiling things that surfaced as if to scream, and then were pulled under before they could express themselves.

Though God preserved me, the best stories were theirs, and these were cut short. The real story of a war is no story at all—blackness, sadness, silence.

“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.”

At eleven, the singers came. They weren’t Africans. Nor were they angels, but they were very good, and the time until lunch went as smoothly as if all the scribes had been drifting down a river. At one, when the female singer finished her last aria, the doors and windows that faced the piazza were filled with a hundred clerks who made their silver coins into a short and violent hailstorm.

“What are you saying?” “I’m saying that we are more or less alone, and that the places we’re going to are often places where no human being has ever been—ever, since the beginning of time. You’ll feel it when you’re there. It’s different from anything you’ve ever felt.”

“I’m not afraid,” Rafi said. “Why not?” “If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.”

He enjoyed standing at the very edge of a cliff, sometimes with only his heels on the rock, like a mountain guide impressing clients, or staring into an abyss so profound that, had he fallen, Alessandro would not, without a telescope, have been able to have seen where he had come to rest, and would not, without a microscope, have been able to have found him where he had fallen.

Rafi was suited perfectly to the mountains, for when he was tested and worn down to practically nothing, his soul was unencumbered, and it rose, drawing him closer to where he wanted to be.

Once you have heard it, whether from afar or close by, you will believe forever in things that you may never have known in a comfortable life. No thunder was ever as deep or as threatening for thunder comes from above and is preceded by light. Though artillery sometimes shows a broad white flash that turns night to day, it seems to have escaped from a fissure in the ground, and its deep and terrible sound has no relation to the aerial tantrums with which we associate it. No, the sound of artillery comes from below, and though its occasional rumbles and booms are as casual as rolling waves, it sets the soul afloat in a world of darkness.

Alessandro put down his book and pulled the cat, a blur of brown, orange, and blond, into his arms. “What’s sad about her,” he said, “is not that she was wounded but that, if she wanted, she could bound out of here—you know how quick cats are, how fast they can run, and how high they can jump—and she could go anywhere she wanted, away from the battle. She could go to a little town in the Apennines and catch mice under an olive tree, and she’d never hear a gunshot again in all her life except when the farmers went out after birds.” He looked at Euridice. “But she doesn’t know. She stays with us.”

The urgency of the clouds hurrying down from the north was captivating even to those who did not know why. “It’s because they come from the north,” Alessandro said to the Guitarist. “They’ve flown over Vienna, rushed along the Danube, and floated above military camps and the Ministry of War. Now they’ve come to look at us. They want no part of any of this, and they speed toward the Adriatic. They’ll cross the sea and float untouched into Africa like lost balloons. They hear nothing. They float over silent deserts and struggling armies as if the two were indistinguishable. I wish that I could do the same.” “Don’t worry,” said the Guitarist. “Someday you will.”

“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. “Well, that’s all very fine, but the truth is I just don’t want to be killed before I see my son.”

A nightmare has no justification, but you try your best to last through it, even if that means playing by the rules. I suppose a nightmare is having to play by rules that make no sense, for a purpose that is entirely alien, without control of either one’s fate or even one’s actions.

The air was full with the smell of whiskey as the besieged 19th River Guard listened to the reassuring sound of rain pattering lightly against the roof, and they all were thinking of home.

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.

I wonder what her voice was like. My father knows. He loved her, and he’ll carry the memory, but he can carry it only so far.”

Gianfranco di Rienzi was without expression, but as his gaze jumped from overspilling gutters to water-slickened façades to rain-laden palms dripping in the wind, he studied the city as if he were a mother touching the face of her child for the last time.

“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.”

I don’t know, but here, at the end, I see that the most beautiful thing between a man and a woman is not the consummation of their love, but, simply, their regard for one another.” “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.”

“Theology is a system.” “Not my theology.” “Then what is it?” “What is it? It’s the overwhelming combination of all that I’ve seen, felt, and cannot explain, that has stayed with me and refused to depart, that drives me again and again to a faith of which I am not sure, that is alluring because it will not stoop to be defined by so inadequate a creature as man. Unlike Marxism, it is ineffable, and it cannot be explained in words.”

If God will have me, it will have to be without an introduction.”

Here were three hundred fathers, brothers, and sons. Their families had been told only that they were missing. Had the people who loved them known, each of the corpses would have been retrieved, each tenderly bathed, their dirty cheeks kissed, their hands caressed by parents, children, and wives. But they were to lie in the open air and decompose like branches.

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.”

“It’s like the days before the war,” he said to his partner on the rope. The other soldier breathed-in the sweet smell of the rock lichen. “Yes,” he answered. “Think how fine it will be when hour after hour passes without the report or threat of a single gun—for years without end. Life will be like a dream.” “And no one will appreciate it,” Alessandro said to the vast distances around him. “Except us, and screw them.”

I need an educated man to be my private secretary until we get to Vienna. There, my personal secretary will rejoin me after he recuperates from a wound he received in Russian roulette.” “How did the bullet miss his brain?” “That was easy.”

Can you see a group of people on a beach in a storm, deafened by the surf, their hair blown back from their foreheads, their eyes tearing, trying to prove the existence of the wind and the sea? “I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I’m grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion.”

of the husbands who would unexpectedly return to their wives, and the fathers who would take their children by surprise as they were playing in the front yard, but when he saw the children freeze, and then run to their fathers’ arms, his bitterness left him. The more he imagined the scenes of return, expected or unexpected, the more he wished the best for those who would have such luck, and the more he loved them and their children.

Alessandro learned yet again that the joy of escape is better than the joy of merely being free.

“I never want to die. I’ll fight to the end and go with a real struggle.” “I know, I know,” Alessandro said kindly. “You can hardly feel time, and yet you are jealous of it more than you will ever be again.”

It would take more than anyone could give to understand the life of one other person—we cannot understand even our own lives—and more energy and compassion than is humanly possible to commemorate even a single life that ends in such a death.

an entire generation of boys had grown up with the rifle and bayonet the tools of their craft. For them nothing seemed quite as real as the trenches, so they didn’t throw themselves into the traditional occupations with much fervor. They believed that peace was a dream, and they found it difficult to invest in an illusion.

“Why weren’t you in the resistance?” “I was tired. And you have to have a certain temperament. You have to be fixed on the point. You need what politicians have, which is the absence of a sense of mortality. It comes, like a drug, from adoration and deference. Revolutionaries get it from dreams. They say that nothing is apolitical, that politics, the bedrock of life, is something from which you cannot depart. I say, fuck them. “I was interested in birds. Are birds political? And I thought the finest thing in my life was being with my son when he was a baby. People used to look at us when we went around in the daytime, and wonder what a man was doing taking care of a child, but every word that came from him, every expression, every smile, even his tears, were worth a million times an honorable profession.

“The priest said, ‘Where you are going there is no fear and there is no dying. Your mother and your father will be there. They’ll hold you like a baby. They’ll stroke your head, and you’ll sleep in their arms, in bliss.’ “‘I wish it would be so,’ the boy said. “‘It will be so,’ Father Michele answered, and he repeated it again and again, ‘It will be so, it will be so,’ until the boy died. “Afterward, when he was clean, I approached Father Michele and asked if he believed what he had said. ‘No,’ he told me, ‘but I was praying to God to make it that way.’

“Just to think about her makes me happy. When I die, no one will think about her ever again, which is why I’ve been holding on.

Though he knew that before he understood Alessandro’s life he would have to live much more of his own, he knew as well that Alessandro had done something marvelous: he had kept his love alive despite everything that had happened, and this was something from which Nicolò did not want to tear himself away.

“Signore, this may seem funny, but I want to do something for all the people in the time of which you spoke. I want to very much, but I can’t, can I.” “But you can. It’s simple. You can do something just, and that is to remember them. Remember them. To think of them in their flesh, not as abstractions. To make no generalizations of war or peace that override their souls. To draw no lessons of history on their behalf. Their history is over. Remember them, just remember them—in their millions—for they were not history, they were only men, women, and children. Recall them, if you can, with affection, and recall them, if you can, with love. That is all you need to do in regard to them, and all they ask.”