A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

“Anticipation is the heart of wisdom. If you are going to cross a desert, you anticipate that

complected

We met only this afternoon, and we’ve said very little. I’m glad that I have retained an aura of mystery.”

apotheosis.

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

“If you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur.”

“You cannot fall and expect not to rise. Call it the wheel, the lesson of Antaeus, what you will, but strength floods in after a fall.

And as they walked, he reminded himself now and then that he was not to walk on his hands.

“I don’t want to be a pair of eyes in the darkness.” “Struggle as you may,” Alessandro said, “that is what you will someday be.

“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.”

corpulent,

“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.”

“You’ll learn more in your journeys to and from Bologna, if you make them on horseback, than from all your professors combined,” the attorney Giuliani had said, and he had almost been right.

Orfeo

Alessandro produced from his vest pocket the beautiful fountain pen with which he wrote anything and everything—his

That is the mark of an old order scribe—consistency. Each letter is always the same. Gentlemen gallop their horses across the fields and leap fences as they choose. Scribes must follow the streetcar tracks; still, the discipline affords satisfaction.

He walked to his room, calmly shut the door, and ripped open the envelope as if it contained the last bit of breathable oxygen left on Mars.

And as for our honor, honor is a complex and important matter best served by doing the right thing.”

In the orchestra, with contempt for the fire laws, two students had set up a brazier and were grilling small cubes of meat.

Can we talk here?” Rafi asked, as if it were a regular theater. “We could fight a duel and no one would notice,” Alessandro answered, “but let’s go outside.”

glissades,

couloirs

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.”

“Yes, I’m calm,” he answered. “But the glory!” he shouted, his body tensed and trembling, waves of joy and madness vibrating through every muscle. “The glory and the joy of the blessed sap and the exalted one! The light! The light!”

“No one wants to go to Germany most of the time, Alessandro,” Rafi assured him, “especially Italians. You must know that. And in the winter even more people don’t want to go to Germany. Add to that the fact that Germany is at war.”

Whenever Alessandro set out on horseback his senses sharpened exhaustingly, but a train journey threw him into a Tibetan trance.

Bindo Altoviti

Scales, however (and everyone knew that a scale comprised three men), were moderate and soothing, nearly invisible to sentries and observers, part of the landscape, and not so big that their apparent movement would appear unusual.

I don’t care about our claims on the Alto Adige, so I’m fighting for nothing, but so is everyone and that’s not the point. A nightmare has no justification, but you try your best to last through it, even if that means playing by the rules.

métier.

The mules bray continually because of the wild boar moving in the brush. In the late evening and early morning hours the boar crash through the vegetation.

“Have you ever heard of the blessed sap that flows from the cloak of the exalted one, on the eucalyptus throne, in the deep shadow of the whitened airless valley of the moon?”

The soldiers in the gondola cars, under the same stars, racing through the same fields, breathing the same scented air, were included in the pact. They too were promised redemption, love, and a ride out.

In one respect it hardly mattered, for the life of a soldier is an introduction to death, and when death comes or is about to come, the soldier is at least partially satisfied.

He was overwhelmed by sensations so keen and clear that he was able to view with equanimity even the prospect of his own death, for the intense satisfaction he now found in nearly all things seemed to be the compression of many years.

As my powers well through my fingers, I touch the soft open eye of the monster that is eating the century. Cumbrinal the Oxitan. Oxitan the Loxitan. Loxitan the Oxitan. I told you once that I’d ride upon his back Now I’m his master, the master of worlds. You drove me to it; the so-called ‘typewriter’ drove me to it.

“When your parents die, Alessandro, you feel that you have betrayed them.” “Why?” Luciana asked. “Because you come to love your children more.

“Then, in that case,” Alessandro answered, “all you need do is secure yourself a toilet and you will have solved the mysteries of the universe. It would be easy enough to provide every man with a toilet at his death, or a porcelain amulet, and then the world would be perfect.

“The way you winked,” Ludovico said accusingly, “the way you winked at me was just like a religious fanatic.” “Sorry,” Alessandro said. “I’ll try to wink like a Marxist.”

“It was easy to be clever, but hard to look into the face of God, who is found not so much by cleverness as by stillness.” “Is that why so many foolish people believe in God?” “If an idiot sees the sun does it mean that the sun doesn’t exist?”

“What do you want from a sardine?” “Precision. A sardine is a precise kind of fish. Look how many get in one can. They don’t fuck around, because they don’t have heads. We should be like that.”

“No. I resent you. I resent that you can see me without looking at me. I resent that you may have fallen in love with me without having seen me. I resent that you lie here, wounded, and your power darts about the room.”

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.

Alpini

“You think Giolitti and the Kaiser made the war? Franz-Josef?” “No?” “A dwarf runs everything, from the first shot to the last, the dwarf Orfeo Quatta. If only I had known.

anoraks

aerie

The lake had some fish, and the farms along its length were rich. Still, they had very little to eat, because, after several thousand years of rapacious tax collectors and alien armies, the local peasants were expert at hiding food.

A field marshal has his own staff! In an industrial state or a conscript army, if you get control of the paperwork you can do anything. War begins with a declaration on paper, and ends with a paper treaty.

“Because the object of war is peace, and I have merely thrown out the middle. If everyone did the same, no one would be crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches.”