A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

Alessandro grieved. His punishment was that nothing in the world could touch him. His punishment was that God had put him into battle and preserved him from its dangers.

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.”

the natural world is infinitely more reliable than the world of man,”

His feeling was much like the disproportionate satisfaction that old people can find, regardless of their losses, infirmities, and disappointments, in small things, like sitting under the trees and watching the birds flit from branch to branch, or drinking tea from a china cup with a gold rim.

For eight hours he had thought nothing save what the physics of plunging forward forced him to think. He had been like an eagle or a hart, with no power of reflection, no time for the future, no time for the past, but only an unbearably rich profusion of motion, color, scent, and sound. He loved it.

“Only after all opportunity is forsaken does devotion come alive.”

God is directly in charge of all things relating to life and death. That I’ve learned in the war.”

A million men die attacking and defending a piece of ground that was inconsequential before the war and will be inconsequential afterward.

CIVILIANS SELDOM understand that soldiers, once impressed into war, will forever take it for the ordinary state of the world, with all else illusion.

God has burdened those who believe in Him with the inability to prove His existence except in the language of His enemies, which is a language in which you cannot prove His existence.

“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.”

the war was still in him, and that it would be in him for a long time to come, for soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever. They never fit in.

“I know enough now about the patterns of the past to see the darkness of the future unraveling before the golden light of time. Behind the clouds is the dawn. How can I possibly know such things? The fact is, I do. So watch out.”

Had he not spent four years in war he could not have wandered on the boulevards for many hours in hunger and cold, for cold was something he had learned to endure, and hunger a state he could sustain for weeks.

The world is a quiet place, Alessandro thought, its images forever fixed. They do not vanish. They can be remembered, and they can be foreseen. Nothing and no one are lost.

In the sound of artillery, he heard the profession of his faith, and it gave him strength to take the hillsides with a purpose, as if, beyond the mountains, where he could not see, someone was waiting.

For the first time, I had looked upon victory from the place of defeat, and because the victory was not my own, and I was apart from it, I felt it all the more. It was God’s victory, the victory of the continuation of the world.

I don’t want money. I want much more. I want what rarely happens. I want what people are afraid even to imagine.” “Like what?” “Resurrection, redemption, love.”

You cannot by force of will undo events, he told himself. You cannot by assaulting the wage structure of a small hotel hope to resurrect the dead. And you do not make miracles by getting on the wrong train.

When you go to bed alone and arise alone, the sound of even a teaspoon in a china cup, very early in the morning, can be as graceless as the sound of a freight train slithering diagonally through a railyard, deliberately slow, scraping every switch.

Though Alessandro was well versed in political theory and could go quickly to the heart of nearly any intellectual question, he told those who tried to talk to him about theory or revolution that he wasn’t qualified to discuss it, that he preferred to cut and burn branches. He preferred to see a little cupped flower that had just burst through the ground on a short stem, he told them, than to talk about remaking the world. “I am a simple man,” he would say.

Either you apprehend God, or you do not.” “Do you?” “Yes, very strongly, but, at times, not. The older I get, and the more I see how life is arranged and with what certainty and predictability we move from stage to stage, the more I believe in God, the more I feel His presence, the more I am stunned by the power of His works. And yet, the older I become and the more I see of suffering and death, the less approachable is God, and the more it appears that He does not exist. Being very clever, He has beaten life into a great question that breaks the living and is answered only in death. I am so much less sure than when I was young. Sometimes I believe, and sometimes not.”

nearly everything they said seemed to be in contradiction to the truth of what I’d seen. “And yet if you ask me what that was, I can’t tell you. I can tell you only that it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for a spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace. I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God’s way of comforting His broken children.

“THE HEART of it,” the old man said, “is my memory of this boy, his mother, the men who were killed in the war, and my own parents. That is the problem I cannot resolve, the question I cannot answer, the hope I cannot relinquish, and the risk I must take. I have not forgotten them.

“Someday, Nicolò, when you get the chance, go to Venice to look at La Tempesta.

The two singers knew that many of us would soon be killed, and their singing came from the heart. I still hear it. I can summon it. I still hear the rain on the roof. Oh, at times you could hardly hear the rain, but it was there.”

Watching the eagle destroy the pack of birds, I hardly breathed. To one who lived with violence and death, it was especially poignant to see them assailed, but I had the sense that the meaning of it did not stop there, that of this battle something would come other than suffering. I still suspect it, I still sense it, I still want it, and still I have not seen it. But, think, if darkness did not exist, how would you know light? You wouldn’t.”

Alessandro had done something marvelous: he had kept his love alive despite everything that had happened,

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