IV. THE 19TH RIVER GUARD

SEPTEMBER, 1916... A dozen soldiers stood just inside the entrance to the tunnel, or squatted, leaning slightly forward, using their rifles for support. They loitered there to get out of the sun and to catch the continuous cool breeze that came from within. A lieutenant of infantry emerged from the grove of pale trees that protected the mouth of the shaft, walking briskly, with his left hand resting on his pistol belt and his right grasping a short stick. Following him was a stocky young naval cadet who struggled under the weight of a duffel bag, his rifle knocking against his side.

The men in the tunnel began to rise, but sank back down when the lieutenant motioned with his hand that they should ignore him. Nonetheless, the ones who were smoking removed the cigarettes from their lips and held them at a polite angle in front of their stomachs until the officer had passed.

"Is this a naval installation?" the cadet asked as they stepped into the tunnel, a hundred kilometers from the sea. "It has to be a mistake."

"Put your duffel and the rest here," the lieutenant said, having taken up position next to a wooden cart on tracks that ran through the tunnel.

The cadet had red hair and a chipped tooth in the front of his mouth. He gladly threw down his things. He followed the lieutenant into the shaft, pulling the cart after them. "I was on the sea," he said, as if to protest.

"If a supply train comes through in either direction we'll have to lift this off the tracks. We each take an end and move the cart to the other side. The supply trains move fast, but you can hear them from far away."

They had been walking for about ten minutes, passing beneath a seemingly endless chain of dim bulbs and wood beams, when the lieutenant answered the naval cadet's question. He didn't get right to the point, as if he didn't care, or could no longer concentrate. "Don't worry," he said. "It isn't really dangerous here anymore. At sea, you wouldn't be much safer."

"Safer? I was on the Euridice."

"The cruiser?"

"Yes, sir, the cruiser. I came aboard in the evening, the next morning at four we left Brindisi, at two in the afternoon we hit a mine, and at two-ten we began to sink. Almost everyone would have escaped, but a submarine was following us. It surfaced and motored around to take advantage of our list. On the starboard side, our guns wouldn't depress low enough to hit it. Our shells passed over the conning tower, and as we rolled more and more they got higher and higher.

"I saw their captain. He put three shots in our side point-blank. The first two shots made the ship shudder. The third hit the magazine and we blew apart in a dozen pieces. I had been in the signals room and I was blown through the door, over the sea. In mid air the wall passed by me and I went through the door again as it caught up with me and moved ahead. When I hit the water, I was thrown against the maps. They crumpled up and I slid into the sea. I smashed my face against something and swallowed brine, but I came to the surface and swam around until I grabbed a half-submerged chair."

"A chair?"

"I think it may have been the captain's chair, but I don't know. It wasn't the signals chair, it was too heavy. I sat in it and bled for an hour until I was picked up by one of our destroyers. I kept my head above water until the chair rolled over, and then I'd get up on it again and try to keep my balance. The wound was on my face, as you can see. I was lucky. If it had been lower down I would have bled into the sea until I died, the way a lot of us did.

"When the submarine passed through the debris, I thought the crew looked remorseful—because the wounded were giving up, letting go, and sinking—but when they passed me they laughed. The bastards."

"How many men were lost?"

"We had twelve hundred and forty-two when we went out. The destroyer pulled a hundred and fifty-seven from the water."

The lieutenant shook his head.

"I got a medal. I was on the ship for less than a day, and I never even saw the code book. I got a medal for keeping my balance in a floating chair."

"Every day," the lieutenant said, "shells land somewhere along this line with good effect, and soldiers sail through the air. They don't end up in floating chairs."

Now and then they passed groups of men on their way out. Few wounded were among them, and those who were wounded were walking.

"It's quiet now," the lieutenant told the naval cadet. "Very little has happened since the middle of August, which probably means that in the fall we're really going to get it."

"There are cycles?"

"Like the weather."

"We've been in this tunnel for a half an hour."

"It's four kilometers long. We'll emerge on the riverbank. It's the only way to go to and from the trenches, safe from artillery. We're descending not because we're going deeper into the earth but because the terrain slopes toward the river: we're always eight meters from the surface, unless we pass under a hill. The earth is soft here, no rock. The miners did this in less than a month."

"Sir, I'm in the navy," the naval cadet said, stopping as if to go no farther.

"So am I."

"You are?" The cadet was astonished. In his well broken-in green uniform and infantry belts the lieutenant was the paradigm of a seasoned soldier.

"Yes. Do you think you're going to wear that stupid uniform when you get up ahead? You'll exchange it for an army set within a day. It's too easy to be shot in blue. You stand out too clearly."

"They have commissaries in the trenches?"

"No, you pull it off a man who has been killed. He gets to be buried in your naval uniform, you wash his and sew up the holes, and you're both happy."

"I see. We're both happy. Why is the navy in the trenches, anyway?" the cadet asked. Despite his experience on the Euridice, he thought the sea might be safer, and he considered going back to it.

"We're the River Guard," the lieutenant answered. He stopped to take out a cigarette. The tunnel seemed infinite, and the cadet wondered if he were not dreaming or dead. "The river's water, isn't it? At the beginning of the war they didn't know things were going to go this way up here—so badly, so slow—and they apportioned too much to the navy."

"Not when I went in."

"You went in late. Before that, it was different. All kinds of clever asses joined the navy to keep out of the trenches, and ended up here."

"Yes, but what is it that we do here?"

"The North is always in danger of an Austrian wheeling movement, but, here, because we're near the mountains, we have few attempts at maneuver. The real infantry stays to the south, and we hold the water line. Someone thought it would assuage the pride of the navy, if we had to fight on land, to call us river guards."

They started walking again. "The river runs like this," the lieu tenant said, motioning with a stick, "from the mountains. Ten kilometers to the north, on steep limestone cliffs, the Alpini take over. Nothing big can come through in a place as vertical as that.

"We're deployed on the western bank of the Isonzo, from the cliffs to a point about ten kilometers south of where we are now. The river does most of our work for us, but you have to watch it closely.

"They're not Jesus Christs, you see. They can't walk on water, so they can't make a massed attack, because we can deal with boats, swimmers, and bridges. When they try that kind of stuff they get killed: volunteers—Czechs? Hungarians? How the hell do I know. I think they aren't told. They get in the boats, or they swim. Even at night, most of them die before they get to this side.

"The only ones who make it into our trenches are the ones who swim on moonless nights, like Indians, and suddenly they jump down from nowhere and kill you with a bayonet."

"That's happened?"

"It happens every week. It's for morale. It's supposed to make them feel good and us feel bad. I know it makes us feel bad, but I really can't see how it makes them feel good. To begin with, they seldom get back to their lines. I told you. Volunteers. Idiots. Suicides. The same with us."

"Us?"

"We're supposed to reply in kind."

"Am I going to have to do it?" the cadet asked, his voice cracking.

"How many times do I have to tell you? It's all volunteers—the strange ones, the ones who think they're Indians, the ones who decide it's time to die."

A white pinhole of light appeared ahead. As they moved toward it, they could hear the muted sound of machine-gun fire.

"It's quiet," the officer said, "but we've got a problem."

"What's that?"

"No rain. The river's drying up. Another two weeks and you'll be able to run across."

"Oh God."

"Well, yes, they've been moving up lots of men. In the last month, their cooking fires doubled. I don't know what they eat, but it smells like shit."

"We do the same, don't we?"

"Eat badly?"

"No. Move up reinforcements."

"We've been screaming for reinforcements, and they finally sent them."

"How many men?"

"So far, only you."

They had reached the exit, where a group of soldiers stood, as at the entrance, to escape the heat.

"You're kind of short," the lieutenant went on, "but you'll take care of us, I know."

The cadet had never heard machine-gun fire, and had never been in a trench.

"Okay," the lieutenant said, "I'm taking you out to the Nineteenth." Now he was tense. He bent forward. He had his pistol in his hand. "Keep your head down." They began to walk through a maze of trenches that were as hot as hell and filled with light that was far too bright.

Without a cart for his baggage the cadet began to breathe heavily and sweat. The footing was often difficult. Though they had been dry for months, the trenches had been built with the rain in mind. Uneven and rashly constructed plank walks lined their floors, and one had to jump gaps, step over upright pieces, and avoid feet that protruded from places of burial in the trench walls where the sand had fallen away and either no one could put it back or no one cared.

In places where the sides of the trench wanted to collapse and were reinforced with timbers, the cadet had to vault the timbers or bend under them. He could not round a bend, he discovered, without banging either the duffel, his rifle, his elbow, or his head into things that projected from the walls. In some stretches the lieutenant motioned for him to crouch down low, or to run very fast, or even to do both. Sweat stung his eyes and he was so exhausted that he felt as if he were coming apart. Even the lieutenant, who carried nothing but his pistol and short stick, was breathing hard, and had dark wet patches on his uniform.

"Where are our soldiers?" the cadet asked. "We've gone several kilometers in the open and I haven't seen anyone except the few who passed us going the other way."

"These are the communications trenches," the lieutenant said, without stopping. "When we get to the lines at the top of the T, it'll be crowded. Enjoy the space while you can."

They continued on until they reached the crossing of the T, where a wider trench ran for several score meters on both sides before a gradual bend cut off the view. Fifty men, more or less, were sitting against the trench wall, standing on the fire-step and peering out slits at the top, or looking through telescopic periscopes to see what lay above and beyond.

The trench had no shadows, the sun was blinding, and the cadet asked for permission to drink.

"When we get to the Nineteenth."

"How far?"

"Not as far as we've come. You want to see something?"

The cadet didn't answer, but he was grateful for a chance to rest.

"You're in the line," the lieutenant said, "so let me acquaint you with the facts. Give me your helmet and your rifle."

The cadet opened his kit bag and passed the iron helmet to the officer, and then his rifle.

"All right," the lieutenant said as he put the helmet on top of the sheathed bayonet, "watch this."

He raised the helmet above ground level and took it down, all in a second. As it descended, shots rang out and earth was scattered into the trench. "They were slewing their guns that time. They didn't even come close. Watch now."

He pushed up the helmet and wiggled it. Following dozens of machine-gun and rifle bursts, the sky darkened momentarily as sand and earth were kicked over the top of the trench. When the helmet came down, it had two graze marks on it.

"The Austrians are better at that than we are," the lieutenant said. "They have more discipline, and they care. You must keep your head down at all times, except at night. You'll see the river at night. It's beautiful, especially when the moon is reflected off the surface. Even during a full moon, they can't see you. Some lunatics in the Nineteenth swim at night. They claim it's safe if you stay close to our side. They can claim anything they want."

"They must be crazy," the cadet asserted.

"Yes," the lieutenant said, his pistol now holstered, his shoulders bent forward as he set out again toward the Nineteenth. "Can you imagine being up to your neck in ice-cold water, naked, with ten thousand guns on the opposite shore?"

"I don't swim without a chair," the cadet said, showing the chipped tooth as he smiled at his own witticism.

"Don't stand so straight, you idiot. You're on a platform, you'll get your head shot off. And put the helmet on."

They moved through the forward trench, passing hundreds of men, dozens of machine-gun emplacements, and the slightly wider circular excavations, reached through a thin zigzagging sub-trench, where the trench mortars and their shells were kept. The hope was that if these were hit by counter-battery fire the force of the explosion would be absorbed in the baffles of the sub-trench, but when an enemy shell found its target and the magazines had been newly stocked, the explosion was so great that the baffles didn't seem to matter and the concussion would slay men up and down the trench for twenty-five meters and knock to the ground soldiers who were standing much farther away.

Rotting camouflage nets were draped along the earthen walls. "Why don't you use that stuff to make some shade?" the cadet asked.

"We did, once," the lieutenant answered, "but it showed them where to aim."

"Then why not cover everything?"

"Not enough netting, and when you jump up to fire you get tangled in it."

After the lieutenant stopped several times to talk to soldiers in their redoubts, they came to a branch in the system, extending northeast at a thirty-degree angle from the main trench.

The lieutenant said, "This leads out to your post, which projects ahead of the lines about a hundred meters onto a bluff above the river. We call it the Bell Tower, because of the view. You see these?" he asked, kicking two insulated wires fastened to one side of the trench. "They're telephone wires. One goes to battalion headquarters, which is just on the other side of the T where we came in, and the other goes to divisional headquarters and the brigade office. So when you talk on that telephone you never know if Cadorna himself will be listening, and you have to be correct."

"I'm going to be talking to Cadorna?"

"Fuck Cadorna. You're going to be calling in reports, when you get the hang of it, and I've given you proper warning. Another thing you should know is that nobody stays in the communications trench between here and the Bell Tower." Firing erupted down the line—machine guns, rifles, some small mortars.

"What's that?" the cadet asked nervously.

"What's what?" he was asked in return.

"That gunfire."

"I don't know," he said. "It's nothing. No one stays in this trench—it's too exposed and shallow, and the angle's no good. As you can see, it won't protect against incoming shells. You have to know the password at both ends, or you'll get shot. In the daytime they usually look to see who it is before they open fire, but don't count on it. At night they shoot right away. You have to say the password loudly enough so that it can be heard, but not so loudly that it will carry across the water."

"What is it?"

"It used to be oil can, but now it's Vittorio Emanuele, Re d'ltalia, but that's too much, so we say, you know, Verdi."

"What if I forget?"

"You won't."

"What if I do? Words can be knocked out of your head."

"Tell them who you are, speak Italian as fast as you can, and pray."

They started up the communications trench that led to the Bell Tower. The lieutenant had cocked his pistol as if he expected the enemy to confront him somewhere ahead.

A few minutes later they arrived at the entrance of the Bell Tower and found themselves staring into the barrel of a machine gun.

"Password!" they heard before they could see who was saying it.

"Verdi!" they said, perhaps more clearly than any words they had ever spoken, and then they went inside.

You could hear the wind in the Bell Tower as if it had been, in fact, a bell tower—not in the city but, rather, on the seacoast, because the steady breezes that came down from the mountains whistled through the beams, the corrugated metal, and the firing slits. They whistled past the mouths of the guns, in turbulent eddies that turned the gun barrels into otherworldly flutes. Despite the wind, the Bell Tower was hot, because the cool air that came through the ports was not enough to relieve the pressure of the sun on the open areas or to refresh the hidden bunkers.

"I brought a new man," the lieutenant said to some soldiers at the entrance. Then he turned around and left without saying anything or looking at the cadet, who feared that the lieutenant had disliked him. The lieutenant had not even decocked his, pistol, and he sped through the trench like a strange kind of rabbit that was afraid to lift its head. Then he rounded the corner and disappeared.

"He's done his work for the day," one of the soldiers said. "Now he'll eat some rostissana Piacenza, and sleep until nightfall."

"So what? We'll go swimming," another soldier said. "Who is this?" he asked about the cadet.

The cadet felt short and overwhelmed, because he was short and overwhelmed, but he wanted to hold his own with soldiers who seemed inured to war, so he said, "I was on the Euridice." Because they seldom saw newspapers they had never heard of the Euridice, and from then on they called him by that name, even though it was a woman's name, even after he died.

 

THE BELL Tower was a round concrete fortification about the size of the arena in a provincial bull ring. Around an open cortile eight meters in diameter were nine bunkers, each of the same size. The cortile was used mainly for taking the sun and air. Shells had fallen directly in the center and would have killed everyone had it not been for a heavy wall of sandbags in a concentric ring between the cortile and the bunkers. The Austrians seemed to have discovered this somehow, and had stopped aiming for direct hits.

The nine bunkers might have been of different sizes had the fortification been designed by those who were to use it. Twenty men lived in the Bell Tower, and with Euridice, twenty-one. The three rooms for sleeping were jammed with cots. Binoculars, coats, weapons, and haversacks hung from rifle-shell casings pegged into planks and beams. A lantern was on a table in the middle. Against the outside walls and under the firing ports were chairs, rifles, and boxes of ammunition. Seven men slept in each room. At least seven men were always on duty, peering through firing ports in the seven bunkers facing the Austrian line. At times fourteen men, at times all twenty-one, fired, loaded, and shifted from one side of the emplacement to another, desperately hauling their three machine guns. In the assault that they feared would come, their number was to be doubled, so that two soldiers would man each firing port, one to fire and one to load, or simply to take the place of the other if he were tired or if he fell. The maps and telephones were in one of the rooms, the kitchen in another, stored ammunition and food in three others. The Bell Tower had no hospital because it had no doctor: stretchers, medical instruments, and material for treating wounds were stockpiled in the map room. Of all the rooms, however, the most remarkable was the latrine.

This surely was the end of the world, these two rows of filthy planks suspended above overbrimming cesspools. One would almost rather die than either breathe, hear, or see in this place. No animal defecating in the open field, whether a horse whose tail lifted deftly on the run, or a solemn and indifferent cow, had less dignity than the two lines of grimacing, twisting, groaning creatures with shaved heads and bad teeth, who struggled not to fall into the horrible soup they strained to augment. Alessandro learned to survive there, but slowly. He took wet mortar flannels with him to clean the wooden bar upon which he had to balance on his thighs, feet precariously off the ground, leaning forward so as not to topple backward into the trench—a fate visited upon two Neapolitans who had been playing with one another's parts. He wrapped his head in a blanket so as not to see, hear, smell, or be seen. Soon, everyone followed suit. When Alessandro was suffering upon the bar, desperately keeping in balance, head turbaned-up in a mass of filthy wool, he dreamed of walking through the Villa Borghese on a cool clear day in the fall, in his finest clothes, with the leaves and the fresh air blowing by him like an express train. Some of the other soldiers sang, while others screamed in pain, muffled in the wool helmets that Alessandro had invented. Being blind in this place was desirable, but risky, for if one were involved in a vendetta one could easily and anonymously be flipped backward, like the Neapolitans.

Euridice put down his duffel on the cot next to Alessandro's. "What's the book?" Euridice asked, assuming that since he himself was a graduate of the liceo and had been a naval cadet, he was the only one on the river who really knew how to read. He looked closely. "It's Greek," he said, drawing back in wonder. Alessandro, after a year and a half on the line, was gaunt, muscular, and sunburned. To Euridice, he looked experienced, and besides that, he was six or seven years older. "Can you read Greek?"

Alessandro nodded.

"That's wonderful, really stupendous!" Euridice said, pointing to the open page. "In the liceo I learned only Latin and German, not Greek."

"I know," Alessandro said, and went back to his book.

"How do you know?" Euridice asked.

Alessandro looked up. "Because this is Arabic."

Euridice opened his duffel and started to unpack. "No one's fat," he said, having noticed that all the soldiers were lean.

"Except you," someone said, cruelly.

"No one's fat," Alessandro repeated without taking his eyes from the book.

"Why?"

Alessandro turned his head. "We're nervous."

"I look forward to losing weight. In the navy, the food was too delicious."

"Don't get bullet holes. You wouldn't be waterproof."

"Waterproof?"

"I keep my ammunition under your bed," Alessandro said, still not looking up. "When it rains it leaks there."

A cat slinked into the room, gliding along on its belly as flat as it could get. It took a look around, jumped onto Alessandro's cot, and began to lick itself.

"What's that?" Euridice asked, looking at the cat.

"That's a cat."

"Yes I know, but what's it wearing?" The cat was encased in leather and metal, in a harness that looked like a cross between a medical appliance and a military apparatus.

"She was hit by a shell fragment," Alessandro said. "It tore a big patch off her back. It took six months to heal, and without the harness she opens it with her teeth." At this, as if on command, the cat turned to try to lick her back. She couldn't get to it, and, instead, she licked the air.

"What's her name?"

"Serafina."

"What does she eat?"

"Macaroni and rats."

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."

 

TWO NIGHTS later, when the moon was hardly visible behind a thick blanket of hot gray cloud, they went swimming. The soldiers of the Bell Tower believed that although it was obviously dangerous to swim in the branch of the Isonzo that ran below them, it was perfectly all right, even rational, if the swimming party numbered no more and no less than three men.

No one had ever been killed on such an excursion, or even detected. The first time they crawled down the slope and through the mine fields they had been three, and in every subsequent three-man expedition nothing had gone awry. More than three men, it was said, would be too large a block. Their movement, whether simultaneous or serial, would attract the attention of that part of the eye that is irritated by sequences. Two men, or even just one, would not move 'scale-like' enough across the landscape. A tiny Ligurian had postulated that movement across nocturnal terrain occurred in three categories: points, scales, and plates. Plates, in being more than three men, were large enough to disturb the eye. Points, in being less than three men, were small enough to disturb the eye. 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. Everyone believed this, even Alessandro, who didn't really believe it but refused to disbelieve it. The Ligurian, whom they called Microscopico, asserted that he had proof. He himself was a point, and when once he had had to crawl to the brink of the Austrian lines to retrieve a wounded comrade (Microscopico had been chosen on the assumption that his small size would allow him to go unnoticed) the night had failed to protect him, and a thousand shots had been fired in his direction. He had escaped only because a feral pig that had been feeding on the dead had been startled by the firing and had run through no-man's-land, usurping the Austrian aim while he himself dragged the dead body of his friend through the muddy depressions. The pig had been felled, because the pig, too, was a point, which all went to show that scales were the only way to move about between armies.

A soldier called the Guitarist, an affable Florentine who, with his classical songs, made the long nights tolerable, had refused to believe the scale theory. They ostracized him. When he entered the latrine, they would exit. When he spoke, they would pay him no heed. He tried to retaliate by putting his guitar up on the wall, but the absence of music hurt him more than it did anyone else, and in a week their tyranny had beaten him down and, allowing that the theory of scales was correct, he had resumed his playing.

Alessandro told him that, of course, the theory was nonsense, but that it held things together. Everything would be all right as long as everyone else believed it. Within a day or two, everyone, even Microscopico, had sought out the Guitarist and said precisely the same thing.

It was so hot that in the daytime the infantrymen doffed their shirts and rolled their pants up above the knee. Summers fat and successful flies could hardly move: when they alighted on something they wanted it to be forever, and often died in the cause. The cat lay stretched on her back and didn't mind if she were wetted down with cold water. Even the machine guns seemed to fire much more slowly, though that was just an illusion.

After midnight, Alessandro, Euridice, and a Roman harness-maker named Guariglia set out for the river. They carried no weapons and wore only light khaki shorts. In that state of undress it was likely that if an enemy patrol discovered them they would be captured rather than killed, and as everyone knew, captivity was safe. Guariglia was tall, balding, dark, and heavily bearded. His eyebrows merged into a single moss-covered bough.

The three soldiers slid down the once-grassy slope that led from the Bell Tower to the river, freezing motionless or ducking behind boulders whenever the clouds brightened with the moon. A wide strip that ran from the fortification to the riverbank was open to Italian fire and had not been mined. They had exited by a small steel door at the base of the tower and rolled back three fronts of wire just enough to squeeze through: the wire at the riverbank had been washed away long before.

The ground was soft, with neither thorns nor nettles. Even pressing up against a boulder at the cue of the moon and clouds was a pleasant sensation, for the rock was cool, and the blue-green lichen on the north side smelled sweet when it was crushed. Their timing was keyed to the moon, the boulders, and gravity, and they descended as silently as if they were part of the hill itself.

The heavily armed enemy was dug in on the opposite bank, and the three naked soldiers in cloud-muffled moonlight were in range of five hundred rifles and half a dozen machine guns. Waiting for them as well were mortars, star shells, flame throwers, and grenades. Back from the line, the heavy guns were silent but ready, and would magnetize to whatever pre-set spot their observers directed.

This arsenal, however, was not the real danger, which was, rather, a keyed-up enemy infiltration party armed to kill in silence with tomahawks, bayonets, and maces. If the swimmers' nakedness did not disarm such an enemy, they would simply be lost.

Just as they reached the river's edge the Austrians sent up a flare a few hundred meters to the north. "Don't move," Alessandro whispered, and they froze and bent among the whitened rocks in the dry part of the riverbed so that even the mothers of the rocks would not have been able to tell them apart.

"Why do we have to whisper?" Euridice whispered. "The water is loud enough to drown out everything."

"For us," Alessandro answered. "We can't hear anything because we're next to it, but if you're far away, you can hear. One of their patrols made that very mistake, and we fired a bunch of flares in a flat trajectory onto the riverbed. The phosphorus exploded into daylight. Even though it was only a short burn, there were no shadows, and we hit every one of them."

The cool white light of the flare got brighter and closer as the wind carried its gay parachute south and the mass of the earth called it in. "Are they still here?" Euridice asked.

"Who?" Alessandro asked in return.

"The Austrian patrol."

"They're dead," Guariglia answered.

"But are they still here?"

"No," Alessandro whispered. "It was a while ago. The water rose and carried them away."

Euridice asked how many there were.

"Six that we got," Guariglia answered, "a plate." He spoke with maddening assurance. Then he said, "Shut up until the flare passes," and they waited among the rocks until it did.

 

EXCEPT PERHAPS in the sandy deltas that usher them into the Adriatic, the Isonzo and its spurs are seldom warm, especially in the north, where the water still carries a feeling for its origins in mountain snows, but September holds the heat of summer as surely as March preserves the ice on lakes. The great heat, a nearby shallow run, the time in the sun, and the pools and shoals where it had been trapped made the water warm.

In quiet pools and still water where they couldn't afford to break the surface, they swam silently and smoothly, as if in oil, in unexpectedly feminine breast strokes, or underwater in complete darkness. In what was left of the rapids, where the boulders fractured the water into surf, they swam vigorously, leaping, kicking, doing all they could just to stay in the same place and not be swept downriver.

After a while they came to a white log that had lodged in the rocks and become a spill over which the river poured in a perfect silver roll. They hung on to the smooth wood and placed their faces against the steady crest of the wave. It pushed them back until their muscles ached; the water thundered over them and gave them a scouring, and they could hardly breathe, but they stayed, staring at the moon and stars faintly wavering in the cool scroll that swept past them. Alessandro looked up. Apart from a few shards of cloud, the sky was open and still. The stars blazed.

"It cleared," he said to Euridice and Guariglia. "Look. It's clear."

"What are we going to do?" Guariglia asked.

"Maybe it'll cloud over again," Alessandro said, but the sky tended to the kind of clarity that rules the south of Italy in summer and for which the summer nights there are justly famous.

Guariglia moved his head from side to side. "No."

"I must have been insane to come down here," Euridice said.

"Why do you say that?"

"They'll see us," Euridice shouted angrily. "They'll kill us."

"So?" Guariglia asked. "Is death beneath you or something?"

"Oh Christ!" Euridice said, almost letting go of the log.

"Wait a minute," said Alessandro. "So what if there's a full moon? We're going to move in a scale. There are three of us. What's the problem?"

"Oh Christ!" Euridice said again, and kept on repeating it into the roll of silver water.

"You shut up, you fucking little tick," Guariglia told him.

"Wait," Alessandro whispered. "You're getting excited for nothing. They haven't seen us. Let's just go back. Until they start to shoot, there isn't any point in worrying."

"Tell me you're not nervous," Euridice commanded.

"He didn't say he wasn't nervous, did he," Guariglia asked. "He said he wasn't worried. That's different. We're always nervous, but we don't worry...."

"That's right," Alessandro added.

"Until they start shooting. And don't be so scared of getting killed, you little asshole, or you'll get us all killed."

"Is that how it works?" Euridice asked, nasty and mocking.

"Yes!" Guariglia said. "You haven't been here for ten minutes, you goddamned fucking little chipped-tooth tick. You don't know a thing. I've been on the line a year." Guariglia's face tightened. "That's how it works."

"Nobody knows how it works," Alessandro said. "Come on."

They moved left in a graceful line against the current, swimming powerfully and with purpose. In the rapids they burst forth like athletes, making good progress against the white water as it churned around them, slapping it down with their strokes, moving always intently, surprised at their own strength. At a large stretch of black water that merely drifted and swirled, no one said anything, but they all knew they could not disturb it. With their arms and legs tight from the previous exertion, they submerged and swam underwater, surfacing with great control to take a deep breath, slowly sinking down, and starting off again. Alessandro led them silently through the darkness. They could follow him because in their utter weightlessness they could feel the turbulence of his strokes, and, sometimes, when they were near the surface, they could see the moonlight flash against his feet. Then they crawled up a shallow watercourse to the place in the dry river where they had come in.

"Why don't we just run?" Guariglia asked. "By the time they know what's happening we'll be halfway up the hill, and by the time they fire a star shell we'll be home."

"They don't have to fire a star shell. That's the point. Anyway, if we run they'll definitely see us. Maybe we Can run the last half of the hill, but now let's go quietly."

"Are we going to crawl?" Euridice wanted to know.

"What for?" Alessandro asked. "They're looking down on us. It wouldn't make any difference. Move away from the rocks, all crouched down, as if you're a rock. Stay still most of the time. You know, pretend you're an Indian."

As soon as Alessandro said "Indian," they heard the launch of a mortar shell.

"Go!" Alessandro screamed, contradicting everything he had just said. They ran forward over the rocks, smashing their feet, listening to the whistle of the shell as it climbed. "Keep on until just after it bursts!" he yelled. "It blinds them at first."

Euridice did what he was told. The star shell burst into eerie daylight.

"Now!" Alessandro shouted. He and Guariglia found places behind boulders at the beginning of the slope. Euridice followed, but a little late. They heard gunfire to the north and south—unintelligible bursts that signified neither pattern nor event.

"They see us," Euridice exclaimed.

"No they don't."

Another mortar shell was launched, and another, and another, right toward them.

"They see us," Alessandro said.

"Why don't we just stay behind the rocks?" Euridice asked in a pathetic high voice. "We're protected."

"That's what you think, you goddamned little tick," Guariglia said so rapidly that it came out almost as one syllable. "If they drop an explosive round in front of us, that's it."

"Run," Alessandro said.

They started to sprint as the three mortar shells were still whistling above them. First one burst, then the next, and the next. The light was so blinding that for a moment they were slowed, but the four star shells burned so brilliantly that it was like daylight, and they could do nothing but regain their speed.

The soldiers in the Bell Tower refrained from firing, not wanting to alert or stimulate the Austrians into doing more than they were inclined to do, but the enemy had seen the figures on the exposed slope. Ten meters from the wire the hillside was raked by machine-gun fire. They had to stop. They hid behind rocks, but the rocks weren't big enough. Bullet fragments and boulder chips were flying everywhere.

Something hit Alessandro in the throat directly under his Adam's apple. He was bleeding, but he could still breathe. Euridice screamed.

"Don't scream, you're out of breath," Guariglia said, hardly able to get the words out.

Alessandro looked up and saw things flying over the Bell Tower, tumbling through the air, blocking out the stars. At first he didn't know what they were, but then he recognized them.

"Genius!" he shouted. "Genius! They're going to be blinded with phosphorus. Get ready...."

From the Bell Tower twenty phosphorus grenades had sailed over the parapet. They tumbled in the air and exploded, blinding anyone looking in their direction. The Austrian machine-gunners were silenced for ten or fifteen seconds, and when once again they could see, the swimmers had passed the wire and gone into the Bell Tower.

Emerging from the narrow passage that led to the cortile, they found that Alessandro had been cut deeply in the throat. He bled profusely over his chest. Guariglia had a bullet hole in his calf. He feared that the bullet was still in him, and frantically examined his leg. When he saw a second hole on the other side, the expression on his face was like that of a man who has just won money in a horse race.

Euridice was proud of himself. "I didn't die," he declared. "I didn't die, again."

"Now they know we swim," Alessandro said as one of the many men crowding around them pressed a bandage to his throat.

"Maybe not," said Microscopico. "Maybe they think we walk around at night half naked."

"I hope they do," Guariglia said, doubled up in pain. "I hope they do think that, those fucking tick-assed Austrians."

"No more swimming," the Guitarist commanded.

"It doesn't matter," Alessandro announced. "It's getting too cold to swim."

 

IN DIRECT sunlight, out of the wind, it was hot, but in the shade the infantrymen wore their tunics. Though a half dozen men were sitting shirtless in the cortile taking in the last of the summer sun, Alessandro, Euridice, and the Guitarist were in the map room, in wool sweaters. The shade was as cool as the dark purple in the distant mountains, which they could see as if through a block of clear crystal.

The map room faced north. Until a bend in the river, both banks were open to view for many more kilometers than the maximum range of Alessandro's captured Mauser 98, which was more accurate and better built than the Italian Martinis, with a bayonet that was shorter and more maneuverable. He had never used the bayonet, and hoped never to have to, but the order of the day was always to keep it fixed and sheathed, which made for a lot of trouble when moving around in the redoubt.

Though Alessandro would have preferred to have been in the sun, his duty was to observe the northern sector from six in the morning until several hours after dark. He sat on a cane chair near the center firing port, squinting outward. The bottom of the port was narrower than the top. Here his rifle rested, a round in the chamber, sights elevated for two hundred meters, the bayonet detached and leaning against the wall. A telescope on a tripod that straddled the rifle was set at eye level, its barrel, like that of the rifle, tilted down in the slope of the port. With twenty-power magnification and a spacious eighty-millimeter lens, this instrument from the naval stores gave Alessandro an unparalleled view of the mountains.

Far to the north was the pure white rim of the Tyrol, the heart of Austria. That even enemy country should be so pristine, beautiful, and high, frozen white through summers of heat and blood, seemed to Alessandro an unambiguous promise. Hardly a clear day passed when he did not go to the map room and sight this rim until he felt light and pure enough to float.

Euridice sat on the edge of a cot underneath the sector map. No one could peer through a telescope all day long. An alternate was necessary even if, as in the case of Euridice, he had not been on the line long enough to know exactly what he was seeing and became so entranced with the colorful terrain moving effortlessly in the sweep of the telescope that he forgot to concentrate on the enemy. It amazed Alessandro that the men of the Bell Tower were entrusted, without training, as spotters for a large portion of the Italian artillery in that section. An artilleryman arrived periodically to check coordinates, writing everything down in a book, explaining that his profession was now practiced mainly at night by men who didn't need to see for themselves but who took in numbers insatiably.

In the middle of the afternoon, the mountains were blinding across their white rim. The cook brought three mess tins of pasta in brodo. Although this time they had much brodo and very little pasta, at other times they had much pasta and very little brodo. The cat Serafina came in behind the cook, sat at attention, and looked earnestly at the three containers of food on the map table.

"Pasta in brodo," the cook said before he left, deeply offended that no one had turned to look at him, except the cat, for he was doing the best he could with what he was given.

Anxious, earnest, eager, proud, and pathetic all at the same time, the cat moved not a muscle, refrained from blinking, and sat as perfectly still as a diplomat transformed into an owl.

"Eat fast, Euridice," Alessandro said, scanning the northern Austrian trench line. "I'm hungry."

Euridice didn't have to be told to eat fast. Still plump, he took comfort in the little food he could get. As he and the Guitarist ate, occasionally feeding pieces of macaroni to the cat, Alessandro grew more and more intent.

"Put in a call," he said to the Guitarist. "I see a lot going on in the near trench at the border of three-sector." The Guitarist turned the crank on the telephone to raise the headquarters. "Brigade-sized unit pouring into first trench just south of three-sector," Alessandro reported. The Guitarist repeated it.

"Can you tell which units?" the Guitarist asked Alessandro for the officer on the other end of the line.

"Spiky helmets," Alessandro answered.

"Feathers?"

"I don't think so, but they're too far away to tell with certainty."

"Hold on...."

Alessandro watched occasional helmets bob up when a tall soldier or one who had a sprightly step rounded an elbow in the faraway trench, and he waited for the Italian comment. In about a minute and a half, he heard it. Thunder came from cannon behind the lines, and because it was a clear day with the light streaming down, Alessandro actually saw the shells as they descended. Huge blasts, tinny and bright, shook the earth on both sides of the trench.

Another two dozen shells came in, scattering the sandy soil. "Perfect aim," Alessandro reported, "but it didn't do anything."

The Guitarist relayed the message. "They say to continue observation and supply rifle fire when necessary."

Alessandro elevated the rear sight of his rifle, positioned himself, and fired a round at the corner of the trench where he had seen the helmets. As he ejected the first cartridge and moved the bolt to load and lock, his ears rang with the concussion of the last shot and he smelled burnt powder blown inward through the gun port. He placed five more shots in the same area and reloaded the rifle.

Hardly able to hear himself, trembling slightly from the concussions, he said, "Now they've got their rifle fire. I like to aerate the soil. It's like gardening."

"I don't understand," Euridice proclaimed as he ate. "Why don't the Austrians concentrate their artillery fire on this post and obliterate it?"

"That's what they'll do in the offensive," the Guitarist answered.

Euridice stopped eating. "Why?"

"How can you ask why, when you've just asked why not?"

"I also want to know why, that's why, and why is different from why not."

"In this case," the Guitarist said, "if you know why not, you also know why."

"How?" Euridice asked.

"Subtract the not," Alessandro added, still using the telescope, "and eat, will you?"

Euridice hurriedly finished his soup, depressing the cat. "You mean that in the offensive they'll level the Bell Tower?"

"They have to," the Guitarist said. "It's too good an observation point and firing position, even if it isn't supposed to hold in a full scale assault."

"What will we do?"

"When the bunkers are about to collapse, those of us who still can will run back to the line."

"And those who can't?"

"They'll stay."

"To die."

"Euridice, by the time the bunkers start to go, the communications trench will already have been filled in. We'll have to go back on the surface, over our own mines, in the open. Probably both sides will be firing at us. What's the difference?"

"Everyone is going to die," Euridice said, realizing it for the first time.

"That's right," Alessandro confirmed, turning from the gun port.

"Let me ask one question," Euridice continued.

"Soon you're going to have to pay us," the Guitarist said.

"When's the offensive?"

"When the river gets shallow enough."

"And when is that?"

"A week, two weeks. It depends on the rain."

"There is no rain."

"Right."

"But we're not sure they'd mount an offensive even if the river dried up completely," Euridice stated.

"Why wouldn't they?"

"Pressing business in other places."

"What other places?"

"Herzegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro..."

"Euridice," the Guitarist said, "this is the place where they have pressing business. In the war between Italy and Austria, the Austrian army is over there, and here—you, me, him—is the Italian army."

"I'm in the navy."

"So are we."

"Why don't they send us back to sea?"

"Why don't you ask them?"

Euridice was discontent until evening. Then the sunset made the mountains pink and gold, and, as the others had done long before, he resigned himself to the fact that he was going to die.

 

THOUGH THE men of the Bell Tower considered the regular army a sub-species, they held them in awe for making suicidal attacks, as on the Western and Russian fronts, in which they climbed out of their trenches and into a wall of machine-gun fire. On occasion, along a stretch of less than a kilometer, five thousand men might go over the top, and within a few minutes suffer a thousand instantly dead, a thousand wounded who would die slowly on the ground, a thousand grievously wounded, a thousand lightly wounded, and a thousand who were physically untouched but spiritually shattered for the rest of their lives, which, in some cases, was merely a matter of weeks.

Only certain portions of the line had to undergo carnage in the French style, but knowledge of it was all-pervasive. Everything the 19th River Guard knew came from quiet meetings in the communications trenches, conversations with sleepless, bitter infantrymen who had been transferred up from the fiercer fighting in the south. If some of the River Guard were on the edge, many of the regular infantry had gone over it long before. Especially disturbing to the naval contingent were reports from down below that Italian troops now were shot quite casually for disciplinary reasons, and that the Italian generals, like their French counterparts, were executing men in decimations for crimes they had not committed. Men with families were pulled from the ranks along with equally mystified adolescents and put to death for acts attributed to others whom they had never seen.

One very clear day, a major in the Medical Corps, a man with no military bearing whatsoever, arrived at the Bell Tower and spoke to the assembled troops, who thought it was going to be yet another useless lesson about venereal disease—they never had leave—but, instead, the major asked for volunteers.

Of course, no one dared, but Alessandro, who bet that the army would not execute volunteers, stepped forward almost without thinking. Guariglia followed, out of friendship and perhaps because he had had the same thoughts. "All I need is two," the doctor said, and off they went, not knowing where, as the other soldiers, who had had more time to project, made mosquito sounds to suggest that the two would be the subjects of a malaria experiment.

"Is there any danger of death?" Alessandro asked as the three men trotted through the communications trench.

"No, but there's cheese and tomatoes."

"Sir?"

"Lunch."

"It's a dietary experiment?"

"Who said anything about an experiment? Just follow me."

At the end of the tunnel they climbed into a truck that then drove toward the mountains. Two hours later, the twenty soldiers inside, all of whom had been anxious and silent, climbed out into a sunny mountain meadow covered with blue flowers. A cold breeze was blowing, but if you dropped close to the ground the temperature was perfect.

The doctor and the truck driver spread checkered table cloths and brought bread, cheese, bottles of wine, and chocolate from a cabinet on the side of the truck. When the food was laid out, the doctor told them to eat, but no one touched it for fear that it was poisoned.

So he took a little of everything from everywhere, and after they saw that he didn't die the soldiers began to put away vast amounts of it, their eyes shifting to and fro, wondering what was going to happen.

"They're going to shoot us and dissect our brains," said a Sicilian who wore a hair net.

"That isn't plausible," Alessandro stated.

"Why does it have to be plausible? What does plausible mean anyway? I suppose you think they just wanted us to go on a picnic."

"We'll find out what they want."

After lunch the doctor had them return their utensils and wine bottles. They shook out the table cloths, but then they laid them down again.

"You see this little blue flower," the doctor said, spinning a tiny flower between his right thumb and index finger. They nodded. They thought he was crazy. "For the next five hours, I want you to pick them, leaving the full stem, and pile them on the table cloths."

"They're going to shoot us," the Sicilian said.

"Shut up," Guariglia told him.

"Sir?" Alessandro asked. "May I ask why?"

"No. Just do as you're told."

For five hours, they picked flowers. Gradually, very gradually, the piles of petals and stems grew into fat humps, and the soldiers' anxiety vanished. The driver picked, too, while the doctor slept in the sun, a newspaper folded over his face, his head resting on a loaf of bread.

"Why?" they asked the driver.

"I don't know. We've done this every day since spring. We take volunteers all up and down the line."

"What happens to the flowers?"

"They're shipped in crates in boxcars, to Milano."

"The son of a bitch has a perfume factory!" the Sicilian exclaimed.

"I don't think so," Guariglia told him. "Smell them."

The Sicilian smelled the flowers in his hand, and recoiled. "These are stinky flowers!"

"Yeah," the driver said.

"Is it always the same flower?" he was asked.

"Always the same."

They spoke as they picked. The Sicilian, who worked in a dry goods store, told them his dream, which had consumed him so intensely that it had followed him from the store in Messina to a sunny meadow in the mountains where the air was fresh and the light clear. He spoke for two hours, ceaselessly repeating and enumerating the objects of his desire, as if that would reserve them for him in later life. His ambition was to own a villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian, a Bugatti automobile, a Caravaggio, a mahogany-and-teak yacht, and an apartment in Seville, Spain. The villa would be a thousand square meters, the Bugatti green, the Caravaggio a crucifixion scene, the yacht a ketch, and the apartment close to the cathedral. His further descriptions of every detail and statistic pertaining to those items were extremely irritating, because he intoned them like a parrot.

"So what?" Alessandro asked.

"If I could have these, if I could have them..."

"Yes?"

"They'll take all my life to get."

"And?"

"When I have them, I'll be happy."

"What if you had them now, and you went back to your unit and got killed," Alessandro speculated.

"I don't know, but I want them."

"You'll spend your whole life getting them, and it won't make any difference whatsoever."

"You're just jealous."

"I'm not jealous. You've turned to the material as comfort in the face of death, but the more you rely upon it the more you'll suffer."

"Oh go fuck yourself," the Sicilian said, tossing a handful of flowers onto one of the piles. "I'm not suffering. Are you? I'm fine. I'm perfectly fine. I know what I want. Life is simple. I don't think about death."

"Of course you don't."

"Why should I bother?"

"You'll see," Alessandro told him. "Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way."

"Someday," the Sicilian told him, "I'll lie in my marble bathtub, looking up through the skylight, a pizza within reach, a real Victrola playing Carmen, and I'll think of you." Pleased with himself, he laughed.

"In a way," Alessandro said, "I do envy you," and then he went back to picking flowers.

They were never told what exactly they had been doing, and they would never forget that they had done it.

 

THE BEGINNING of October was cloudy, the sky looked like slate, and the air was dry and cool. Summer was over and they would have to learn once again to live in darkness. A heavy rainfall was necessary to stop the offensive, but the days passed without rain.

The mood of the infantry changed. Small irritations that had been burned away by the heat and light of summer now came to the fore. The ceilings of the bunkers seemed to be much lower. Aching teeth tormented their owners and only got worse, for all the dentists in the army were in places a half-day-pass away. An appointment could be had with three months' advance warning, but no one wanted to tempt fate with the arrogance of assuming that he would be able to keep it.

The food became unbearable even though few soldiers ever had enough. Laundry took longer to dry, a shower meant trembling for two hours afterward, and except when occasional sunshine broke through the clouds (which drove-in the fact that no rain had fallen), only the lice were happy.

During this time the army on the other side of the Isonzo was quiet. They fired hardly a shot, but wagons arrived at night with men and materiel. Though the Italians harassed the nocturnal resupply and reinforcement with constant artillery fire, it neither stopped nor slackened.

Still, with each day that passed, hopes grew stronger that in being so meticulous about preparing the offensive the enemy was trading a chance to walk across the river for the delay that would accommodate one days murderously heavy rain.

"It doesn't matter," Guariglia said. "The day that it rains is the day they'll attack. They're waiting until then; the river will be at its lowest and they will have brought up the greatest number of men."

"The artillery barrage will start immediately," Microscopico added from his cot, making a diagram with his hands. "For six hours, constant shelling. Then many thousands of men will appear from the trenches all at once. They'll start off slowly, but in a few seconds they'll be up on their feet and running. When they cross the river many will fall, but thousands will get to the hill. How many will get to our trenches is another story. Some will, however, and you'll meet them face to face. At that point they'll be rather overstimulated and a few will think they're God. They'll be firing as fast as hell and using their bayonets."

"Austrians are better with bayonets than we are," said Biondo, a taciturn machinist from Torino, who had enlisted in the navy because of his belief that he would be most valuable in the engine rooms of stricken and damaged ships.

"Why is that?" Euridice asked meekly.

The explanation was obvious, but no one could put it into words. Finally, someone said, "They're taller," and for a brief moment not a man among them did not feel seasick with foreboding.

At night, now, because of the cold wind that came down from alps marvelously clad in ice and snow, they had a fire in an oil drum stove. Though most of the wood they burned was what remained of the lumber used in constructing trenches and fortifications, a large pile of apple wood had somehow found its way to the Bell Tower, and two or three apple logs were put on every blaze.

It was a shame, for they could tell by its sprouts and shoots that the tree was still bearing fruit when it had been cut, and would have continued for another twenty years, and all they had now was the scent.

For a week before the offensive, Alessandro had the day watch and could sleep at night. The week before that, he had had night duty, and changing over exhausted him to the point where he feared his heart would give out. As time passed, however, he slowly regained his strength and was able to sleep properly and dream. He dreamed of Rome.

After dinner they would wash up, open the gun ports wide to let in the cold night air, throw some apple logs onto the fire, extinguish the lantern, and wrap themselves in their wool blankets. Sleep came easily as the wind whistled through the fortification and the fire crackled. Each man saw in the fire what he saw in his heart. For Alessandro the opening tableau was always the same, a perfect, hot blue day in the Villa Borghese, when the shadows among the trees were so dark that they had red in them. In a grove of hysterical cypress, where the leaves danced in the wind like sequins, the clash of so many beams of light against the dark made a continual phosphorescence. All through the shadows were glimpses of blue so rich that it could almost be breathed.

The water in the fountains of the Villa Borghese was bright and cold. It could take the sun blindingly, like the flash of a sword, collapse upon itself in surf-like white, float in a mist of rainbows, or rush from darkness to darkness, emerging momentarily over a bed of yellow pebbles as if to be proved clear by the sun.

His father, mother, and sister were on a bench in the shadows, and Alessandro was in a white suit, by the fountain, half blinded by the light, his hand shielding his eyes as he searched the darkness. Luciana dangled her legs from the bench and swung them back and forth, looking to her right for a child with whom to play. Alessandro's mother and father were dressed as he had seen them in nineteenth-century photographs in which, even in the stiff portrayal of their youth, they had seemed as unconcerned with mortality as if the year 1900 were to have been a cap against which the geyser of time would rise only to fall back in decorative plumes.

 

THE NEXT day, Alessandro sat with his back propped against the wall of the cortile in the Bell Tower. His rifle, bayonet fixed, was leaning against the same wall. Beyond the rim of the fortification, in the circular lake of sky visible to the soldiers in the cortile, dark clouds raced on high winds. Their undersides were black, the rest gray. Though sunshine broke through now and then and the soldiers strained their necks to look, shielding their eyes in a salute, most of the time they were in cool shade.

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."

"Do you really believe that?"

The Guitarist thought. "You mean, if there's something on the other side of the fence?"

"Yes."

"I don't know. All logic says no, but my wife just had a baby boy—I've never seen him. Where did he come from? Space? It isn't logical at all, so who cares about logic."

"It takes a lot of balls to risk the hope, doesn't it."

"It does. I have the feeling that I'm sure to be punished for the presumption, but I've already had the bad luck to have been a musician and a soldier, so maybe I'll get a break.

"Music," the Guitarist continued, with affection, "is the one thing that tells me time and time again that God exists and that He'll take care. Why do you think they have it in churches?"

"I know why they have it in churches," Alessandro replied.

"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."

"You've learned to dare, and you dare to believe that someday you're going to float like a cloud."

"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."

Euridice and Microscopico were kicking a soccer ball back and forth across the cortile. Always a little awkward, Euridice met the ball with his toe too low and raised his foot too high in compensation. The ball soared in the air. Everyone in the cortile watched it rise against the background of cloud, and hoped it would not go over the wall. It did, and was five meters out when it started to return as the wind pushed it toward the center of the cortile. It landed against the near wall, bounced, flew into the air in a low trajectory, and came to rest on the grassy rim that formed the roof of the Bell Tower.

They watched silently as it settled. Someone said, "That's a good ball." Half the soldiers who had been leaning against the walls stood to get a better view. Alessandro and the Guitarist remained sitting because they could see it from where they were.

"I kicked it," Euridice said, moving toward the wall.

"Don't go up there," Guariglia warned him as he was about to grip the handholds in the wall and climb up.

"Why not?" Euridice asked. He was still the new man.

"It's on the edge," Guariglia told him. "They have the edge sighted-in."

"But if I go quickly, stay low, and just grab it and fall back, they won't have time to shoot."

"I wouldn't do it," Biondo said.

"But we don't have another ball," Euridice insisted.

"Let Microscopico get it," the Guitarist called out.

"Fuck you," said Microscopico, who was sick of being a small target. "Why don't you get it?"

"I didn't kick it up there," the Guitarist answered, "and I'm not a midget."

"I told you what to do," Microscopico called out.

Euridice was already up on the grassy part of the roof. Guariglia shouted for him to wait. Alessandro and the Guitarist rose to their feet. "Come back," Guariglia called. "Leave it until nightfall. Not now. It's not worth it."

Flat on his stomach, Euridice crawled along the grass toward the ball. He stopped just short of the rim and looked back. "It's nice up here," he said. "All I have to do is reach out my hand."

Alessandro stepped forward and shouted in anger. "Euridice, don't be an idiot. Come down from there."

For a moment, Euridice didn't move. He twisted, and looked down the length of his body at everyone who was looking up at him. Now he was one of them. "All right," he said, "I'll get it later."

They sighed in relief, but then, for a reason that no one ever knew, perhaps because he felt he was so close, perhaps because everyone was watching, because no one had died since he had arrived, or because he forgot where he was and imagined that he was still in school, Euridice stretched out his hand to get the ball.

In so doing, he raised his head. The soldiers in the cortile froze where they stood, hoping that Euridice's impulsiveness would be his guardian, but just before his hand would have swept the ball back down the grassy slope, his head snapped back and he tumbled down the incline. The right arm punched the air, puffing the body with it. He went over the sandbag wall and fell into the cortile, on his side.

They knew by now how to recognize death, and they stood silently as a hundred clouds passed overhead, rushing south.

 

Dearest Mama and Papa, Alessandro wrote.

I have been writing infrequently because, although we don't do much here, it takes up all the time we have. My life is a little like that of a forest ranger, so you'd think I'd have some peace. I stare out into the hills and mountains for twelve hours, and then I'm free. Presumably, with all the time in the world to reflect, I could write brilliant essays and letters that you might read more than once, but I can't. It's too tense here, and everyone is too unhappy. In fact, if I ever get a short leave, I'm going to go to Venice and drink three bottles of wine.

Today I saw something miraculous. I was looking southward through a firing port, with a telescope. It was evening and the light was coming from the northwest. Over the trenches a black cloud appeared, changing direction and moving as rapidly as an airplane, but it was the size of a palace. It writhed dropped, rose, and fell again, catching the light like chain mail or dulled sequins. It was a cloud of starlings or swallows that feed upon the corpses in the no-man's-lands between the lines. Guariglia, who has served farther down, says that they come out every evening and dance over the dead. I don't know what to make of it, as it is at once so beautiful and so grotesque.

We are continually expecting an Austrian 'tick-ass' to come from nowhere, throw a grenade, fire some shots, and bayonet a poor idiot coming out of the latrine. This kind of thing makes you tense twenty-four hours a day. So do the shells. On average, eight to ten a week hit the Bell Tower, and you never know when they're coming. When they do come, they knock you out of bed if you're sleeping, or knock you down if you're standing up, or get you up onto your feet if you're sitting down. These shells, they don't like the status quo. They reverse everything. Dirt comes down from the roof, the walls shake, objects fall to the ground.

We always have to look out for cannon drawn up close to our position. The enemy would like to fire point-blank, in an almost flat trajectory, at our gun ports. The shell would go through the steel plates and that would be the end of the Bell Tower, so the minute we see a cannon we all run to fire at it with rifles and machine guns, we pull the trench mortar into the cortile and drop shells into it, and we call up our own artillery. Even if we see some sort of optical device or wood frame, we assume that they're pre-sighting the gun ports so that they can move the cannon up at night, and we respond with the same great diligence. If someone were to put up a cross or try to make a laundry frame, he would draw all our fire and he probably would never know why.

I fire twenty or thirty rounds a day, which may account for my shaky handwriting. I don't hear very well anymore, either. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go to the opera again, because I could hardly hear it even before my right ear drum was ruined by my own rifle.

Another source of tension here is that we have no privacy. Most people have never had their own rooms, as I did, and because they were never alone they learned to live without reflection or contemplation. If I'm in a room with Guariglia, for example, a Romano, a harness-maker, and I sink into thought, he'll feel it, it will make him uncomfortable, and he'll do his best to distract me or engage me in conversation. Physical privacy doesn't exist here. The best you can do is to go to one of the store rooms, where there might be only two other people, who are concentrating on observation and firing out the ports.

Although I don't write often, at least not as much as I used to, I have some things I'd like to clear up with you, or try to clear up, while I can. I feel that I've been living beyond my time, that we may never see each other again. It wasn't that way at first, but something has changed. Anyway, the passes that I get are not long enough to let me come home, and I don't have a way of alerting you so that you could meet me in Venice. Perhaps I'll get home this Christmas—I don't know. We're safe at present, more or less. The last one killed was a boy who, for the sake of retrieving a soccer ball, exposed himself to enemy fire rather than wait until dark. One never knows what will happen, and we're expecting an offensive now at any time.

I mean a local offensive, because it seems unlikely that the Austrians will move along the whole line, but even that is possible. It rained so little this summer that the river is very low. We used to go out at night to swim, and the last time we did we found that at its deepest it was only up to the middle of my chest. That was a few dry weeks ago, and since then the snow has stopped melting in the mountains. Now the river is shallow enough to walk through in a dozen places. In a few days they'll be able to walk across it anywhere. Even if it rains tonight, it's too late, which is why I write.

I promise several things. I'll fight well, I'll try to stay alive, and I'll concentrate on the former rather than on the latter, because the best way to stay alive is to be resolute and to risk. 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. 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. To the extent that I do have control, I'll do what I can. Unfortunately, the war is ruled inordinately by chance, to the point almost where human action seems to have lost its meaning. They're executing soldiers not only for theft and desertion, but, sometimes, for nothing. I believe that after the war, for a long time, perhaps even for the rest of the century, the implications of this will reverberate through almost everything, but I'll save that kind of speculation for when I get home. Weil sit in the garden and talk about all these things, because if I get home I want to buy the garden back. I want to take out the weeds, thicken the grass, prune the trees, and make it what it once was. I have the energy, the will, and, for the first time in my life, the patience.

I want to tell you now how much I love you, all of you, and I've always neglected Luciana but now I'm so proud that she has become the beautiful and impressive woman that she has become. Don't worry about me, no matter what happens. We're nervous here, but not afraid. We have all looked into our souls, one way or another, and are content to die if need be. The only thing left to say is that I love you.

 

Alessandro

 

At the end of the month summer had been pushed back, winter was beginning to flood the Veneto with high clouds that had begun their relaxed flight to Africa, and the mountains were covered in white. When far to the north a blue lake in the clouds enlarged to the size of a principality and the sun came through, the Alps would glare in their entirety like flash powder, and the great white image would roll over the north of Italy, hanging in the azure air for all to see.

Thirty more men arrived in the Bell Tower, army conscripts who had been in the lower trenches taking the brunt of the fighting since the beginning. Cynical, violent, and mutinous, they com pletely destroyed the civilized equilibrium of the naval contingent, made a great deal of noise, fouled the latrine, and fought among themselves. They played cards, drank, vomited, and whacked at each other with sheathed bayonets.

The River Guard was at their mercy because they had brought a sergeant with them who rearranged everything and told everyone what to do. With their raucous laughter, their unshavenness, their skin diseases, their syphilis, and their apparent delight in killing, they seemed as overpowering as the war itself.

They sent out nightly patrols of men who could see in the dark and who brought back with them a boar, a feral pig, and once even a foolish buck that had followed the nearly dry riverbed far from his home in the mountains. Huge feasts of meat and wine followed each patrol, and even these did their part in setting everyone on edge and convincing the River Guard that they were doomed.

In a week the clouds broke apart in cool sunshine, and hopes were raised, but shortly after the sun reappeared so did thousands of enemy cavalry. They were visible in the rear of their lines, beyond artillery range, raising dust as they came into formation or deployed from one sector to another. It was possible to tell where they were even without a telescope. Wagons and caissons made dust clouds that looked like smoldering grass fires. Cavalry raised dust like a train. It moved evenly and smoothly across the landscape in an unmistakable indication of swift well fed warhorses.

"I wish I were in the cavalry," Alessandro said to Guariglia. "I was raised to it. I studied riding and swordsmanship all my life."

"Don't be crazy," Guariglia told him. "Our machine guns are waiting for those bastards and their poor horses. They won't last a minute."

The soldiers knew exactly what was coming, as if it had been in their blood. "They're here for the break," they said of the distant cavalry, "to make a hole in our lines in several places and then pour through like grain that spills from a torn sack. Horses are not like men. They don't have the patience to sit around waiting. They only bring up horses just before the attack. The river's low. They'll be knocking at our door in two or three days."

The whole line came alive and was packed with men, but not as much as the Austrian lines, which nearly burst with new uniforms and bobbing bayonets. So much ammunition was carried into the Bell Tower that each bunker was greatly reduced in size. The army men cut new firing ports, laid new mines, and put up new wire.

"You naval cocksuckers don't know how to landfight. Why don't you go back to the sea, where you came from?" asked an infantryman who had a disc-like scar in place of much of his chin.

"Give me a ticket," said Biondo.

They persecuted Microscopico until he told them why he was in the navy. He was conscripted to sweep chimneys and clean boilers. "Because I'm so small," he said, "I can crawl through the pipes. And don't tell me you're brave until you've crawled through the guts of a boiler and out the stack. If you get stuck, you're through. They don't dismantle warships on account of chimney sweeps, and you can get stuck. Keep the ticket, thanks: I'd much rather be here." It was totally a lie: he had been a baker's helper on a supply ship.

Huge rain clouds were visible over the mountains on the day when the artillery bombardment started. The clouds looked like wine-colored rock walls, and they moved slowly southward, feeling their way with tendrils of yellow and white lightning.

The Italian artillery had been active for weeks in harassing the Austrian build-up. Shells sped overhead several times a minute, and the Austrians compressed their answer into the period between dusk and dawn. They had no need of observation, because nothing failed to come under their fire.

When Alessandro had stood at the edge of the testing ground in Munich he was shaken and awed. Now the line of a hundred guns was ten deep, and it fired continuously, a hundred at a time, without let-up, allowing not a second for breathing at ease. When a shell actually hit the Bell Tower, which happened scores of times that night, everyone would be thrown to the floor, hoping that the roof would not collapse.

"I wonder if we're going to be ordered out on a charge," the army man between Alessandro and Guariglia kept saying. "I see no sign, but they may decide to send us on a charge." Then he would laugh. He did this all night. At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone was deaf and trembling from artillery, he came to Guariglia and said, "You won't tell them who I am, will you?"

"Who are you?"

With obvious pain and dread, the soldier replied, "The king's son."

"What are you doing here?" Guariglia asked.

"My father sent me here to die."

"Who's your father?" Alessandro asked, not having heard.

"The king."

"The king of what?"

"Of Italy."

"I want to talk to him after the war," Guariglia said. "I have a few things I'd like to say to him."

"Everyone says that," the soldier answered, "but when they come into his presence they find that they can hardly speak."

"You'll be there, won't you?"

The mad soldier shook his head from side to side. "I'll be dead."

"You have a point," Alessandro said. The prince was suffering so from fear that he turned to run for the latrine. "All right, all right," Alessandro called out after him. "You'll go to heaven. The king's son always goes to heaven."

At five o'clock, just before the light, the artillery stopped. Though as soon as the enemy formations rose from the trenches the Italian artillery would throw everything it could onto the advancing tide, it was quiet. For a while no one knew. Their senses had been so disrupted by exploding shells that it took them fifteen minutes to understand silence.

The rain had begun, and at night the river had risen because of storms in the mountains. The wind lashed the Bell Tower and droplets flew through the gun ports. Every few seconds bolts of lightning were followed by a deep forest of thunder, but after the barrage these thundercracks seemed gentle. 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.

 

THE GUITARIST was in the communications room, and at five-fifteen he screamed that his lines had been cut. An infiltrator was in the trench.

The River Guard looked anxiously at the infantry, who looked back with contempt. "Its not our redoubt," one of them said.

"Go ahead," another added nonchalantly. "Someone's knocking."

Everyone looked at Guariglia, who was the toughest, and the biggest, but it wasn't fair, and they knew it. They knew his children as if they had met them, and they understood the love that had moved him to describe them again and again. Besides that, he had done more than his share of difficult and dangerous things. Then they looked at the Guitarist, who had not done his share, but he was a musician, he was soft, he had a family, and he stared at the ground. Microscopico was too small. Biondo was at the gun port. The others were in other bunkers.

With his heart fluttering, Alessandro threw the sheath off his bayonet. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor. In an instant he had picked up the rifle and was running through the doorway, then across the cortile, then past the machine-gunner and into the communications trench.

When he started out he had been afraid, but with each step his anger rose, until, as he rounded the slight bends in the trench, he was ferocious and electrified. He flipped the safety catch on the rifle and steered the raised bayonet adroitly through the turns. He felt bodiless, as if he were only two strong arms, a well oiled rifle, and a flashing bayonet gliding through the trench at top speed. He wanted only to kill the interlopers who had dared cut the lines.

It would be too dangerous for them to go back. They would be there, waiting. They were.

As he came around a sharp corner a shot was fired at him. It missed and drove into the wall of the trench. The Austrian soldier who had fired it shrank back in panic and worked the bolt on his rifle.

Alessandro kept running. Just as the enemy soldier, a young boy with a delicate face, a stranger, had expressed another round into the chamber and was about to raise his rifle, Alessandro plunged the bayonet into his chest, doubling him up as if his body were a clenched fist, killing him. Two shots sounded from ahead.

The two companions of the boy Alessandro had just killed were firing at him. One shot missed. The other struck Alessandro at the top of his shoulder, throwing him backward into the sandy wall of the trench. He hadn't let go of his rifle, and it pulled out of the dead soldier and righted itself in his hands.

The Austrians dropped to their knees and worked their bolts. Alessandro was in no condition to aim. He pointed the rifle in their direction and fired. One of them rolled onto the ground. The other fired and missed again. Seeing that his friend was now still, that Alessandro was reloading, and that he himself could not reload faster, he threw down his weapon and struggled over the top of the trench.

Alessandro saw that the man he had shot had stopped moving. The other had not even jerked. They lay immobile in pools of blood. His face tightened as he slung his bloody rifle. Pressing his right hand against the wound, he stumbled back to the Bell Tower.

Light-headed, he pushed into the map room and stood before the others. The ones who were sitting, stood up. They looked at his bloodied hand covering the wound, and at his devastated eyes.

Even the infantrymen did not make light of it. One guided Alessandro to a cot. Another took the rifle and went to clean the bayonet. This was their métier. It wasn't something with which you were born, you learned it, and it wasn't even that difficult to learn. They used bandage shears to cut open Alessandro's shirt quickly, the way it would be done if he had been going to die, but then they stepped back. "Nothing," an infantryman said.

"It cut a little channel in the top of your shoulder, that's all," Guariglia stated before he dropped an alcohol-soaked rag on what looked like a sabre cut. The alcohol made Alessandro scream at the top of his lungs.

"Here they come!" one of the infantrymen shouted, as a chilling sound rolled through the Bell Tower—the cry of twenty thousand men beginning a charge.

 

ALONG THE entire length of the line thousands of Austrians and Germans appeared to rise out of the ground, slowly at first as they went over the top, and then faster as they ran toward the river, shielded by ragged banks of smoke. By the thousands and the ten thousands, they shouted. The Italians mounted the firesteps, looked over the tops of their trenches, and fired. Trench mortars on both sides were continually stoked. They could, at random, level a line of attackers as they began to wade the river, or kill the defenders exposed above their dugouts, and they did. The heavy artillery ceased except for a ten-minute barrage against the Bell Tower, which was hit by hundreds of shells.

The cat Serafina, who had suffered before from artillery fire, was crouched in terror in the deepest corner of the communications bunker. Alessandro lay on a cot, bandaged and throbbing.

At first no one could move, but the concussions of the shells became so great that everything shook, and people were knocked around the room like dice in a cup.

Then, as if pushing through waves in stormy surf, shouting things that no one could really hear but that were obscenities of anger and determination, the infantrymen and the River Guard struggled to the firing ports. They were knocked down. They were pinned under parts of the ceiling as it fell, choked with dust, thrown against each other, but some made it to the outer wall. There, they screamed and they cursed, and they took their weapons.

Hardly able to see or hear, blinded by the smoke and choking on the powder, they fired toward the river, sweeping to and fro with the machine guns, their teeth clenched as if they were using swords and pikes. A man at the center was blown inward and made unrecognizable when a shell exploded just outside his gun port. Another man rushed to his position, but could not find a weapon.

As Alessandro got up to replace a man who fell, one of the other bunkers exploded. After a terrible cry, everyone who was left alive began to run, because the firing ports had been closed and the Austrians, who had lost several thousand men in the river, were now at the shattered wire. Alessandro was last out.

Biondo lay dead in the cortile. The Guitarist was climbing over the rubble to get away. The machine-gunner was dead and his machine gun at the entrance to the trench smashed apart. Guariglia had been right. The trench was filled in.

As Alessandro struggled through the craters and began to run toward the Italian line, he saw only about a dozen others from the Bell Tower. The cat ran so fast that she disappeared almost immediately, leaping right over the Italian trench that was everyone else's goal, running like a rocket toward the fields of the Veneto.

The heavy artillery had stopped but the trench mortars kept up their barrage. Some of the men fell. No one went back to see if they were alive, for a thousand Austrians had come through the wire and were close behind.

Alessandro reached the trench and vaulted in. The Italians over whose heads he had jumped were working their rifles madly and had hardly even noticed.

The sound of their firing was tremendous, as if the whole world had been taken up in an explosive wind. Alessandro closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw the Guitarist crouched down right in front of him. He was smiling, so Alessandro automatically smiled back. At least they had come through. Then he looked more closely. The Guitarist was frozen in place, and his eyes were dead.

"Who's left?" Alessandro cried out.

He looked down the trench. Microscopico was firing. Some of the infantry from the Bell Tower now manned a machine gun in clouds of smoke. Others were vaguely recognizable along the line. Alessandro picked up a rifle that had been lying on the ground. He laid it across a sandbag, mounted the fire-step, and coldly began to shoot at the advancing ranks of enemy soldiers. Some had reached the Italian trench and were fighting inside it. Alessandro was in a daze. He reloaded.