Back to Science Fiction stories
by
Frank Wu
PART TWO
Mazzini stared out at the crowd, carefully examining
each of the four hundred soldiers crammed into the mess tent. He stood perfectly
still, only his eyes moving.
"What's he doing?" Paolo asked.
"Seeing if there's anyone here who outranks
him," Aroldo whispered.
Suddenly, Mazzini started sweeping back and forth
across the front of the stage. The
soldiers continued to file in, taking their seats. Of the Futurists, only Mazzini was moving.
The others lay still on a stage made from tables lashed together.
Behind Mazzini hung banners proclaiming: Sing of the Multi-Colored,
Polyphonic Tides of Revolution! Sing
of the Vibrant Nightly Fervor of Arsenals!
“He’s not what I expected my commanding officer
to be like,” Paolo whispered.
Aroldo looked Paolo in the eyes.
He spoke in low tones only Paolo could hear.
“You have to understand that almost all the officers in this
Army are insane. How can you
oversee the systematic destruction of whole battalions and not be?
But they’re all insane in different ways. There’s no one quite like Mazzini.”
"Welcome to our Futurist evening!"
Mazzini opened his arms wide to the audience.
The men greeted Mazzini with polite applause befitting the lieutenant's
rank. Then Mazzini shouted: "I have heard that it is pointless
to demonstrate a steam engine to a cow! Let’s
see if it’s also pointless to reveal the Future to my audience of imbeciles
and slaves to pedantry!"
The men murmured among themselves.
Why had he said that? Paolo wondered.
Some men laughed hopefully, thinking it a comedic skit.
"Slaves and imbeciles!" Mazzini repeated.
"The Colonel must not be here," Aroldo
whispered.
Paolo said, "Wouldn't it be easier to explain
Futurism without the shouting and insults?"
“When he goes into town,” Matteo said, “the
girls find it terribly amusing.”
Paolo started to say, “But don’t you think---”
Gino said, without discernible sarcasm,
"Actually, deep inside, he's really a quiet fellow."
"Do you not know you are all enslaved by
putrefied traditions?" Mazzini shouted at the audience.
"Why not throw off the yoke? Tonight
I will liberate you with art and music and philosophies which will break down
the mysterious doors of the impossible! Tell
me! What are the greatest works of
art created by our countrymen?"
The Mona Lisa, one soldier said.
The birth of Venus, offered another.
Michelangelo's David, said a third.
"You all wear the same uniforms, you all march
to the same drum. But must you all
think the same thoughts? Why do you
all suffer from terminal necrophilia? Can
you not think of any great Italian art created in the last century, the last
decade, the last year? What can a
moldy, smelly four-hundred-year-old painting teach the modern man?
These traditional forms should be mocked and then forgotten!
Lifeless portraits of lifeless people!
Academic nudes standing coyly, half-robed!
Are these supposed to be exciting? And
still-lifes! Especially still lifes!
To paint a motionless flower pot in static isolation is to deny the
knowledge of the persistence of the image on the retina!
To deny the revelations of the X-Ray!"
Ugo ripped aside a curtain to unveil a painting.
Mazzini looked out onto the soulless soldiers, men
who were daily and hourly told what to shovel, where to stand, what to scrub and
polish and move and stack, and these men who were more like cows looked upon
this monstrosity, this enigma, this utterly foreign thing, with complete and
silent incomprehension.
"Behold! I
give you a canvas for modern times! Behold
the compenetrating planes of force, the crossfire of energy!"
From his position on the floor, Paolo craned his neck
to look up at Mazzini's painting.
It was an abstract painting of a rifleman charging on
horseback. But much more than that!
The horse was a cascading tumult of brushstrokes from nostril to fetlock,
the chest lost in a riot of hooves. Not
just four hooves, but dozens of hooves layered on top of each other, a confusion
of V- and U-shapes trampling the earth and each other as if the horse had a
hundred legs. And the rifleman? His face was horrid, Paolo thought. He imagined a bric-a-brac bust of Napoleon, dashed against
the floor. The floor and the air
itself were fragmented by the impact, the shards jumbled up, reassembled, and
shattered again. Then, as the
horror of the face wore off, Paolo realized that the painting was doing another
thing to him. It was assaulting
him, insulting him. Not with an
oafish, obvious depiction of a raised finger, but with color.
He realized in that instant that, in his whole life as a soldier, his eye
had been dulled by monotonous earthtones: olive drab uniforms, beige tents,
slushy grays splattered over guns melting into the mud.
But now! In this painting he
saw a pandemonium of colors, solar yellows, enormous greens, ridiculous blues!
Crisp red, purples, fuscias, bickering with each other, screaming at him,
lashing out, each brushstroke a violent blow to the canvas, each demanding his
utmost attention. The colors were
rude, disruptive, and yet exhilarating! The
colors made him feel alive, and at that moment he knew why he became a Futurist.
"When we paint a form, we must render the whole
of the surrounding atmosphere," Mazzini explained.
"Our faces penetrate the wind we breathe!
The wind penetrates our faces! Is
this not a dynamic gesture of beauty?"
A man in the audience stood up, shouting,
"It’s a more beautiful gesture... when you put down your brush than when
you pick it up!”
"What do you know of beauty?
If you cannot see the superiority of our work, you, too are nothing but a
vulgar, banal, besotted, mediocre ignoramus wallowing in pedantry!
Now..." Mazzini said and then paused a choreographed pause, and
said, "What do the rest of you imbeciles think?"
Then, for the first time that evening, Mazzini shut
his mouth.
The enlisted men answered back with insults and
curses. And thrown spaghetti.
Mazzini laughed as the strands struck his shirt.
“Pedantry! Pedantry!
Feed me with your pedantry!” Then
he opened his mouth wide. As the
noodles struck his lips, he gobbled them up with glee.
“What does he mean by ‘pedantry’?” Paolo
asked Carlo.
“I don’t know,” Carlo said.
Carlo looked at Gino, who shrugged and said, “I
think it means, like, when you hang someone around your neck like a jewel.”
One soldier let out a harsh, high-pitched whistle.
"You see these men lying here on the
stage?" Mazzini pointed down at Paolo and the other Futurists.
"These are the passeists!"
With that cue, Paolo, Aroldo and the others began wiggling around the
stage. "These are the gouty
academic mealy worms who know everything about rules and meters and nothing
about passion! They kill and
sterilize anything clever or witty or original.
And you, my friends, are no better than them!"
"I know good art when I see it, and yours isn't
it!" the whistling soldier shouted to general agreement.
"I suppose you think you know something about
music, too!" Mazzini shouted back.
"I am a cultured man!" the soldier said.
"We differ in that way!"
Mazzini lifted Paolo off the stage, sat him on a
stool, and handed him Nina’s guitar.
"What do you want me to do?" Paolo asked.
"Play that Bach piece again," Mazzini said
to Paolo.
"I thought you hated it, sir," Paolo
replied.
"I do," Mazzini said with a wink.
Turning back to the audience, Mazzini shouted, "Tell me what you
think of this!"
Just as the men prepared to insult Mazzini again, the
Lieutenant threw them off balance. They
fell silent as the playful chords of Bach's Bourrée wafted into the air from
Paolo's fingertips.
"Now that's good music!" the whistling
soldier shouted.
“Good music? Good
music?” Mazzini turned red and
waved his arm violently for Paolo to stop playing.
"I will show you good music!" Mazzini shouted.
"I will show you good music!"
Turning to Aroldo and the others lying on the stage, he said, "Get
up! Get up! All of
you! You must play for them your
composition!"
“Lieutenant, are you sure you want---” Aroldo
began to say.
“The noise organs!
The noise organs!” Mazzini demanded.
“Yes! Yes!”
“If you insist, sir,” Aroldo said.
Aroldo and all the Futurists except for Mazzini and
Paolo rushed about the stage, pulling tarps off noise organs of different sizes.
Paolo could see Aroldo nervously glancing back and forth between the
organs and the restless audience.
A thrown potato smacked against Carlo's temple, so
the lieutenant turned to the audience and shouted, "Instead of vegetables,
why don’t you toss out some fresh ideas?”
The soldier whistled again.
Mazzini said to him, "There is a crack in your
head and the wind rushes through it."
The jokes won the Futurists a small reprieve from the
shower of insults and spaghetti. Mazzini,
conductor's baton in hand, gave the signal to begin.
Carlo, Gino and Matteo each stood behind a noise
organ. At Mazzini's signal they
sounded them forth in unison:
Buzzz!
Crackle!
Pow!
Then, just as suddenly, the noise organs were silent
in a general pause. One beat later,
the noise organs blared forth again in unison:
Buzzz!
Crackle!
Pow!
The stage again fell silent, except for a wheezing
sound, as Aroldo turned the crank of a sibilator noise organ, slowly, haltingly.
Paolo found the wheezing unlistenable.
Slowly the sound grew more rhythmic.
Then other instruments joined in: a rumbler, a
thumper, a rustler. The players
changed the pitch and volume of each noise organ seemingly at random, like an
orchestra tuning up. The
coordination demonstrated at the beginning of the piece was completely absent.
"Declamato!" Mazzini shouted at Carlo.
"Have mercy, please!" the whistling man
shouted. "What have we done to
deserve such punishment?"
"Trionfante!" he shouted at Gino.
"Grandioso!" he shouted at Matteo, who crinkled his noise, as
if wondering how to make rustling sound more grandiose.
Now the noise organs were all rising and falling in
tone to the same lilting rhythm, accenting the same downbeats.
Ah, this is at least listenable, Paolo thought.
Then he realized that there was more to it than that.
Aroldo's composition was not a formless swirl of unorchestrated sounds.
Aroldo had chosen his noise organs to give a full sound, an ulalator
replacing the violins, a rumbler providing the bass. One portion of the composition was a lively dance, in 2/4
time. Another was a stately dance
with what appeared to be two reprises, in slow tempo and triple time.
As he analyzed the music, Paolo realized that motives were being
repeated, and when the tempo changed again, Paolo made a remarkable realization.
Aroldo’s composition was progressing through the movements of the
classical suite-- prelude, allemande, courante, saraband and, finally, gigue!
He was using traditional forms, but employing crashing sounds, grinding
sounds, explosions. Was this meant
to be a commentary? Or a mockery,
translating traditional pomposity from cello and oboe to rumbler and crackler?
As Paolo contemplated this, a soldier yelled,
"Let the boy play more Bach!"
"My three-year-old son knows more about music
than you do!"
Paolo wanted to stand up and defend Aroldo’s music.
Perhaps he alone understood how clever it was.
Mazzini didn’t even recognize a well-known Bach piece, although he
pretended to. He probably also had
no knowledge of the classical suite.
As Paolo was deciding if he would speak out, Mazzini
came onto the stage. Mazzini waved
his arms for Aroldo and the others to stop playing.
"We have shown you tonight a new kind of
painting! Now we have shown you a
modern music for a modern--"
"I'd rather live in the past!"
"--age! No
more will your ear we lulled into boredom with sound of the violin, but rallied
with the sound of motor--"
"I'd rather live in the past!"
"--tractor!
Not stupefied by clarinets, but energized by the sound of the
water-cooled machine gun!"
"I would rather be stupefied by that boy playing
Bach than listen to your Futurist trash and your childish philosophizing!"
the whistling soldier shouted. "Beauty! Hah!
Your stupid Cubist artwork!”
“We are not Cubists!” Mazzini shouted.
“You don’t even know the difference!”
Paolo asked Aroldo, “What’s a Cubist?”
Aroldo said, “I’ll tell you later,” as Mazzini
shouted again, “We are not Cubists! We
are not fucking Cubists!” As
Mazzini shouted this, for the first time, he thought that Mazzini was truly
angry, no longer pretending as part of the art.
“Picasso can go to hell! We
are Futurists, damn it, Futurists!”
“Cubist? Futurist?
What’s the difference? It’s
all ugly, rude and childish horseshit!"
He stood up on a table and turned his back to Mazzini.
Facing the audience, he shouted, “Look!
I’m a Cubist musician!” and then bent over and blew air in the
Lieutenant’s direction.
With that, Mazzini flew into a rage.
Paolo saw Mazzini's huge, knobby hands rushing toward
him.
Then Paolo realized Mazzini wasn't reaching for him.
He was reaching for the guitar, which he seized from
Paolo's fumbling hands and held high over his own head.
"Not my guitar!" Paolo shouted.
Mazzini said to Paolo, "We must all make
sacrifices in wartime!" Turning
to the audience, the lieutenant proclaimed, "This is the sound of centuries
of musical history destroyed in a moment!"
Then he smashed Paolo’s guitar against the edge of
the stage. The wood splintered,
strings snapped, shards of bracing spun into the air, and Carlo sounded an
exploder: Pow! Pow! Pow!
Then Mazzini kicked the stool out from under Paolo,
throwing him to the floor. As Paolo
pretended to try to wiggle away, Mazzini pretended to kick him.
This part of the act touched off the riot.
A man, not knowing the brawl was preplanned, leapt
onto the stage to protect Paolo and punched Mazzini in the jaw.
Mazzini shoved the man, who fell into the front row.
More fists were thrown, more men rushed to try to tackle Mazzini's
substantial mass to the ground. Aroldo
signaled to Carlo, Gino, and Matteo to hurry the noise organs away.
"You see, we really don't appreciate your
work!" the whistling soldier screamed as he tried to punch Mazzini's
stomach, a very large target.
"I know you actually love it!" Mazzini
said, slapping and spitting. "You
are just too embarrassed by your own inferiority to admit it!"
Mazzini threw the man down with such force that Paolo
feared his head would be smashed to bits.
By this time, the brawl had spread throughout the
entire tent. The audience was a
blur of kicking and thrashing. Spaghetti
was thrown liberally.
"Now don't you regret insulting us?" a man
demanded from Mazzini.
In the middle of the melee, Aroldo came to Paolo with
a terrified look and shouted, "He's coming! He's coming!"
"Oh no!" Mazzini shouted.
"You should be proud to be the first insulted!
Tomorrow I insult other battalions, other divisions, until I have
insulted the entire army!"
Paolo was gathering shattered pieces of the guitar as
spaghetti flew over his head. "Who's
coming?"
"Colonel De Pisis!"
The Colonel had chosen that moment, at the height of
the riot, to enter the tent. He
rode into the midst of the fighting on his horse, a great white steed twenty-one
hands tall. As the horse's hooves
pounded the dirt floor of the tent and overturned a table, the Colonel held his
revolver in the air and fired it three times, straight through the fabric roof
of the tent.
The men jerked to attention, quickly wiping the blood
from their faces and forming lines among the overturned tables.
When the men finished re-ordering themselves, the
Colonel dismounted and started walking toward the troops.
At the door to the tent stood several soldiers, each
carrying a short-barreled rifle and wearing a wide black hat.
Each hat was decorated with an enormous plume, the bottom half of which
was blue, the top half red.
Paolo did not recognize the uniforms, so he mumbled,
"Who's that?"
"Those are carabinieri," Matteo whispered.
"They shoot cowards and traitors.
Shhh!"
"Who? C--?"
Paolo said.
"Shhh!"
The Colonel was coming toward them.
"Don't let them scare you," Carlo said,
under his breath. "For such
big men, they've got really small---"
"Shh!"
The Colonel came near and shouted at Paolo,
"What are you looking at, soldier?"
Paolo trembled at the man's rank and said in all
seriousness, "I was, uh, admiring the professionalism of your, uh,
calamari, sir."
Matteo winced.
The Colonel said, "Hm," and carefully
looked over Paolo's uniform. The
pocket of Paolo's shirt dangled only by a few threads. The Colonel raised his hand, and Paolo braced to be slapped.
Then Colonel caught the pocket between two fingers and tore it off with a
snap of the wrist.
Then the Colonel continued down the line.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Carlo said,
"Guns."
"Lieutenant Ugo Mazzini," the Colonel said
solemnly. "What have you done
here?"
Mazzini stood absolutely stiffly, his eyes pointed
forward, his chest thrust out, the model of military dignity.
"Sir, I have entertained the troops as you requested!"
De Pisis placed his face next to Mazzini's cheek.
"And incited a riot in the process!" the Colonel said.
"You have single-handedly destroyed all discipline, all order.”
Although he knew he was supposed to only look
forward, he stole glances to see if Mazzini would blink or flinch as the Colonel
berated him. He did not.
In fact, as the Colonel spoke, the tiniest of imperceptible grins seemed
to appear on his face.
“You have caused my men to fight among themselves,
instead of against the enemy,” the Colonel said. Then he smiled. “Do
you know what you have really done, Lieutenant?”
“I do not understand what you mean, sir.”
“I will tell you, Lieutenant Ugo Mazzini, what you
have really done. You have done all
I had hoped for, and more. Before
tonight, these men were a listless and retched band of soldiers.
Their hearts had stopped pumping, their blood congealing in their veins.
They were ineffectual and demoralized automatons, incapable of fighting,
incapable of doing anything but whine. Tonight
I have seen these men more energetic and excited than ever before!
Wonderful! Now they are
ready to fight! And they are ready
to win, because at dawn tomorrow we will attack the Austrians!"
Suddenly the guitar did not seem very important to
Paolo anymore.
They would soon be making other sacrifices.
The time was three-thirty in the morning, and the
whispered voices of Aroldo, Matteo, Carlo, and Paolo moved through the darkness
of the trench. The voices were
accompanied by the smell of oil and the sounds of scraping and squeaking of
10.4-mm rifles being cleaned and loaded.
Occasionally a shell exploded, and Paolo flinched
every time.
"Those are nothing, just for fun, like
firecrackers," Aroldo said. "The
major bombardment will not begin for a little while yet.
We've amassed twelve hundred guns, six times what we had a few months
ago."
"Are Futurist evenings usually like..."
Paolo asked. "Was last night
typical?"
"It was pretty mild," Aroldo said.
"The audience isn’t usually so patient.
You got some sleep, didn't you?"
"A little," Paolo said.
"Good. Mazzini
had us up all night polishing pipes. I think he views these battles as interruptions in our work.
But now we have to prepare to fight."
“I have a couple questions, though,” Paolo said.
“I mean, what...” He
lowered his voice, in case his question might embarass him.
“Well, what is the difference between a Cubist and a Futurist?”
“Well, that’s a little hard to explain,” Aroldo
said. “A Cubist is, um...”
“A Cubist?” Carlo shouted. “This is a Cubist!”
He sat up quickly on a sandbag, tensing his neck, his expression
completely blank. Elbows at his
waist, his arms and legs were rigid and bent at precise right angles, as if he
were made of steel posts and joints. He
snapped one arm straight out in front of him, as if he were mechanical, and then
drew a stairstep in the air with his straight fingers. Then he drew a stairstep going down, like a ziggurat placed
squarely in front of him. “Not
much fun, huh? Now, this is a
Futurist.”
He sprang up, leaping into the air.
When he landed, his feet were apart, his chest bent, almost parallel to
the ground, his hands formed into fists. He
looked as if he might run or kick or punch out in the next moment.
Then he leapt into the air again, and, upon landing, switched his feet to
the other direction. He lashed out
with a hand, slicing through the air, back and forth, and then back and forth
again. “That’s Futurism,” he
said, smiling proudly at all the soldiers staring in bewilderment at him.
“You are the weirdest person I know,” Mateo said,
“much weirder than Mazzini.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you for your
attention,” Carlo said, waved, and sat down.
Aroldo shook his head and turned away.
Paolo glanced around, but no one was speaking.
“That wasn’t terribly enlightening,” Paolo
mumbled.
For a long time, no one said anything.
Paolo thought about where he was.
Some of the soldiers smiled quietly to themselves, amused by Carlo’s
antics. Somehow they just made
Paolo sad. He thought, if Giannina
had done what Carlo had done, I would have laughed, mainly because it would have
been so uncharacteristic of her. He
thought about how far away she was, and how he wished he were with her, and not
lunatics like Carlo. He thought of
the Isonzo River, which ran parallel to the trenches, far behind their lines. He thought of the plains ahead of him, and beyond them, the
Austrian guns pointed at him. He
wished he could run away, away from the Austrian guns, towards the Isonzo.
He wished he could jump into the river, and let it sweep him away...
toward home. As the dawn
approached, the sky filled with light, and Paolo saw his fellow soldiers more
clearly, scurrying in the trenches, and he thought they looked like rats.
Trapped in a cage, or a maze. Doomed.
The Colonel rode up on his stallion to survey the
troops. It was the same horse he
had ridden into the tent the night before, but Paolo had not had a good look at
it. Paolo imagined that it was
descended from those massive beasts bred in the thirteenth century to gallop at
full speed, with armored face and ironclad breast, heraldic imagery swirling
about the hooves, bearing the man-at-arms nobly into battle.
This was a horse befitting an Italian Colonel!
Mazzini rode behind the Colonel on a small brown
horse that did not hold Paolo's attention.
Without dismounting, Mazzini leaned down to say to
Paolo, "I am truly, deeply sorry about what I did to your guitar.”
His voice was surprisingly sheepish.
“I didn’t know it was a gift from your girl.
I don’t know what got into me. Sometimes
I do these things." Then
Mazzini handed Paolo a wrapped package about twenty-five centimeters across.
"I’m sorry. I hope
this makes up for it."
“Thank you, sir,” Paolo said.
Then, suddenly, explosively, Mazzini was shouting
again: “Today you will become a hero!”
“I will?” Paolo said.
"Mazzini!" the Colonel called.
"Come here!"
"Remember that honesty and individuality are the
gods that march before us!" Mazzini said and rode off.
Paolo opened the package and was surprised to find a
miniature noise organ in his hand. "Why
did he give this to me?" he asked.
"Strap it on your back," Aroldo said,
turning to demonstrate the portable noise organ sitting atop his backpack.
"You see that cord dangling down from it?
Tie that around your ankle. It
will free your hands from cranking."
"Why...?" Paolo asked.
Matteo answered.
"Musical instruments have long been brought into battles.
Drums, bugles, and fifes... Remember
when ram's horn trumpets brought down the walls of..."
Carlo shouted, imitating Mazzini’s inflections,
"Today these modern instruments will sound forth the Futurist victory!"
Now all Paolo and the other Futurists had to do was
wait. Other than the noise organs,
they had brought no artistic implements to entertain themselves.
They could have made a symphony, but instead they chose to wait.
And wait. Wait for the
shelling to begin. Wait for the men
in the forward trench to attack first. Wait
for their signal to charge. Wait
for 500 rounds a minute of Austrian bullets to lacerate the air around him.
They waited.
And waited.
Paolo wanted to play his guitar, but of course he
couldn’t. He considered playing
the miniature noise organ, but only for a moment.
It was no substitute. Why
had he let Mazzini take the guitar from his hands?
Why didn’t he hold onto it tighter?
It was in his hands one moment, safe and loved, and then the next moment,
it was smashed to pieces. Why?
And what had Mazzini done that? He
didn’t understand.
How was he going to explain this to Nina when he went
home to her?
He thought of their last day together, before he
enlisted. They had gone for a long
walk among the sun-scorched rocks in the hill overlooking their little fishing
village. The town seemed so small
and vulnerable, sandwiched between the uninhabitable rocks and the inhospitable
sea. It clung to the land, as
fragile as a paper wasp’s nest that might be dislodged by a strong wind or a
round woman with a long broomstick.
The sky had never seemed so warm, so blue, so
expansive. Giannina’s hair
sparkled like tinsel, splitting the sunlight into shards and planes.
“Isn’t this romantic?” he asked her.
She responded, “What do you think about getting
married?”
He was so startled by the question that he nearly
fell down the hill and tumbled into the sea.
With the patience of a mother speaking to an
incompetent child, she asked him again. “What
do you think about marriage?”
He turned away from her, closing his eyes.
The sun was warm on his eyelids. He
wished he could pluck the words from the air and stuff them back into her mouth.
Why would she want to marry me? he wondered.
I am a simple man, the son of a simple man.
A baker. What honor could I bring to her?
Paolo had long thought that a man did not marry just
a woman, but he married into a family. Nina’s
father had been a Colonel in Somalia. Her grandfather had distinguished himself in battles against
the Prussians during the civil war.
How could he compete with that legacy?
“Paolo?”
He did not answer.
For a moment he toyed with the idea of asking her
right there, on the rocks, to marry him.
Then he thought: What if she said no?
Was her question just a prelude to telling him that she didn’t want him
anymore? That he wasn’t worthy?
Why would she choose him?
The other boys in town-- the pretty boys, the popular
boys-- had already gone off to enlist. When
they returned with their ribbons and medals, how could he compete?
Paolo took Giannina by the hand and looked her
straight in the eye and said, “I will marry you when I come back from the war.
You will be so proud of me, with medals on my chest and stars on my
collar.”
When she started to cry, he said, “I’ll miss you,
too. We won’t be apart that long.
The war can’t last much longer. The
Germans and Austrians are nearly exhausted now.”
She said, “But what if you--”
“Don’t worry about that,” Paolo said.
“I don’t worry about it. What
I worry about is that the war will be over too quickly.
I won’t have a chance to win any decorations.”
As he lay in the trench, waiting for the shelling to
begin, waiting for the signal to charge, he thought, Today, Nina, today I will
make you proud. You will be so
proud when I come back to you. Yes, yes, yes, that’s what I’ll do.
That’s it.
Suddenly the memory of Nina seemed thousands of miles
away, and he found himself screaming, thrusting his face into the mud at the
bottom of the trench, ramming his fingertips into his ears, as the artillery
barrage sounded, the Italian siege cannons blowing their enemies into tiny
pieces, zang tum tuumb zang tum tuuumb, round after round, 100 pound
shells, 16 pound shells, 200 pound shells, and the ground shook under him, and
the stench of gunpowder burned the insides of his nostrils, and clods of dirt
thrown up by explosions rained back down on him, and he screamed out Nina's
name, and then suddenly it was quiet and he knew the attack would begin in
moments.
IF THE GESTURE BE BEAUTIFUL
PART 1 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4
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