A Soldier of the Great War Read Online Free PDF Page A

would rise that night, Alessandro said, late, but when the moon did rise it would be perfectly full. Here they would go off the road and traverse a set of rounded peaks that overlooked Sant' Angelo and, farther beyond, Monte Prato.
    Alessandro said that they would walk through the night, the next day, the whole of another night, and the early part of the next morning. The weather would be good and the full moon would be their lantern.
    Already Sant' Angelo and Monte Prato had become far more than just mountain villages on the line of the motorized trolley. They seemed far away, beautiful, and high. Before reaching them, Alessandro Giuliani and Nicolò would have much walking to do, and would have to pass through the towns of Acereto, Lanciata, and perhaps five or six others with beautiful names, equidistant over civilizing fields and groves of trees waving against the perfectly blue sky. At the start of their long walk, the road was deserted, and, perhaps because the world was silent, they were too.
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    A LESSANDRO G IULIANI believed that if all things went smoothly and well on a journey, the momentum and equanimity of walking or riding would overshadow whatever the traveler had left behind and whatever he was traveling to reach. Making good time on the road was in itself reason for elation.
    Once, in a lecture, he had stated this in passing, only to be abruptly challenged by a student who had wanted to know if the respected professor thought that elation could come to a condemned man on his way to the gallows.
    "I don't know," Alessandro had answered. "Usually, the way to the gallows is not long enough to be called a journey, but let us say, for example, that a condemned man must be transported from one extreme of a country to another, where he will be executed, and that his journey will take days or weeks."
    "Is that realistic?" the student asked.
    "Yes," Alessandro replied. "Yes, it is realistic. In such a case," he continued, "the man may know the greatest elation and the most savage despair—as if, in anticipation of eternity in heaven or in hell, he were previewing both."
    "I don't understand. Elation in a man condemned to die?"
    "Elation, mad elation, visions, euphoria." A long silence had followed, during which the lecture audience had been as motionless as if it had been under the gun, and the professor had been unable to resume the lecture, on account of memories that made him forget momentarily where he was and what he was doing.
    Even a trip across the city provided minor joys and desperations that, although of a lesser order than those experienced on a journey of days or weeks, stood in relation to one another nonetheless in much the same way as those of a voyage around the world. The scale might change, but the patterns were the same. Alessandro guessed that Nicolò would expect the walk to be of one complexion. Why should it not be? Despite enough variation in the experience of a child by the age of fourteen to show him twenty times over that life is stupefying and complex, a single great force drove him forward and gave him both the momentum he would need for the rest of his life and the immediate resilience for surviving the blows he attracted with his adolescent stupidities and excesses. Nicolò would have chased the streetcar not only to Acereto,
but, if he hadn't caught it there, to Lanciata and perhaps all the way to Sant' Angelo. He expected the world to be complected uniformly.
    Nicolò would be bitterly disappointed by the slow and difficult, but Alessandro had learned to love these as much as or perhaps more than he loved the fast and easy. To him, they seemed not so far apart. It was almost as if, facing off invariably at odds, they conducted a secret liaison, with their hands enwrapped under the table.
    Nicolò could not yet know this, and he would be troubled when the road grew dark and steep. For that reason, Alessandro was disappointed that they had set out with such glory all