He had an entire set of World War One assault units, the Arditi. They were paper dolls, with all the accessories and clothing for each unit, and little cardboard tabs so you could remove and replace parts of the uniform. The little paper belt with cartridge pouches and the dagger and scabbard and even a bersagliere’s helmet with a paper flume to one side, black cockerel feathers inked onto it. The felt cap of an Ardito, a scodellino they called it, a little dish.
Colonel, I don’t want bread. I only want lead for my musket, his father would sing to him on the rare occasion when he was in a friendly mood.
The Arditi were called the Black Flames. The Alpini were the Green Flames, his father told him. Bersaglieri were Red Flames, sharpshooters who ran instead of marched.
Sandro moved his paper Alpini around and pretended he was a Green Flame, a thing burning that wasn’t meant to be, a thing releasing its poison, like the flames that licked over the plastic bedside clock he’d melted to see what would happen, and his room had filled with a noxious odor he’d waved out the open windows with towels so the servants wouldn’t know.
He had the dolls and the full-color catalogues that listed which items belonged with which doll. To make them run he lifted and lightly bobbed them along the dresser edge, dun-dun-dun, instead of a more plodding and rhythmic march march march. They did not come with wristwatches, and having been told by his father that the wristwatch was an invention of war, for aiming a pistol and not having to fumble with a pocket watch, he drew them each a watch with a pen. There were units with different skills and missions, and each looked different and wore different hats and did different things, used different kinds of weapons and caused different kinds of deaths and destructions. The game was keeping them straight. Knowing which hats and badges and daggers went with which unit. That was how Sandro liked to play it and if things got mixed up it was enough to make him cry, because what about war as military order, as the invention of the wristwatch and so forth? Roberto came in and jumbled everything and said Sandro was a sissy and a fool. It’s not like that, instructed Roberto, an authority because he was older and could better understand the terribleness of the subject matter. Roberto clanged cymbals against Sandro’s ears before the sun had risen. “Wake-up call for Arditi is oh six hundred hours!” Roberto announced, “And by trench mortar round!” At breakfast he ate Sandro’s pastry and declared it the way of an Ardito to be a plunderer.
Included with Sandro’s dolls was the cycle battalion, like Papa’s. Papa had been an Ardito and he rode a cycle called Pope. A gold cycle and the white skull-and-crossbones on the jacket, a Carcano bolt-action rifle on the rear, and on the hips, a file-handled dagger on one side and a Glisenti automatic pistol on the other. Machine gunners behind him with water-cooled Fiat 14s.
His father said the Glisenti was no good, when he saw Sandro using it to kill an entire regiment of enemies hiding under his bedsheet. No good? It was a meant to be like a German gun, his father said, a Luger. But it was a beggar’s Luger. A bastard’s Luger. A pimp’s Luger and it constantly jammed.
“But mine doesn’t do that,” Sandro said. “It doesn’t jam.”
“Well, okay,” his father said. “But I see you have wounded on stretchers.”
“Yes,” Sandro said, “this one needs a medic.”
“But they are assault troops.”
“Yes.”
“We were on the couple system. There were no medic units or stretcher-bearers. You had to carry your partner if he was wounded, and it was easier if he died. So that was how you helped him, by finishing him off.”
His father’s insistence on inglorious details. Sandro pushed them aside and focused on the splendid Arditi patches in gold and silver with oak leaf and laurel, the large pocket each Ardito had on the back of his tunic for storing hand grenades. And the privileges they enjoyed, such as hot meals, while the soldiers in the regular battalions ate cold ones. Hot meals and no camp chores, no guard duty, no trench duty. They rode nifty vehicles like the gold motorcycle called Pope. They zipped along with a huge dagger in a leather scabbard and blam-blam weapons, the Bodeo with the folding trigger and the Glisenti, Thevenot grenades they could pull from the pocket on their back and free the pin and toss aside lightly because they themselves were moving, with motors under them. You tossed the grenade, it went off where it landed, and you, you were far ahead at that point. You didn’t toss it and run frantically and duck, you tossed it and rode proud and straight with your hand on the throttle of the gold Pope cycle — zoom and boom. Boom.
The flamethrowers with their twin tanks and their gas mask were Sandro’s favorite of the assault company dolls. The asbestos sweater and balloon pants and gauntlet gloves you could outfit them with so they would not carbonize when they set a woods on fire. A woods or bunker or enemy machine gun nest, depending. A supply line of trucks or a laddered stack of bodies, depending.
The flamethrowers could have been from a different century, both brutal and ancient and at the same time horribly modern. The flame oil in the twin tanks they carried was five parts tar oil and one part crude, and they had a little canister of carbon dioxide and an automatic igniter and a belt pouch with spare igniters. The flamethrower was never, ever defensive. He was pure offense, overrunning enemy lines. He surged forth, a hulking creature with huge tanks on his back, a giant nozzle in his hand, hooked to the tanks. He was a harbinger of death. He looked like death, in his asbestos hood with the wide cowl, and he squirted liquid fire from a magnificent range — fifty meters — into the pillboxes and trenches of the enemy and they had no chance.
But then his father told him the flamethrowers were a hopeless lot. Their tanks were cumbersome and heavy and they were obvious and slow-moving targets and if they were ever caught they were shown no mercy. That’s not a thing you want to be, his father said, after which Sandro continued to love the flamethrowers best, to reserve for them a special fascination, in their eerie, hooded asbestos suit, the long and evil nozzle they aimed at enemy holdouts. But he didn’t know if his interest was reverence or a kind of pity.
Roberto yelling, “Kaiserschlacht!” and pouring gasoline over his paper men.
Sandro, eight years old, his face wet with tears, saying, “Why? Why Kaiserschlacht?”
Because, Roberto said, half of them died in the offensive and the others had to be executed for pillaging. Don’t you know what happened? This is the retreat from the Isonzo to the Piave, after a poison gas attack by German storm troopers. If you want to play Arditi you have to do it properly, how the battles actually went. The Arditi who survived looted and pillaged as they retreated and had to be killed by their commanders, they had to be killed as a punishment, and if you want to play the game you have to do it right.
An older sibling’s function was to bring in swift and unpleasant justice. Roberto had dumped gas from a bottle he snuck from the garage, and then lit a match. The little dolls and their cardboard tabs. The tiny asbestos sweater. The scabbard for the file-handled dagger, which fitted itself in easily because Sandro had been so careful not to bend or crease it. All carbonized to ash.