The Red Horse, by Eugene Corti.
New York: Ignatius Press, 2001.
$23.95 - 1,015 pages.

“When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, ‘Come!’ And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth so that men should slay one another.”

- Revelation 6:3-4

Having taught a little Latin and ancient history in a variety of circumstances, I often find the innocence of my students regarding the brutality of the Greeks and Romans oddly moving. When learning of the horrors of the Colesseum or of the wholesale massacres that typically followed the conquest of a city, these young people talk as if human beings have matured, have made a great leap into a new age that condemns such savagery as both barbarous and outdated.

It is then that I point out to them that the 20th century has brought us the most devastating acts of savagery in all history, both in sheer numbers and in human depravity. The numbers are indisputable; besides the millions of soldiers who have died in our various modern wars, the world has seen millions upon millions of its inhabitants shot, hanged, gassed, starved to death, bombed, and incinerated, indeed dispatched in such a variety of ways that Caligula himself - that mad and murderous emperor who once wished that all humanity might have one neck so that he could chop it off with a single blow - might have gasped with both astonishment and admiration at our modern ability to put human beings into early graves.

The question of depravity and its depths is more difficult. Which is the more depraved act: the crucifixion of a thousand rebellious slaves or the aerial firebombing of a city? Who is more depraved: the Roman commander who superintends the wanton slaughter and rape of a captured city, or the air-conditioned bureaucrat whose stamped document seals the fate of a million kulaks in the Ukraine?

The Red Horse is Eugene Corti’s massive historical fiction recounting events in Italy from the late 1930s to the 1960s. Originally published in Italy in 1981, The Red Horse brilliantly details the horrors wrought by war and politics on this century.

Corti sets his novel in Normana, a Northern Italian industrial town, and uses as his characters Italians from different walks of life. There is Ambrogio Riva, the son of a local industrialist, and his brothers and sisters. There is Micele, the intellectual who, following his time in the Russian prisoner of war camps, returns to Italy to write of his experiences. There are those who do not survive the war, Stefano the simple farm boy, and Manno, Ambrogio’s cousin, who dies a hero’s death in a battle in which he hopes for the beginning of the end of German control. There is Alminia, Ambrogio’s beautiful sister who marries Michele; Columba, Ambrogio’s true love, though not the woman whom he married; and a company of other characters, all deftly portrayed, who help to make this novel one of the most significant books to come out of Italy in the last 50 years.

Corti, who fought on the Russian front and then later as a freedom fighter against the Germans, has much to offer American readers in terms of historical interpretation. From him we discover the depth of oppostion by the Italians to the war, even by the Fascists; we discover the great chasm that separated Nazism from Italian Facism; we learn, if we do not know it, how stupidly the Germans blundered when invading Russia, where they might so easily have gained the support of the population; we see how close Italy came to communism following the war, and how the Left captured and still holds the culture of Italy as well as the rest of Europe.

But always Corti focuses on his people, his characters, and it is through them that we learn not only of Italy’s suffering during and after the war, but also of the triumphs of the human spirit in such circumstances. Corti gives us real heroes, people who overcome their doubts and their despair to keep on struggling. Often his characters face moral dilemmas as well as physical challenges: Micele’s high-minded search for truth in the Russian camps, for example, offers a vision of idealism and quiet passion that should touch the most confirmed relativist.

Corti’s novel is finally an account of the power of love in the face of cruelty and extreme change. Ambrogio’s unrequited love for Columba; Micele’s passion both for Aliminia, his wife, and for truth; the love of Stefano for his home, Manno, and his country: The Red Horse demonstrates in these characters and in many others the great strength of love in the face of unforeseen challenges.

Another novel of Italy and war which may interest readers is Mark Helprin’s bestseller A Soldier Of The Great War. Helprin’s tale commences with an old man, a retired professor of aesthetics, Alessandro Giuliani, taking an unexpected long walk with Nicolo Sambucca, a young and historically innocent worker in an airplane propeller factory. As their walk progresses, Alessandro, who is certainly one of the more delightful creations in modern fiction, educates the young Nicolo by telling him his life story.

Like Corti, Helprin uses his fiction to explore the politics, wars, and philosophies of our bloody century. Like Corti, Helprin creates an intellectual with a heart - Alessandro - as the instrument to examine the last hundred years. Alessandro, who grows to manhood during the turn of the century, particpates in the Great War, that long-ago name for the First World War; as the reader continues through this astonishing novel, it becomes clear that the Great War is a war against the century itself, a war against dehumanization and modern politics. Near the end of their long walk, Alessandro says to Nicolo:

“.. You have to be fixed on the point. You need what politicians have, which is the absence of a sense of mortality. It comes, like a drug, from adoration and deference. Revolutionaries get it from dreams. They say that nothing is apolitical, that politics, the bedrock of life, is something from which you cannot depart ...
“I was interested in birds. Are birds political? And I thought the finest thing in my life was being with my son when he was a baby. People used to look at us when we went around in the daytime and wondered what a man was doing taking care of a child, but every word that came from him, every expression, every smile, even his tears, were worth a million times an honorable profession.”

One trouble with reviewing Helprin’s book is that one wants to keep quoting the author. The dialogues between Alessandro and Nicolo demand to be shared with others. It’s the sort of book which forces the members of its audience to read aloud from it to anyone in the room. The descriptions scrip of the war, of the fierce mountain fighting between Austrian and Italian troops is gripping and intense (Helprin, a Harvard graduate, has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force). The professor’s observations, ranging from the meaning of existence to the effect on the intellect of the mortification of the flesh, make the reader aware of the joys of fiction, of the foolishness behind the idea that the novel is dead.

If read together, A Soldier of the Great War and The Red Horse offer the reader not only truly great fiction as well as a history of 20th century Italy but also a rare meditation on the human condition.
(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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