Beautiful Ruins

The narrative depicts the first chapter of Alvis’s novel The Smile of Heaven, which takes place near La Spezia, Italy, in April 1945, toward the end of WWII. The Germans retreat, but the American generals continue to give soldiers marching orders. Alvis finds himself in a miserable state as his feet become infected, and he desperately longs for dry socks as his unit marches in a fashion that appears arbitrary to him. Alvis and his friend Richards specialize in translating Italian, and his unit is tasked with burying bodies and exchanging small goods for information on the Germans and Communists.

Alvis takes note of the “larger tactics at play in [his] war’s end” (75), but he categorizes the war as a slog of “wet, fretful marches up dirt roads and down hillsides to the edges of bombed-out villages, short bursts of interrogating dead-eyed dirty peasants who begged [the American soldiers] for food” (76). Alvis considers shooting himself as his feet continue to deteriorate. He fantasizes about being sent back to his home in Madison, Wisconsin, where he will live as an invalid conjuring false stories about a sense of valor he does not possess. On the day he decides to shoot his feet, he and Richards march to a village to interrogate survivors, and he sees the body of a dead German soldier along the way.