The Sojourn Page 6

  Then, at the end of our basic training, Zlee and I were pulled from the ranks without explanation and led into a tent where a captain sat behind a desk made up of two trunks with a board laid across the top. He was Austrian, which was evident by his uniform, and spoke to us in a bookish-sounding Hungarian. He wore black boots that had a soft, worn gloss to them, and he fiddled with a riding crop.

  “So, you are from one of Kray’s regiments,” he said, and began to pace behind his station and question us about our village, our parents, how it was we had learned to shoot so well. He seemed intrigued by Zlee’s insistence that he was an orphan adopted by my father and that we were brothers not of blood but of labor and the land.

  “Labor,” he said. “You sound like a Communist. Don’t all mothers labor to bear their sons in blood?”

  Zlee said that he had never met a Communist and so couldn’t say what one sounded like. What he meant was that he and I were as close as brothers because of the life my father had given us both. “Sir, I have seen him work on the land, and so I know what this Soldat will do in battle,” Zlee said, staring straight ahead as he spoke of me as a Soldat, which I was, all the while maintaining the soldier’s respect for his superior and never once making eye contact with that captain, who cursed and spat and said, “You know nothing of battle.”

  Then he turned to me. “Und Sie,” he said. “Was haben Sie über diese Bruderschaft zu sagen?”

  I don’t know why he switched to his native language then, but I knew enough German to understand that he wanted to know what I thought of this brotherhood Zlee spoke of. The summer before I signed up, I had studied the standard commands of the army so that I wouldn’t be turned away if they questioned me, and the language came easily. Could he have known this? Could he have known, too, that Zlee’s German didn’t go beyond twenty or so words because he had no head for anything that required study, from a book, that is? No, this captain was testing my loyalty—it was plain to me—wanting to see how I would respond if I was given a chance to speak privately. And so, thinking not in German but in a foreign language I knew, I replied in English, “Sir, there is nothing my father taught me that he didn’t teach him also.”

  The captain looked surprised, smiled, and asked Zlee, “How is your English, Private Pes?”

  Zlee, still staring doggedly at some point on the wall, said, “Sir, better than you might expect.”

  A few days later, just before the entire battalion was supposed to move out, we were released from our regiment, given lance corporal stars to attach to our uniform collars, and boarded a train with a company of other soldiers going in the same direction, but not the same place.

  That night, we arrived at a camp on the Duna outside of Pozsony. A sergeant barked orders at us there in the dark, where we stood at attention for what seemed like hours, until two officers showed up, and the sergeant snapped to attention himself and then receded. One, another Austrian captain, did all the talking, while the other, whose uniform was German but whose overcoat looked more like some Bavarian hunter’s, stood by, listening and surveying us there in the harsh light.

  Nineteen sixteen was the year the Austrians started sending sharpshooters to learn sniping skills for the front. Most of these schools recruited men from the Tirolean region of the Southern Alps, on the border with Italy, and were run by German officers. Scharfschützen, they called them. The Italians called them cecchini and (we were to learn in time) feared them more than anything else in those mountains. Under that veil of mock secrecy, it emerged that we were being sent to a place in Austria called Klagenfurt to be trained as Scharfschützen for the empire’s defense of its culture and threatened borders on the southern front. We had been chosen, the captain told us, not only for our marksmanship but for our character and ability to endure hardship in conditions under which most men would buckle, although I’m sure he knew or cared nothing about my character. The emperor himself understood who we were and how important our mission was, he said to us, and from there on out we were ordered never to speak unless spoken to by a superior officer, and any soldier showing the least amount of weakness or lack of discipline and restraint would be sent straight back to his regiment and a trench on the eastern front.

  There we were, forty of us, men from the ranks—although there were only four other Slavs, two Bosnians, and two Czechs—brought together because we had a common skill that was about to be pressed into service. I didn’t understand what it meant then to have what the captain referred to as a gift. There were plenty of Frontkämpfer, he said, the frontline infantry, who wore the marksman’s badge and would line up in the trenches next to machine gunners when the enemy attacked. We weren’t riflemen, though. We weren’t Frontkämpfer. We were hunters who already knew how to stalk game in the mountains and forests we had lived in before the war, and who were now being taught to hunt men, observing their numbers, their movements, their skills or the lack of them, their habits, and ultimately their faces—front or back—through the crosshairs of a rifle scope, all so that we might kill them, one at a time, with a silence that terrified them more than anything because it held nothing of the glory they imagined they’d find in battle.

  In Klagenfurt, we trained and practiced—not just drilled but practiced—as though virtuosi who would one day be given their concert hall solos in some great symphonic concerto, conducted by our maestro, Sergeant Major Bücher, who had been fighting on the western front since August 1914, until he lost a leg to a long-range French shell that had caught him leaving the line at Verdun. He limped well enough with the prosthetic limb a puppet maker in Leipzig had carved for him, but the Germans were one sharpshooter down at the front as a result. So he offered his services as an instructor and would always say, as we stood at attention at dawn on snow-packed and frozen ground while he paced before us, that the sharpshooter should consider himself above rank and disregard it, as it is rank that ought to be hunted first, killing from the top down in order to leave an army leaderless and demoralized. Search for whom and what seems out of the ordinary, he instructed us. The nonuniform, the affectation. Field glasses around the neck out in the open. A scarf of school colors catching the wind. A knitted pullover. An umbrella.

  “To desire rank is to desire death,” he intoned aphoristically. “You must find the soldier of rank, and find in yourselves the will to remain calm, silent, and alert. Then kill as though it were your only chance to live.”

  For the first week, we never fired a shot. We cleaned our rifles six times a day and became familiar with the meticulous care of optical sights. We learned to read maps and draw maps and study maps taken from prisoners, so that we could see our ground from their perspective. We dressed in white cover to blend in with the snow during those late-winter months and practiced Nordic techniques until we could ski fifteen miles with a thirtypound pack on our backs and not fall. We learned how to range, judge distances, take into account variations of topography, spot and report small troop movement, and how to move instinctively—against the instincts of the average man—toward higher ground there in the Alps, while we sought out a good hide, and a good means of escape. That was, Bücher said, if we knew and could employ well the full quiver of our skills, the most important weapon we could find, a safe place to hide, and this exercise made up the second week of our training.

  Each day, we disappeared into the woods, wanting to see and not be seen. Most of us they had chosen in twos, and so we worked in twos, Zlee and I seemingly inseparable now as spotter and shooter. After we were dismissed into the forests in teams, the remaining men fanned out to find us, just as my father and I had done in the mountains years ago, hunter and hunted making notes on details of an occupied position, until the hunter ultimately revealed his target. If the hunted—watching from the hide—had more information on the hunter, the teams switched roles. The one with better notes got the kill. Sometimes it was as insignificant as the fold in a man’s cap.

  Zlee and I started out against a pair of Tiroleans from the L
andesschützen, severe and insular men of the Alpine regions who had remained loyal to the Habsburgs. They kept to themselves and seemed especially derisive of the standard Austrian officers. They hated Slavs, too. It didn’t matter that we were fighting for the same king.

  We found them easily enough because they whispered to each other in their mountain dialect as they hid in the socket of two large boulders, which created a kind of sounding board. They must have thought we couldn’t hear them if we couldn’t understand them, and so they cursed us when Zlee inched his head over the top of the rock, looked down, and said in a whisper, “Boom.” I had a page of notes on them, even jotting down a word I transliterated from their Austrian, which Bücher knew I could not have known, and he called them “useless jokers,” and sent them back to their regiment. Once Zlee and I were given the chance to disappear, no one found us, not even Bücher, who had his own perch with a telescope, from which he made notes—good ones, too.

  It was just as well that we couldn’t be found, because, but for the sergeant major’s attention, we were ignored. The men we trained with were mostly Austrians, and the training we got was unique to the man sent to instruct us. In spite of Bücher’s insistence that the best weapon the empire had was the men who lived and survived in her mountains, captains who did the recruiting chose as sharpshooters young Austrian men who knew the luxury of sport hunting and who arrived in Klagenfurt with their own rifles, like gentlemen showing up at school with their own horses. That’s where I saw my first Schoenauer, a beautiful and powerful rifle with the precision of a surgical instrument. I saw the Norwegian model of the Krag, German Mausers and Gewehr 98s sent down from the western front, and a few other peculiar cannons that looked as though they should have been left in the nineteenth century. But the weapon didn’t make the shot, and in the end more than a few of those gentlemen were sent home with their rifles, where they’d live to hunt game-park deer, not Italian soldiers.

  Twenty-five of us remained by the third week, and that’s when we took to the range again, this time firing a long-barrel Mannlicher 95 with a double-set trigger and fitted with an optical sight, the physical effect of which was still something new for Zlee and me, despite the fact that we had been carrying them around and caring for them for weeks. We were trained to make head shots and aimed for the teeth, which seems ludicrous until, on a cold morning, across the distance of a valley through refracted light, you can suddenly see a man’s breath, see that he’s speaking to a comrade, or perhaps only to himself, having a smoke, singing a song he loves, or maybe giving voice to some prayer, words that will be his last. It was hand-to-hand combat, except that the enemy never saw your hand, and lifted his to no effect.

  As a team with rifle, rounds, field glasses, and maps, Zlee and I were a rarity, spotter and shooter equally good at both. Bücher called us die Zwillinge, “the twins.” And then, almost as quickly as it began, just shy of a month of training in that mountain forest by the lake and on ground soft and thawing in the sun, we were pronounced ready, given gold-colored sharpshooter cords for our uniforms, told to keep silent and alert, and sent off to the front, unaware of what kind of war awaited us there.

  LIKE MOST OF THE TROOPS ON THAT TRAIN, MEN WHO STRODE along the ravines and through forests from Ljubljana west to the river town of Most na Soc•i, Zlee and I had yet to see battle, and we were a spirited, if tentative, bunch, some men singing, others shouting boastful taunts to unseen and unknown Italians, until, idle and waiting at the station platforms of small and emptied Slovenian towns, we saw our first trains of the wounded push past.

  Closer to the lines, we came upon the field hospitals and casualty-clearing stations, where the lives of those men in all their misery were born.

  Because this was where trains were constantly switching, we stopped and were held there, which must have been some mistake if anyone had the morale of new soldiers in mind. Some joked, others praised the valor of the wounded, but most of us just looked away or made the sign of the cross to hide our unease, unease at the sight of figures prone on stretchers or laid out on the frozen ground, some screaming and crying for their mothers like hurt children, others emitting a rhythm of slow moans, as though their breath had to pass through the reed of a bassoon. Some never uttered a sound. Soldiers old enough to have facial hair at that time wore their best imitations of Franz Jozef’s handlebar mustache. On the gray and emaciated lips of the dying, though, those mustaches appeared unkempt and spindling imitations of the real thing.

  I don’t know how many hours we waited, or for what or whom we were waiting. Trains that had arrived behind us had inched out of there long ago. It seemed an eternity passing and chipping away at our collective desire at that moment to hurl our young wills into what battle awaited us, believing somehow that we would be saved and emerge unscathed, while others, though lost, should live on in our memories as heroes, so that the borders our train approached might remain drawn as though time itself had drawn them.

  From the siding, we could hear long-range artillery dropping randomly in the distance, indistinguishable from the thunder of a storm passing, or commencing. One stretcher would get ferried into a tent, while others still waited outside, the look on the ones left behind, if they looked at all, an aspect of dismay and surprise. I watched a young woman without expression on a face that might once have been pretty carrying a large bucket like it was just another basin of wash water, the bucket pressed against an apron soaked in blood. She stopped beside a cistern I hadn’t noticed before (or, if I had, couldn’t recognize what its contents were) and dumped her care of body parts into a swill of larger limbs. On her way back to the tent, she leaned over one of the silent, mustached officers, who looked as though he had fallen asleep, and pulled the dirty wool blanket that had accompanied him to these grounds over his face. Then she disappeared.

  And at about the time I saw the sun dropping through a break in the clouds to the west, the conductor whistled that we were to depart, and the company commander shouted at a group of men who were smoking and had started a game of cards, so that some brushed their winnings into their hats and they all swung aboard as the train lurched, and we were off, not stopping again on that pilgrimage from which most of us would never return, until we had reached the front.

  EXCEPT FOR THE INTERMITTENT EXERCISE OF ARTILLERY RANGING or harassing, the Soca Valley was quiet in the early spring of 1917. There had been many defeats the year before, but our army held the hills to the north, east, and south of Görz and could survey the Italian lines more strategically than if the city had remained in Austrian hands. Zlee and I knew nothing of battles won and lost along this river in the months and years before we’d arrived. Apart from the dead and wounded we had seen as we approached, the grounds seemed fixed and ordered to us, with trenches dug from rock and sandbagged higher, gun placements set up forward of and behind the lines (as though monstrous men themselves who would move into and out of battle at a general’s command), and all of this wending its way around the outlying hills of that town through which the Soca flowed, a town that, when I glassed it for the first time, seemed a place too old and delicate and beautiful to be the center of so much destruction.

  Nothing of this appeared as I’d expected war to appear, although, in truth, I can’t say if I had a vision of war in mind, save perhaps for the placement of men who were wont to fight. I expected open fields and open ground, where columns of the emperor’s soldiers in pike gray marched in place, broke for the charge, and clashed, until the strong defeated the weak on that ground. But the only surface that was wide and open in this land was the river herself, which flowed serene and cottony blue, while entire armies hid themselves and their weapons and woke each day and watched and waited for the other to move or show himself above the top of each other’s subterranean world.

  Zlee and I were attached to a regiment dug in north of Görz and, having survived the roulette of artillery and trench mortars in that first week, were itching for some action. Well fed (at the tim
e), kitted out with good woolen uniforms, and fit, we brushed off the scene we had glimpsed at the field hospital, as well as rumors we heard that our army was barely holding on against an Italian onslaught. Up and down the lines, while men continued to dig and strengthen trenches that had literally been hewn out of rock, they spoke of General Boroević as though he were their father, or their god.

  “Sveto won’t give them Trieste,” they’d say. Or “Boroević could have Görz back tomorrow if he wanted it.” I never met the man, but it was a comfort to me that so many soldiers, in the ranks and among the officers, believed in him as a commander.

  It was after stand-to at dusk one day that we were told by a captain to report immediately to Major Márai’s tent. Though we were only lance corporals, as sharpshooters we reported to Márai, who reported directly to Colonel Rhelen, whom we rarely saw, which didn’t matter. Sharpshooters were given freedom to range along the lines in search of good targets in spite of our regimental assignment because that was what the Germans did, so that’s what our Austrian commanders let us do. We were lone hunters among the other officers and ordinary ranks of infantry, and this set us apart, sometimes with awe, most times with contempt, especially among the sergeants and first lieutenants, whose jobs were to maintain discipline and order in their platoons. We wore the identifying lanyard on the outside of our uniforms, carried a rifle with an optical sight and a barrel longer than the average soldier’s carbine, and always traveled in twos. If these weren’t enough to tip off whichever captain wanted to know why we were separated from our unit, we simply replied, “Scharfschützen, Herr Hauptmann.”