The Sojourn Page 7

  Yet we were welcomed by the veterans of the Soca because they saw firsthand why it was we listened and spoke to no one, and knew that in the balance of power our success raised the likelihood that they’d remain alive one more day. In those battlements, natural and man-made, the Austrians maintained a state of readiness throughout most of the winter. There was constant talk of yet another Italian offensive, which we would have to wait for, as we didn’t have enough reserves to launch one ourselves, and that lethal mix of rumor and readiness wore on a soldier’s nerves. But because our orders were to carve away at the long vast body that made up the Italian lines one limb and member at a time, we boosted morale when forward units saw us moving through a trench past them, or a sentry gave word in the morning after stand-to that a team of sharpshooters was in the sector.

  And so, that evening we were told to rest and ready our weapon, and by midnight we were hidden and silent and waiting in an abandoned kaverne with an escape route through a tunnel out the back.

  MY FIRST KILL WAS A MEMBER OF THE BERSIGLIERI, THE ELITE Italian infantry, though to me he was just a solider who got as close as possible to the forward line on motorcycle and then marched several hundred yards carrying a leather pouch toward a manned trench. Zlee spotted him when he was still on his bike, which made one hell of a racket in the quiet dawn. From our position, and according to orders, we had been expecting only to report on movement that day, but there seemed an arrogance to this man, his arrival, his singular message, the ridiculous cap he wore, which had something like plumage sticking from the top of it, and the rage that I had carried to this war found itself focused. From where we stood behind our shield of rock and dirt, the front was two hundred yards away. I had the man in my sights from the moment Zlee said, “Moving target, five hundred yards.” I’ll lose him when he ducks into a dugout, I thought, but he marched right up and stood in a part of their trench that rose to his shoulders and left his neck and head exposed. I aimed for his ear, just below that goddamn peacock’s head of a helmet he wore, and pulled the trigger.

  “That’s a kill,” Zlee said as I watched the man’s profile disappear, the first life I had ever taken.

  I bolted another round, held, and waited. There was scrambling and someone yelled “Cecchini!” A face rose in that same position, this time looking right at me through the crosshairs, as though someone had painted them on his teeth, and I fired.

  “Two,” Zlee said, but I knew, and I will tell you that I never once wondered who those men might be, if they were in love with anyone or if they had families. They were the enemy, and they would stand and fight and try to kill as many men as I might pass in the night to or from the trenches that separated us not just in battle but—we were told—by the will of God, and so I killed as I had been instructed and believed that death and death alone would save me.

  Five minutes later, short-range artillery destroyed the kaverne Zlee and I had used for cover, but we were long gone from there and saw the damage only when we walked past on our way to another hide two weeks later.

  Weeks. That’s how we measured time, a week on patrol there in the mountains surrounding Görz as the winter snows gave way to mud and mist and freezing rain, and a week’s rest, during which we rarely did more than maintain equipment, or travel to Ljubljana, where prostitutes, painted and starving, ducked their heads out from alleyways along the river that ran beneath the castle walls, and they begged us for food when they saw that we were only soldiers with no money, which made me feel lonely and then just made me wish we were back on patrol in the mountains, engaged in the careful measure of a not so different kind of hunt.

  By April, our commanders wondered where the Italians would attack, not when. Zlee and I were put into service to determine the extent of troop movements, although there was little we could see because of the constantly poor weather that month, mostly rain, and fog from the spring melt, but also the occasional snow squall when the temperatures dipped fast. On one night, the skies cleared enough to reveal a gibbous moon and offer visibility a few miles across the valley, and that’s when we discovered deserters going over to the Italians.

  There was talk—rumors fed by Slav nationalists—that the English and Americans were going to help the Czechs and Slovaks set up a sovereign state, if Austria and Hungary could be defeated. With the fall of Görz and the attrition of soldiers, supplies, and ammunition at the front, it appeared as though the days of the empire’s army really were numbered. For us, though, we were still soldiers of the emperor, and desertion was treason, punishable by death.

  “Cleansing,” Major Márai called it. On the last day before we were to march down to a reserve billet, we were called into the company captain’s tent and told that our rest had been canceled. Since we had discovered and reported the desertions, Major Márai had ordered that we perform a cleansing in case any other soldiers were tempted to desert, as well.

  “Why didn’t you kill the men when you saw them?” that captain asked us.

  Zlee remarked that we had only been spotting, and by the time we were in a position to fire, the targets had made it to safe cover.

  “You have one of the best kill records of any sharpshooter team at the front,” the captain replied. “It’s surprising to think that a target might escape you,” he added, as though taunting us. “Pes. That’s a Slavic name, isn’t it? Are you a Czech?”

  Zlee said he was an orphan, and the captain asked if he was mocking him. I begged pardon to explain and said that Zlee had been raised by my father since the two of us were boys. We spoke Slovak and Hungarian equally well, and the emperor had our full allegiance. Zlee just stood at attention, silent.

  The captain outlined our orders. We were to set up a hide near the suspected company and wait to see if any other men attempted to cross over. A platoon sergeant, two privates, and a sapper were to accompany us, in order to send up flares and verify any kills, if necessary. I heard Zlee draw breath and waited for him to object to our being sent out with a raiding party in tow, which the captain seemed to expect as well, but Zlee said nothing.

  The next night we set our trap, removing guards from that sector under the pretense of a night raid in another. The sergeant who came with us talked too much and kept saying that he could shoot as well as any sharpshooter, and he stomped along behind us over the rocks and fallen trees like an oafish boy in clodhoppers. Then he stopped and lit a cigarette, and Zlee turned and grabbed it from his mouth and crushed it on the ground. The sergeant became furious and shouted at Zlee in the strange stillness of that night, “You are under my command, Corporal Pes!”

  “You are under my protection, Herr Stern,” Zlee said. “And I can make a bullet in your head look like it came from the enemy, although I might not have to.”

  The sergeant turned to his infantrymen for support, but they were blank. He spat, cursed his disapproval, and the six of us set off again.

  Word must have gotten out, because no one or thing showed itself that night, or the next. In the half-light of the early morning of the third day, a scrawny buck leapt over the ground in front of us and the sergeant ordered, “Flare!”

  Zlee was the shooter that hour, but he never lifted the rifle from where it rested on his thigh. The sapper fired on command and the flare riffed in a wavering arc into the faint sky and exploded over the ground before us, bathing that entire section of forested battlefield in green light. The deer stood frozen, dived forward, tripped over its front hooves, regained its balance, and sprinted down the mountain toward the Italians as the flare sputtered and dropped. We got our week’s rest after four nights, and when we returned to the line, we hiked through that sector as though it were a worn path or a place forgotten.

  WHEN WE WERE WELL OUT OF EARSHOT OF THE SENTRIES, though, we doubled back and took position on an outcropping of rock no more than one hundred yards above where we had sat in a trench with that loudmouthed sergeant and his skittish men two weeks prior. The weather was better, but the moon had waned to new since t
hen, which meant anyone else going out was as blind as we were, until first light, and there we waited.

  Sometime just before dawn broke, we heard sentries rustling and whispering, convinced, I suppose, that everyone at war was asleep but them. Then we watched two soldiers, rifleless and shorn of all uniform decorations, go over the top. Though trying hard to move quickly, they seemed to hop in slow motion among the shattered trunks and shell holes that defined the ground.

  During our rest, Zlee and I had removed the bullets from one of our clips and reversed the heads. It was something Bücher had taught us. With the flatter back end of the slug at the front of the projectile, the bullet mashes and tumbles as soon as it hits. The Germans used these to penetrate firing plates, and we figured we’d be shooting at moving targets and so would have to aim for the body, which meant that even if the shot hit wide, it would still tear up the chest cavity and be lethal.

  I was shooter when the deserters emerged, and I got the first one in my sights, waited as he loped and tucked, and then led him to the right, exactly where he was supposed to step, and shot him between the shoulder blades. When he went down, the other one stopped and looked back. I could see his face as though I were looking through a mirror: young, filthy from not having washed in a long time, eyes big with fear. I aimed for his head, but in that split second I realized that he wouldn’t stand in profile like that for long, and so I lowered the rifle as he spun back around, and fired. His arm seemed to whip out from the force of the turn and, when the bullet hit his shoulder, tore off his body and into the air. He dropped and screamed for one involuntary second, then lay motionless and quiet on the ground.

  Light was barely discernible, a brief, shadowy dawn particular to the mountains. Zlee glassed the ground and said, “He’s still alive.”

  I could hear the weak sounds of leaves and sticks crackling slowly, and said, “Let’s go.” He would bleed to death eventually, and there would be short-range artillery soon.

  But Zlee said, “They’d have opened up by now. No one over there knows what’s going on. We have to finish this.”

  So we left cover and moved out along a sap that barely came to shoulder height. I didn’t like being out in the open so close to morning. The Italians had snipers, too, and I was afraid Zlee was wrong, that someone over there was watching us, but we came to a place where the trench dead-ended against a tussle of roots and rocks, and we settled into that for a hide.

  The near-quiet woods and the knowledge that I had failed to get my kill unnerved and fatigued me, so I handed Zlee the rifle. He took his time observing the wounded man. Two minutes, ten—I don’t know. His trigger finger moved slightly along the inside of the grasping groove like it was stroking a chin, and I whispered, “One hundred and fifty yards,” and noted a fluky breeze. Zlee adjusted slightly for it, then lay still and breathed slowly as he peered through the scope, and all I could think about was the light and what a shame it would be to get killed on a morning as beautiful as this one. Then Zlee drew the rifle in tight and fired.

  From there, we continued north. The line broke and we bouldered over an exposed but high escarpment above the Soca, still running, so deep and strangely blue. High pressure along with the wind seemed to have settled over the entire valley, and I remembered that it was May. We came into a new sector just south of Plava and ranged among the mountains the Italians called the Three Saints, and which our armies held: Santo, San Gabriele, and San Daniele. That evening, a Croatian outfit shared with us their supper of pine-needle tea and gamey horse meat, and then paraded around two Italian deserters, whom they were going to shoot in the morning.

  “You cold bastards shouldn’t get to have all the fun,” they said, laughing and a little drunk on wine they had found in the basement of an old church. We kept to ourselves after that and hiked and spotted from higher ground at intervals that suited us.

  One night we camped near a small stream at the back of San Daniele so that our fire wouldn’t be detected. Artillery thumped slow but steady in the distance like the ouff of waves on a shore, and Zlee and I ate vodici we picked in those hills and boiled with our tea and talked about Pastvina, my father, and what we hoped to do after the war. I said that I wanted to travel to America, live by a pond in Massachusetts, and leave behind everything about Pastvina, and Hungary, and the people I had no love for anymore.

  Zlee laughed. “Well then, my brother, I’ll miss you, because I’d be happy doing nothing more than living the rest of my life as a shepherd,” he said, with only my father around to talk to, and that’s all he wanted to do now.

  And I thought of the way in which my father had taken Zlee and shaped him and given him a life he certainly would never have known if he had remained on the streets of Eperjes with his mother until it came time for him to go off to war, and I asked him if he had ever heard from his mother, if he knew where she was, or ever thought of going to find her.

  His mood darkened, and I saw a flash of the old mad dog in his eyes.

  “Find her?” he said. “For years she knew where to find me, but after a few months of writing to tell me that she was getting herself back on her feet, and that she had met a wonderful man who was quite rich and looking forward to meeting me, it all stopped, and your father took me into the mountains. You don’t know how angry those letters made me, or how many times that winter I nearly left to go in search of her, just to see her, to see if she had lied about her life or not. At the camp that spring, I wanted to walk down into the city and find her, and show her that, in spite of her having left me, I had become a man. I had even risen early one morning, intent on going, but when I walked out the door of the cabin, I stood looking out over the hills. There was a faint light in the sky, a few sheep bleating, and Sawatch came up and lay down at my feet. I felt as though I couldn’t move, and I thought, What of her rich men and good life? Otec and you treat me like a son and a brother, and that’s already more than I ever expected to be given in any life.”

  And that night she came to me in my dreams again, my own mother, and she seemed as fearful as she had been the last time, although she still appeared to be shimmering, as though the beatific perfection of that faded print my father kept, every curve and shadow of which I had memorized as a boy. She waved to me and began to walk away, and I shouted, “No!” She turned and, hands outstretched, said, “Stay, Jozef. You’ll be safe,” and I begged her to come back, but she kept walking, with her back to me, until she dissipated like a mist.

  THREE DAYS LATER, WE CIRCLED BACK TOWARD DIVISIONAL headquarters near Görz and reported in. What we brought the major (we had to bring him something) was news of recently fortified Italian camps, accompanied by troop movement along the entire western stretch of river, from the Bainsizza Plateau down to Görz. Battle was imminent, and the Italians looked determined to make it their last.

  It wasn’t their last, though. The Austrians expected a spring offensive, and our scouting confirmed this, but the high command’s best guess was that the Italians would proceed more tactically than they had in the past, using diversionary incursions upstream to draw our divisions holding the three mountains away from higher ground, and then attacking with their seemingly endless supply of troops. But the Italians had learned nothing in two years of fighting, and the emperor’s generals learned that for all of its ethnic factions, diversities, and desertions, theirs was an army of men who would go to their deaths throwing stones at the Italians rather than give an inch of homeland.

  And so it began with little more warning than the suspicious activity Zlee and I and a few spotters reported to our command. At first light on the twelfth of May, we had just come off a week’s rest and were sitting in a good hide forward of our main trench, from which we had seen an artillery team in range. We wondered why they had exposed themselves so foolishly, but we never thought to question our luck. The officer was easy to identify as his gunners loaded and aimed their cannon. I reckoned him at 550 yards, a long shot, but Zlee never second-guessed himself, or me. W
indage was light and the morning air dry, and Zlee just brushed the trigger and I watched that man’s head snap back and body crumble as though it had been relieved of its bones.

  And hell followed. Three thousand guns—long-range, medium-range, trench mortars, everything—opened fire on us and every other Austrian position from Plava to the Adriatic for two days straight, so that no one or no thing could run, move, or even breathe, a hell in which I prayed to God that I might die so that the banishment toward it would end as quickly as it had begun.

  They say the earth is a soldier’s mother when the shells begin to fall, and she is, at first, your instinct not to run, but to dig and hold and hug as much of that earth as you possibly can, down, down, down into the dirt, with your fingertips, hands, arms, chest, thighs, and feet, until you are like a child clinging with his entire body to comfort after a nightmare.

  But minutes of this, then hours, and days, and you wonder, How many days? Because the earth herself can’t stop shaking and disintegrating as the shrieks and howls rain in like otherworldly miscreations on wing who know —know—where you are hiding and want not just to kill but to annihilate you, their hissing and infuriate ruts as they approach the last sound you’ll ever hear.

  In that initial wave, our forward position saved our lives. Lines flanking us to the right and left took hit after hit and the longer-range guns seemed to be inching ahead with each bombardment, stalking our counterbattery fire, command posts, and supply dugouts, so that any response or counterattacks would have to struggle to follow. Yet the Italians seemed interested not in accuracy but fury, and Zlee and I pressed down beneath the cover of canvas we’d used for camouflage and a wall of sandbags we pushed up to take shrapnel for four hours of nonstop shelling, some explosions so close I could feel air being sucked from my lungs.