The Sojourn Read online

  At what we guessed was late morning, there was a lull. We took our chances and threaded through the warren of dugouts, ledges, and trenches that made up our forward line, the men still in positions that hadn’t been completely destroyed looking like gray mannequins in a desolate uniform shop, some doe-eyed and terrified, others appearing resigned to their deaths already. The sergeant who had gone out with us to shoot deserters got hauled past on a stretcher by two bearers, his mouth opened in a scream we couldn’t hear (for the bombardment had rendered us deaf) and his chest laid open so clean, I could see his heart beating wildly beneath the bones of his rib cage. The captain’s dugout had taken a direct hit. Nothing and no one there by the time we reached it but a horse on its haunches pawing the dirt, and the coppery stink of blood and burned flesh all around.

  By noon, the Italians were at full force again, and we had made it to Major Márai’s tent just beyond the reserves. He said he wanted us to stay out of the lines and head back to Mount Santo, where they suspected the Italians would attack in strength when the artillery barrage was finished. We were to take any shots we had on high-value targets—officers, cannoneers, scouts.

  After a day’s hike with a separate regiment, Zlee and I took position on the upper reach of Mount Santo in the ruins of an old monastery’s gatehouse, long since reduced to rubble by artillery. The night before, we had eaten field rations of biscuits and hard tack with the same Croats who had fed us when we were ranging from those hills. And at dawn on the fourteenth, the Italians came over the top.

  The brigade sent to retake that mountain knew the mixed terrain on the western slope and had been hiding its regiments among the massive stones and stands of trees under the ongoing cover of artillery fire, so that the soldiers defending the mountain were caught off guard, weakened and shell-shocked as they were, as wave after wave of Italian fanti burst from their positions like water from an earthen dam and charged up the steep and bald slopes of those hills, only to be mown down by our Schwarzloses and close-range guns. By late morning, men barely seemed to touch the ground as they entered battle and died in one seamless move, so thickly strewn with bodies were those hills. The few that pushed on toward a trench or rock dugout were shot in the face with pistols, gutted with bayonets, or fought hand to hand, bravery and folly indistinguishable on both sides, until the Italians seemed a being that grew with death and for that reason was incapable of dying, and all we could do was follow our own who had survived and retreat down the steep back of Santo, so that by evening it was in enemy hands.

  So holy was it considered, though, that a Czech major general named Novak ordered those same Croat defenders to return the fight on that mountain just when the Italians were at their most vulnerable—in victory. The counterattack was swift and surprising, early in the morning of the next day. From the close-quartered position of the mouth of a collapsed kaverne, Zlee and I watched as the wearied but confident Italians rose from their sleep to the din, stumbled and rubbed their eyes, and there they died in a chaos of bizarre yelps and war cries from the mouths and bellies of men bent on vengeance, and seemingly astonished to find themselves alive.

  THE WHOLE OF SUMMER, BATTLE RAGED, THE BLOODY STALEMATE of attack and counterattack proving ineffective for all but the winnowing of souls, so that I came to believe that our stand there on the Soca could not survive, and I wondered more darkly in the back of my mind if we—our empire, our army, the land on which my father had taught me, too, how to survive—had been abandoned by the emperor’s God for some sin long forgotten or even unknown to those of us sent to atone for it, an atonement Zlee and I were yet kept from by the simple fact that we were a more useful tool kept alive, though all it would take was for one of us to be hit by a shell, or brought down by something as simple as dysentery, and the other would be useless and so sacrificed.

  And no doubt we would have been ordered in the end to stand and die there on the slopes of those mountains, along with half a million other men I’d slipped past silently in a trench or shared tea with in the Austrian Landwehr when the Italians launched their eleventh battle on the southern front at the end of that summer had we not been ordered north to Kobarid with a new regiment of Austrian Sturmtruppen, without knowing or even questioning why.

  The Tolmin bridgehead was only a day behind us when the Italians let loose from their positions and fought to cross the Soca, holding their lines this time. In its first two days alone, the August shelling exceeded the onslaught we had faced in May and left entire divisions of men wiped out, save for a few freakish survivors. Onto the Bainsizza Plateau the Italians charged, resisted only here and there where air reconnaissance had failed to identify a well-dug-in company of Austrian riflemen and machine gunners. And on a day when Emperor Karl was said to have surveyed the lost battleground from Cepovan Hill with Borević at his side, the order was given to retreat from the Bainsizza in order to save what was left of his loyal army, Borević himself hoping at least to keep the northern borders of the Austrian Littoral intact, along with the southern prize of Trieste, but leaving the Soca south of Luzia to be revered by Italian soldiers and poets as the Isonzo.

  We watched, too, that day, like chosen ones who turn back to see their city burn, and surveyed the battle from the northern heights that rose above that river. None of the men, Austrian or Italian, had faces as they had when we stood with or against them in battle. It was the crawl of the fight we witnessed sweeping steadily east below, the scene broken only by the concentration of artillery on some holdout sectors, until the mountain breeze pushed out the cloud of smoke and Italian helmets continued to poke along the plain and were contested only intermittently. Then, at our new captain’s orders, we turned away, shouldered our rifles, and hiked in silence and single file.

  IN THE SMALL RIVER TOWN OF KOBARID, TUCKED INTO A shaded and rugged valley where only a single church with a rounded bell tower rose above the tiled roofs of the houses of farmers and merchants who cared little for whether the rest of the world referred to their home (as obscure before the autumn of 1917 as some Tasmanian cove) by a name Slavic or Italian, we ranged among the Austrian Sturmtruppen with whom we had retreated, and a number of German forces who had come south from the western front.

  There was no peace or active cease-fire on the river this far north, but the animus of battle was absent, at least for the time being, and we returned to the exercise of watching and ranging, taking the occasional shot at some poorly disciplined or perhaps new recruit in the trenches that faced us to the west, but we found that we were killing less and less, not because our skills were weakening but because our adversaries were digging in—whether out of fear or preparation for some engagement to come, we were unable to tell.

  Perhaps, though, they had their scouts, too, who might have witnessed what we were becoming, old soldiers who seemed to have marched into a new war. As sharpshooters, Zlee and I were trained to be invisible and silent. But for rounds of ammunition, field rations, and water, we stripped away or left in reserve what the standard infantry soldier needed—and wanted—in his pack to survive, so that we could move in and out of hides like jewel thieves.

  But the Sturmtruppen of the Armeeoberkomando carried with them what seemed like the crucial elements of an entire supply truck on their belts and backs—double rations of food, water, gas masks, filters, hand grenades, flashlights, spades, pickaxes, wire cutters, medical kits, compasses, whistles, trench daggers, bayonets, pistols, carbines, and on and on—and still they moved as though every limb of every man followed the orchestrated touches of an overlord, all-seeing, all-knowing, indefatigable, and swift. They drilled in separate units, and although their uniforms never matched a single shade of Austrian gray, their steps did, so that from the distance that Zlee and I often observed them, they appeared a flock of disparatefeathered doves who nevertheless clung in flight to a formation that bolted forward in an instant, left or right, without a single frayed or lagging edge.

  The men of our own army were like ambitious re
cruits compared to the German soldiers who swelled not just our ranks but our morale, men the likes of which we had never seen, soldier paragons who looked as though they could—and would—rise and do battle at a moment’s notice, even from the deepest reaches of sleep. They were distinguishable only by the visorless Feldmütze they wore and their indifference to all but the dutiful carrying out of orders, as though they were the very laws of cause and effect. And yet, in reserve, where we maintained rifles and listened to flat-toned stories of days on the Somme (where they said a man was lucky if he could say he had kept himself alive for an hour, let alone the length of a day), they were humorous and good-souled men who laughed at our German (which marked us as Slavs), shared their food and drink equally, never quarreled, and showed respect to anyone who moved with the same command-abiding precision with which they moved. The world and the war—life and death—were that simple.

  When Zlee and I first arrived at the southern front in those spring months that lengthened to feel like years, and ran afoul of Austrian line officers who were convinced that their place above subordinates was given to them by the divine right of kings, we cultivated our own aloofness as sharpshooters to avoid the whimsical orders that issued from those men when they felt the need to be obeyed. But among the Austrian and German troops we fell in with that autumn in Kobarid, we felt the camaraderie of skill and demeanor, and so began to believe again in the possibility of victory in that war, after having lost so many battles, a victory, we would soon find out, that was being mapped out in the mountains above the plateau the generals had conceded to their enemy in order to save themselves and their imperial army.

  Gradually it became clear to our high command that the strength of the Italians on the Bainsizza Plateau came at the expense of troops left to defend their lines to the north. This, and the rumors swirling that General Cadorna had no intention of waging war so close to winter, and that even he, their commander in chief, had retreated to quarters in the mountains to write his memoirs. To us, though, what mattered was the martial practice of routine, each soldier to his regiment, and Zlee and I on our own. With permission from our sector captain (after hearing a group of men from the Black Forest say they longed only for something close to the food they had once enjoyed there), we shot a stag in the woods east of our own lines and delivered it up to the mess sergeant, who turned it into a venison stew, which he served with brown bread and beer, items which had showed up mysteriously from Bohemia. There was a feeling of renewed strength among our company that night, and we rested well, free from the threat of random artillery and mortar fire, and woke the next day to a morning cold and clear there on the river, the air smelling of autumn and cookstoves.

  That was a Monday and near the end of October, which I remember because a priest had come to say Mass the day before. We knew not a word of his Latin and took Communion perfunctorily, then stood around wide-eyed and waiting for the cook to dole out our huntsman’s feast. But before Zlee and I could claim our fair share, we were summoned to the captain’s tent, where we saw again Sergeant Major Bücher, who had trained us in Klagenfurt.

  “Die Zwillinge,” he said when we entered, and smiled his broad smile, his tunic adorned with the ribbon of the Bavarian Military Service Order. “You have kept well, I see.”

  We saluted and he took a step toward us with arms crossed behind his back, as though in the attitude of inspection.

  “We have kept, Herr Bücher,” Zlee said, and at this the man nodded, turned, and lowered his head.

  Never, when I set out from Pastvina—all of the world I knew—did I imagine that war would become such a lonely and peregrinated life. A soldier lives by nature in the company of others like him, protecting, trusting, and much of the pull away from my father and my village was one born of a desire for common conviction among that company. We believed in the right of the emperor in those days, and any man who took up arms believed it to the end, an end no one feared, for, if it came, it carried purpose and the promise of a kingdom greater even than the one for which we were willing to fight and die.

  And then a skill we honed out of need put Zlee and me on the path of an isolated, if not a privileged, existence within that fraying quilt of cultures, tongues, and commanders so at odds and yet capable of taking orders so that men stood and fought and died, and other men took their place, and any notion of camaraderie or company I once had disappeared in the detached deployment of men like us who worked on the periphery of rank and regimental assignment in what they called a modern war, but which bore our mortality along like any other.

  None of this I questioned as we moved from place to place, often only hours before destruction rained down upon whoever or whatever remained there, and Zlee and I kept marching forward, believing that this was our fate and no man or weapon could touch us. Until I saw our old mentor that day.

  I was glad to lay eyes on Bücher again and probably stood ever so slightly taller in that tent as a result, but I wondered, too (like a child who is playing with a difficult puzzle and to whom the position of a long-passed-over piece suddenly becomes clear), if there wasn’t simply a human hand in what I had attributed to some divine purpose, someone, not something, directing us like a general moving an army on a map, though our mover wore an overcoat and a wooden leg and we were the only two pieces he pushed on that map, and I had a bad feeling about where it was Sergeant Bücher was about to send us.

  He paced back and forth a few steps and then said to our captain in German, “Attach them to Klammer’s regiment. Though Prosch, the bastard, doesn’t deserve them.”

  To us, he said that, while we had trained hard with these men for the offensive that was imminent, he had a request from the Austrian high command for a team of sharpshooters to report to Fort Cherle in the high mountains near Lake Garda, where an Italian sniper had been taking his toll on the men there.

  “It will be a long and difficult passage,” he said, “and the war may even be over before you get there, but this is what I trained you to do. To hunt and to kill what you are hunting. Not storm bridges.” He snapped to attention, dismissed us, and said, “Godspeed, my friends.”

  Two days later, in a cold and shrouding mist, while German and Austrian special forces smashed through the unsuspecting Italian lines at Kobarid and commenced an attack that collapsed Cadorna’s army and forced it to retreat as far as the shores of the Piave River, Zlee and I hiked north and west into the Karnische Alpen and jagged Dolomiten, peaks and valleys already covered in wet and deep snows that forced the unit of Tiroler Landesschützen with whom we traveled onto skis and snowshoes as we crossed the northern littoral, away from the rivers of Italy, and back into the mountains.

  THE NORTHWESTERN CARPATHIANS, IN WHICH I WAS RAISED, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might—millennia later—be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.

  And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and the next, when the time came for that.

  In Tolmezzo, we picked up another unit of Landesschützen, along with a Bergführer, and separated so that each team would be no more and no less than a day apart, ours leaving one day later. We hiked through the Wolayer Pass to Kötschach-Mauthen (the names of places told to us by our mountain guide), and roads gave way to footpaths, and footpaths disappeared into forests, and what towns and hamlets we came to and passed through, then, didn’t matter enough to name, so we hike
d in silence, as the soldiers with whom we trekked were inclined.

  And they—these soldiers of the east Tirol—bore the years of their own detached fighting in the distinct terrain of the high Alpine war. When we stopped to rest and take water and food, and they removed their protective clothing, I saw fingers missing from frostbite, unkempt beards, and deep carved lines radiating from the edge of their eyes and across scabbed and leathery faces. And although we remained silent as we moved, over tea they (who seemed to know who and what we were) would remind us, in a tone strangely hieratic and as though they could see into our disappointment at having been ordered away from the Soca, that this, too, was a front, these mountains borders that separated centuries of their own culture, convictions, and quiet life from the new, false sense of nation that the Italians in their folly had already succumbed to, and of this we had no doubt as we fell back into formation and followed our guides along some path that remained invisible to us and yet to them had been carved in stone by great-great-grandfathers long ago.

  As the days wore on, the cold slowed us more than the snow, and had we not the shelter of a mountain refuge each night along the way, we might have survived one bivouac in that terrain but perished by the morning, so fast and hard would those temperatures change, bringing blizzards that kept us snowbound sometimes for days, and the journey that should have taken a few weeks by foot looked more likely to stretch into months.

  But even these periods of rest were seen as necessary to the nature of the landscape, and never did I sense any form of boredom or acedia entering into the disposition of those men, so Roman and stoic in the makeup of body and soul were they. When the front that had brought weather cleared out, we rose and pushed on as ordered.