The Sojourn Page 9

  There was nothing to gain by kindness in that war, but those men drew us into their numbers and gave to us from their own store the woolen socks and balaclavas and mittens made of rabbit skin that they wore as we hiked and waited, hiked and waited, week after week, the landscape breathtaking, the altitude increasingly punishing, and we followed the arc of the range south by southwest and into the Dolomiten, where we replaced our alpenstocks with ice axes and strapped nailed soles to our boots and roped ourselves together as we climbed, with Zlee and me in the middle of the team so that the veteran guides could both lead in front and bring up the rear, the paths we walked now discernible only to those guides. And for a few late-autumn days, during which we hiked steadily and without rest until we came to the mountaintop refuges along our way and slept, I felt a sense of peace in that war, within myself, and without, amid the unexpected beauty of those peaks that lured and threatened us like enemies themselves, though a threat unlike the arbitrariness of battle on the Soca, because the mountains seemed in equal measure exacting and prepared to forgive.

  Even so, we were reminded of how indiscriminate and cold this enemy who would survive us all was as we approached Mount Marmolada and proceeded up the face, a full traverse the only option we were given. A father and his son, who had joined the Landesschützen together and who knew the mountains so well that they could point out critical discrepancies in the maps issued from the high command, were the last two on our rope and saw too late the thin ice layer that masked the crevasse over which we had all passed, blinded and hunched by exhaustion and the weight of our packs, and the old man dropped through like a stone, pulling the line taut in an instant and his son in a rapid slide toward him, so that the boy (I say this remembering that I was just eighteen at the time, but this lad, strong as he was, could not have been a day over fifteen) had to lean back and dig his heels into the snow as he yelled “Absturz!” to Zlee and me, and we dropped and dug in hard with our axes. But the shock and dizziness weakened his footing and he began to slip as the crumbling layer through which his father had broken cracked and shattered and the rope moved through it like wire through wax, so that he, too, now fell as the top gave way beneath him.

  Slowly, the weight of two men dangling from that rope began dragging Zlee and me to the edge of the crevasse, until I could peer down into its faint blue and see the boy struggling to right himself in near daylight, while the old man twisted on the darkened bitter end. As we tried to haul them out of that grave, the rope began to slice and fray against the hard crust, our own footing gradually giving way, and I saw the boy look down at his father (whose figure had stopped spinning) and up again at me, then pull his knife out of its sheath, cut the rope above his head, and disappear into the ice.

  We continued on, over less daunting peaks, but with the storms and the weather becoming more severe, until one day we forded steep falls, which we were told were the headwaters of the Adige, and in what little talk there was among these men, there was mention of Advent soon, and at the next refuge a makeshift wreath of fresh spruce and paraffin candles unburned and waiting sat on the table, left by villagers or the unit of Landesschützen that had been here before us (although days or weeks before, we weren’t sure), and yet there was little else to mark the time since we had left Kötschach and begun our long descent toward the Asiago Plateau, so unremitting was our trek of ascents and descents through the seemingly endless and impassable world of forest, rock, and snow.

  And on the last day of November, at an outpost where our team caught up with the unit we had been dogging, Commander Klammer passed around a clear glass bottle of grappa to celebrate his patron, Saint Andrew, and I remembered celebrating the same, my father’s name day, each year in Pastvina, the mutton, the rich red Hungarian wine (before he took to slivovica, and the only time drink was ever allowed), the reminder that the old man painted with a parted beard and a scroll brought wisdom and the Word, and this all foreshadowing the Savior the pious men surrounding me said was to come.

  My father, who was drunk on so little in those days, used to say with a cherubic smile, although his tone had sounded sad, “There is God in all of this,” and I wondered that night in the mountains of Austria if he was right, or if he was bending to the fear that over the years had begun to encompass him, and I said out loud, “Where is God in all of this, Father? Where?” But he was silent there. No word. No wisdom. Was he where I had left him, his kiss dry, his eyes wet? Or was he silent now because he had gone from me? Zlee and I downed our toast of the strong drink that tasted like grapes soaked in turpentine and butter, heard someone who had just been told why it was we were on that odyssey whisper, “Armer Kerl,” slept fitfully for the cold, and woke before the sun was up to leave with this new unit of Landesschützen, the one that would take us, finally, to Fort Cherle, although, as it turned out, the storm of the winter was yet to descend, and it would be nearly another month of hiking and waiting in the high mountains before we arrived at that garrison.

  I REMEMBER STILL, AS WE APPROACHED FORT CHERLE, THE new snow falling on the already deep pack we skied, and the strange lack of harassing fire from either the Italian or Austrian positions as we pushed up the access road that led to the back of the fort, and in the silence of the forest, I thought of Bücher. He had been right about the time it would take us to get there. Had he been right, too, about the fighting and the war?

  We reported to Captain Edmund Prosch, a bored and phlegmatic officer assigned to this stalemated outpost. Or maybe he was happy there, away from battle on the open plains below, where our army now pursued with a thirst to destroy its enemy (it was said), news of which he had certainly received, for there was a tone of anticipated victory at Cherle, and everywhere, for that matter, along the northern front. After he looked us over and told us never to report to a commanding officer without having washed and shaved first, he bent down to his papers.

  We waited, undismissed, until he looked up and said, as though this was the first day we had spent in the army—and the conversation with our superior officer had in fact been seamless—“You men will do as I say, and go where I tell you to go,” and then informed us that there would be Mass at midnight in the fort’s refectory. “Mandatory. You’re not Protestants, are you?” he asked as he turned back to the papers he kept riffling through, occasionally adding his signature.

  I said that we weren’t, and he said, “Good. Let them desert to the English all they want, because I would just as soon shoot them coming at me as running away.”

  And so we moved along the tunnels of that fort to a dank and makeshift chapel, listened in our weariness and the darkness lit by candlelight to the high Latin of the Christmas liturgy, with which we were wholly unfamiliar, and fell off to sleep afterward on folded blankets and steel racks bolted into crumbling bricks, where the cold emanated from the walls.

  Fort Cherle stood at the edge of Austrian territory in the high mountains northeast of Lake Garda and straddled the northern Alpine front. From its barricades and walls, its guns traded defensive fire with Italian posts at Campomolon, although it seemed like hubris to believe that these positions had reach enough to claim or even prove that they defined lines and borders in those mountains. All of its firepower was trained forward and to the south, and we were told by a gunnery captain that its roof could withstand sustained direct hits of artillery and that its walls (belowground and encircled by a kind of dry moat) were meant to absorb the impact of shells. Outside, though, a soldier on lookout was in greater danger of being wounded or killed by the limestone shards that a well-placed shell could produce than he was by an army climbing out of the surrounding valley and storming its ramparts.

  And as though to dramatize the senseless and unsuspecting terror of the place for us, in the first week of the new year, the Italians began a steady barrage from their 149-mm cannons, enough to make one wonder if perhaps they hadn’t chosen this fort as the one place where they would wage an unlikely assault. The rounds were steady and frequent and
their accuracy was gaining. Zlee and I were called up to a gunner’s post to assess what the fire might presage, and as we climbed into one of the mounts, a near-direct hit slammed into the wall of the moat that surrounded the fort. When we lifted our heads and shook off the dirt, we turned to the two gunners who were manning the M9. Like twins themselves attached to that gun in life and death, they sat unblinking and in disbelief on the iron grillwork of the steps, an ort of sharp limestone in the neck of each, blood pumping out and pouring into their uniforms at the chest every time they gasped for breath, until, in what was perhaps only a few seconds, they took their last. That fort was the remnant of wars no country would ever see again, and I quickly came to despise it, even before I knew what awaited when it came time for me to climb down off of that mountain with the will to fight for the only hope left: to see my father again.

  IN MID-JANUARY—IT WAS 1918, THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR—Zlee and I saw for the first time the work of our adversary. At first, Prosch and his men believed it was random fire and Italian luck that was taking a slow toll on the men who stood lookout at dawn, or who didn’t come back from the early-morning hunting party in search of goat. But once they saw that luck had nothing to do with placing a bullet in the head of a man in the same spot every time, they realized they were being hunted by a sniper. The only thing random about him was the frequency with which he killed, this only adding to the cost of morale at the fort, as well as men on lookout. There was no frequency, at least any that they could discern. Three days, one week, a month would go by, and then two kills two days in a row, followed by another lull. No pattern emerged, and no artillery seemed able to deter him, or them.

  Prosch was the son of a Viennese colonel and he insisted that he be sent his own sharpshooter to hunt for the sniper. A small party of four Landesschützen had showed up in September. They’d gone out, and only one had come back, pale with the loss of blood and dehydrated and able to give up no information on the others, or the sniper, before he died. Two Austrian sharpshooters had been sent in October, just before the advance at Kobarid, and they had been found dead in a cave less than a mile above Cherle, the shooter appearing asleep over the sights of his rifle, the spotter killed with a bullet to the head. Prosch had sent an outraged cable to Ljubljana, and within days, Zlee and I were trudging through those mountain passes because Bücher had become well known and respected at the Austrian high command.

  After the harassing fire of New Year’s, we wondered, but never questioned, why Prosch kept putting us on lookout just before dusk, when, on that morning in mid-January, one of the two men who had replaced us dropped with a bullet through his neck. Artillery responded in the direction of Campomolon, but no one had gotten a good fix on the shooter’s position because the morning was overcast and the air had a slight mist to it. Prosch ordered us to his office and told us to get what we needed from his lieutenant and “find that son of a whore, or pray that he finds you first.”

  From the lieutenant and a bespectacled man in supply we got beeswax for our boots, a ration of biscuits, an extra canteen for water, and some small candles we used to melt snow in our cups, and then we stayed put at the fort. The temperatures had dipped well below freezing by nightfall and a sickle moon hung in the western sky, the air so crisp that it seemed to crackle when you inhaled. The next day we rose and ranged to the peak of Mount Cornetto, the best vantage point in the region of the surrounding territory, and safely to the north, but we only did this to escape the damp cells and crushing morale of the fort. In truth, we had no idea how we should go about finding the man or men who most likely thought and acted as we did, and we even wondered each time we stepped off of the access road to the fort and into the pine and rock ledges of the forest, if we’d emerge onto some height, glass our line of sight, and be killed right where we stood. But we changed our route every day, found several vantage points and possible hides, overnighted below the tree line each night in a hidden snow cave we carpeted with pine needles, and, after a week of this, reported back to Fort Cherle.

  Prosch seemed surprised to see us, or at least he feigned surprise, and wanted to know why we weren’t out hunting our sniper, as we’d been ordered.

  “Herr Hauptman, because he’s not out there,” Zlee said.

  “How can you be so sure?” Prosch replied.

  “It’s too cold, sir. So we’re ranging to find the most likely place for him to reappear when the weather breaks, and for us to position ourselves.”

  “Splendid,” Prosch said. “I’ve been sent mountain men who have found it too cold to hunt in the mountains. Corporals Pes and Vinich, if one more man dies at the hand of this Italian while you are under my command, there will be no courts-martial. I will execute you both myself and have the stable boys pitch your bodies over a cliff. Do you understand?”

  For the first time, I feared what a man was capable of doing to me in that war, a man weaker than I, and yet one whom I was bound to obey, at least in his presence. At that moment, I would have chosen to have been blown to bits by random artillery rather than to have had Captain Edmund Prosch be the last man to see me alive before a firing squad put a bullet through my heart.

  But Zlee never flinched. “Herr Hauptmann, if you will forgive the solitary nature of our methods and allow me to explain.”

  Zlee’s German sounded nothing like the high tone he had meant to use, even if sarcastically, but Prosch, who loved to be coddled almost as much as he loved to be feared, sat down and said, “Explain.”

  And so Zlee told him that we suspected the sniper had been using the intermittent warming trends in the mountains to hunt in the early mornings, when the mist that rose from the melting snow provided a kind of directional cover for him, while it still allowed him to fire accurately using an optical sight, because the scope picked up more morning light than the naked eye. And in the thin mountain air, the closer he got to his target, the more accurate he’d be.

  “He’s not firing from the next mountain over, sir,” Zlee said, “but more likely only a few hills.” We couldn’t know this for sure, but it was our best guess, and so we told Prosch something he wanted to hear.

  Prosch asked why the other Austrian sharpshooters hadn’t known this and Zlee said that unfortunately they had overestimated the skill of their adversary. “If he were good at what he does, sir, he would be wearing a coat of field gray and fighting for Emperor Karl.” Although we ourselves suspected our target to be a local Austrian trained like us, yet who, for reasons only he knew, had switched sides.

  Zlee then explained that we would do nothing until a warm front came through, in anticipation of which we would set out in the direction of the peak to the north of us, settle into our hide, and wait for the shooter to show himself.

  “How do you propose to see him before he sees you, or, more likely, kills another one of my sentries?” Prosch asked. The corner of his mouth lifted to what looked like a faint smile every time he posed a question, and I wondered if he was using us and every other sharpshooter who had come through here for a bizarre game of cat and mouse that broke up the boredom of his war.

  Zlee said that on the morning when the temperature rose above freezing, the sentry would be a mannequin, “the best likeness your man in supply can create.” We would attempt to get a visual on him, and at the very least would see his muzzle flash when he fired. With that, perhaps, we might be the ones to fire next.

  Prosch stood, head down, for what seemed like too long, and then he looked up at us. “A ruse. Yes. I like it. Don’t worry, Corporal Pes, our sentry will be so lifelike, you’ll expect him to salute. All that will remain is for you and your twin to shoot straight, and well.”

  It was almost a month before the mercury rose above zero in those mountains, an evening in late February, when full cloud cover came in after a day of strong sun and trapped the heat. Already, each week seemed to bring more daylight, and you could feel the moisture rising and evaporating in the air, so we reported to Prosch and had the night sentries r
eplace the man who was to take over at 0400 with our dummy.

  They gave him a cigarette at 0600 and had the sentry prop him up so that his face showed through a gun mount on the parapet. That same sentry had orders to lie on the floor next to the mock guard until 0800, or until someone fired in his direction, after which he was to yell as loud as he could, while still undercover, “Sharfschütze!” The artillery commander gave the forward gunners orders to wait for three minutes after the shot and then to fire in the direction of Campomolon, regardless of whether they could tell exactly from where the shot had come.

  From sunset until first light, Zlee and I watched from a tight grouping of rocks just above the tree line a mountain away, expecting the shooter to be hiding in a slow-rising forest of firs that began at an elevation slightly higher than Cherle, about six hundred yards east-southeast of the fort. If we were right, we’d have a long but clear shot across the valley, a distance of almost eleven hundred yards, we reckoned, the longest we’d ever attempted, longer than any Austrian sharpshooter had ever recorded, but the closest we could get to this enemy who knew those mountains better than we did without letting him know that we were there, too.

  There was a long and deceptive silence then on that battlefield of peaks and crags and valleys, as the sky lightened and the snowcaps reflected changing hues of rose, until, within minutes, as though the curtain had lifted on a play we’d written below, we heard the crack of a rifle and a distant more urgent cry of “Scharfschütze!” and then another crack, soon after which (too soon by my count) artillery let loose a hurried salvo into Italian territory, and everything was quiet again.

  Zlee never took the shot. With the rising mist came a breeze, strong enough to make his long-distance attempt no more accurate than if he had been looking down the barrel of a musket. As for me, spotting into that dawn from a distance too great, I could see nothing of what was unfolding down below, and so we were caught not knowing what to do. If we abandoned our hide and reported back to Prosch, we’d be marked ourselves, and not likely to get another chance to outshoot our shooter. If we stayed put, there was no guarantee he would return to the same position for more hunting the next day, or any day after, and Prosch would certainly believe that we had deserted. He’d only be happy only with the head of some foe on a silver platter, a dish we might just be able to deliver, though, if we trusted our instincts, and luck did the rest. What did we have to lose (besides our lives) by staying put for another twenty-four hours and finding our man before he could strike again the next morning?