The Sojourn (10 page)

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. Windage 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.

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 recruits 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.