The Sojourn (14 page)

Then, in the distance, I heard what sounded like a train approaching, the sound of its wheels and engine growing and growing until it was clear that it was coming toward us. Suddenly I couldn't move and she let go of my hand, her face changing to the stern pose she wore in the daguerrotype, although the image of her still clear and distinct in front of me. And she said, “Jozef! Hurry. Come to me!”

But I couldn't move. I was pinned down and felt as though I was being smothered. “Jozef,” she was almost yelling now, “you must!”

But as she said this, her image began to fade, even as she implored me more and more to go with her, until her
voice trailed off into a beseeching echo, and the oncoming train roared overhead, with nothing in its wake but the dark and a few faint wails like that of a baby, or a lost boy.

I woke, to find the lieutenant standing in the trench with his back to me and looking out over the no-man's-land of the river plain. He heard me stir and turned.

“That was a long night, sir,” I said, my own voice sounding hollow.

“Night? You were out for three days, Vinich. I had to convince the captain for two of them that you were only exhausted from the march and that you'd be up in no time, and so he turned a blind eye.”

He stood and hobbled on one foot for a moment, then placed more weight slowly on the other. I asked him what had happened and he said that on the third day British planes had begun a wave of bombing and strafing runs over our positions. A new unit coming up to the line led them straight to our company, and they went at us all day like hornets from an overturned nest. On their last run, the lieutenant saw the plane that was coming in directly for us. I was huddled in a blanket. He wrapped me tighter and pushed me into the corner of the trench, then threw himself on top of me as the plane opened up with a burst of machine-gun fire. All around him men who couldn't find cover were shot to pieces, those not killed outright screaming from the burning of the wounds the plane's guns inflicted. Another one came in along the same line and dropped a shrapnel bomb as it banked up and away from the trenches and our poor attempts to return fire. The bomb fell just behind of where the lieutenant and I had taken cover, and a piece ripped along the dirt wall and tore into the side of his calf.

“The bleeding stopped this morning,” he said, and showed me the muddy bandage he had found to dress the wound. “I've been drinking more of this Gypsy brew than you have. But I'll live to fight.”

I must have looked dazed, still, from the fever, but he knew what I was thinking. Just another foot soldier who should have been sent to a field hospital in reserve, from which everyone knew he'd never return, and yet there I was, left to ride out the same fever that had been striking hard up and down the lines. The lieutenant took the gold-colored sharpshooter lanyard I had removed and kept secreted in my breast pocket, and he said, “You don't want to have this on you if you're captured, and with what's coming, I'm going to need someone who can shoot.”

His name was Holub, his father a Czech from Vienna and his mother a Slovak from Pozsony. He was in his final year of university, where he studied philology, when he was conscripted and sent to the front in the fall because of the army's desperate need for line officers. He had been cold, hungry, seen men dead and dying, he said, but had never been in battle, and he hoped that he would get the chance to fight the Italians before he died in this damn trench. I was silent the whole time he spoke, grateful to my savior but tired of the war and talk of Austria's superiority, and I hoped, too, for his sake, that Lieutenant Holub would see battle soon and that it would be fierce and unrelenting and that he would die quickly and well.

 

 

BY MAY 1918 WE WERE BEING RESUPPLIED WITH EVERYTHING from horses and trucks to artillery, bullets, coffee, and plum brandy. Our own air support dropped food—tins of
meat and loaves of bread, along with battle rations of hardtack—and officers made sure that men at the front had what they needed to maintain as much morale as one could hope for under the circumstances.

Early June and the last of the troops ordered to the front along the Piave had sneaked beneath their cover of camouflage and taken up position in the alleys of defense we had sculpted out of the stripped and barren mud. Men deserted when they saw squadrons of those British planes take control of the skies, and when they looked to the left and right of them and saw not an army ready to burst from those trenches for a fight, but thinned pockets of sick and dirty men weary from having survived a destruction.

And yet, and yet. Those who rose to stand-to every morning still believed in the genius of Borević and the divine guidance of our emperor. It was that kind of world. The Italians were hated fiercely, and there were still enough veterans of Kobarid around who had watched them turn and flee (“Like rats!” they said, laughing with derision) in the autumn of 1917 to tell their comrades that soon, if they fought “as hard as we fought on the Soca,” well-provisioned Italian trenches would be theirs. And then on to Venice and Milan.

“Soldiers!” the generals exhorted us in a message on the eve of battle, “Your fathers, your grandfathers, and your ancestors have fought and conquered the same enemy with the same spirit. You will not fall below them. You will rise above, and overthrow everything before you.”

On the morning of the fifteenth of June, our guns began at 0300, throwing across the river at the Italians everything we had left. For two hours, our artillery pounded the far shore and I listened and waited in the
ranks with indurate men whose disdain for death had become a filth they let cover themselves and seemed even to display like a talisman, and new recruits who longed to fight instead of starve at home now saw battle for the first time and wept, wet themselves, or tried to run, even after a captain, to make an example, put a bullet through the head of a fresh cadet whose hysterics threatened to unman everyone within earshot of his howls.

We had dug in well with what time, food, and tools were given us. We used riveting of logs, straw, and wire mesh to shore up the banks of mud and stone, so that even though the odd shell or lucky aim dropped directly into our trench works and took its toll of whatever soldier stood his ground there, we underwent the torture of holding hard to our resolve with forbearance, terror, and resignation.

Light came with mist and the smoke of battle, and into it sappers moved like ants to construct pontoon bridges that would let us ford the swollen river. Little more than an hour later, we were given orders to fix bayonets and move out, and I felt a sense of freedom—not fear—as I went over the top and moved onto the floodplain without hesitation, as though my entire being had been let loose by a trigger pull.

The wet ground sucked at our feet, but we struck fast, astounded and buoyed up by the accurate and punishing support our own artillery provided for us in the dawn. At the water's edge, the bridge sections banged and jostled against their fittings as they floated on the thick current, and, still trotting, we bent low to cross them, hoping the anchors at both ends would hold until every man had gone over.

There were other dangers. Our big • koda guns hadn't managed to take out all of the Italian machine-gun nests, and these strafed the bridges when the first units attempted to pass and killed more than half of our men before trench mortars found the right positions. British planes began coming in waves for more bombing runs, so we held back when we heard the drone of their approaching. And when the stream of men surged again, Italian riflemen plied their trade along the banks. Lieutenant Holub went over the top and onto the bridge with us, and when I saw him stumble as we were midstream, I thought his leg had given out, or that he had been hit, but it was the soldier in front of him who had been shot full in the chest, so that Holub tripped on him as the man dropped and rolled into the water, and we pressed on at the double.

When we reached the other side, we took up position in an abandoned Italian trench. All but one of our platoon had made it across, and we regrouped in order to continue our advance. There was little in front of us, though. The cannoneers had done their work. Limbs and litter were everywhere, the bodies of stretcher bearers lying next to the men they had come to remove, and on the wind the bitter taste of gas mingled with the smell of burning pine. By day's end, we had advanced west, uncontested, into a forested rise, from which we could look back out over the Piave. Some of the dead we had seen wore English uniforms, their Lewis guns (which we had heard about) smashed relics of their firepower nearby, and so we knew that the Italians, who still outnumbered us, had Western support on the ground as well as in the air. It was only a matter of time before we found the place at which they had ceased to retreat and turned to make their stand, and it came to us on the next day
with a counterattack in the morning, which by noon we had barely repelled. We had the better position, fortified with several Schwarzloses, and so held our ground with machine-gun and rifle fire against the endless charge of the enemy.

But we lost many men, too. To the north of our position, a group of Italian soldiers penetrated the trench with grenades and fell into hand-to-hand combat until they were killed with knives and pistols. Reinforcements we had expected on the following day never arrived, and we barely held off another counterattack because of the high ground we maintained.

Two days later (it might have been the nineteenth or the twentieth of June, but I had no way of keeping track of days within the month, only the rising and setting of the sun), two new companies made it to our side—part, another new lieutenant among them said, of an entire division of men thrown into the fight by General von Wurm, in the hopes of opening a gap in the Italian lines and pushing through once and for all.

The next day, we stood to with bayonets fixed, and Holub said to me in the trench, as though a veteran of battle, “Stay right beside me,” and we went over the top into a wall of Italian machine-gun and rifle fire, the enfilade so close that we were pinned down instantly, and I felt the heat of the rounds, wondered how it was I hadn't been hit and killed, turned to Holub for direction, and saw his body lying next to me, eyes wide open as he stared at the sky, his chest and belly torn apart. Officers in the rear ordered men to advance, and those men were mowed down. When the attack was abandoned, we crawled back into our position and sat numb and indifferent, like prisoners who had just received a stay of execution, until new
orders came on the morning of the following day: a fullscale withdrawal back to the east bank of the Piave.

Because we were in one of the forward positions of the advance, our company made up the flank in retreat. Horses, trucks, artillery caissons, and men poured over the Piave under even greater danger from aircraft and machine guns now, because our supporting guns had gone silent from ever more accurate Italian fire and the continuous, lethal presence of British planes. The Italians were hungry for their revenge, now that it was clear that we had nothing, nothing left at all. They weren't going to let an enemy who had humiliated them on their own soil simply walk across the river to lick his wounds. When I took up my defensive position on Papadopoli Island with what was left of our platoon and prepared to retreat the unlikely half mile across the eastern branch of the river to safety, I heard the whistle for an attack come from the Italian side, and so I could do nothing else but take up my weapon to stand and defend the troops retreating.

At eighty yards, the machine guns to the left of me opened up on soldiers moving quickly in a forward advance. The gunners let go in tight, short bursts, aiming for where the men ran bunched up. I drew down on the ones quick enough to break for cover and dropped them with single shots to the waist. Another fellow rifleman to my right—a boy no older than sixteen—fired with a control and accuracy so well trained and deadly that I believed for a moment that it was Zlee at my side and that we'd get out of this alive. But the waves of men coming over those embankments seemed to grow higher and higher. Our defensive artillery, and any commander who might order men to come up and fight, had turned to the logistics of flight and left us to fend for ourselves in this position,
which was becoming more sacrificial than defensive, and it was only a matter of time before we ran out of ammunition and were overtaken by the storm.

Upriver, no more than a hundred yards, I saw an enemy unit make it to our barbed wire and begin cutting, and I realized that the division in charge of these positions had chosen ground that left a gap of cover between the machine guns' range and our trenches. I heard a few explosions and their guns stopped. I knew that soon the fight would come down to grenades and knives. I bolted a new round, and as the gunners to my left stopped to reload, they were shot dead in quick succession. I turned and could see a sweep of enemy soldiers attacking from ground that a company of Honvéd had been ordered to hold for the retreat, but they, too, had cut and run.

I pushed the dead men and their gun tripod over and got down in a prone position behind them. My nameless comrade of the trench kept firing at the unit advancing in front of us until more than he could kill with one rifle came at him and he fell back from a bullet in the face, and I was alone, to fight, retreat, or die like those whose bodies lay off to the side as though they were asleep in spite of the din surrounding us.

When I stood to return fire, I saw a new wave of infantry, hushed and spurred, advancing upon the island. Two men with a light machine gun dropped into a shell hole out in front of me, and I waited for the soldier feeding the belt to lift his head to see where I had taken position, and when he did, I shot him and ducked for cover again. Some enemy rifle fire ensued, but I had silenced the machine gunners, or so I thought, when a burst opened up above me, stopped, and then hammered—as though
enraged at the delay I had caused them—into the now ripped-up carcasses of the dead men covering me.