The Sojourn (11 page)

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 hiked 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.

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?