The Sojourn

by Andrew Krivak

  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.

  I had one more round in my clip, and Zlee’s ghost had fallen too far from me to crawl to him for what cartridges might remain in his field pouch, and I knew that the next time I stood would be my last. I thought of my father and wondered what it would be like to live a life as long as his, if I would have become him in the end, weaker but wiser from all that’s lost as well as hard-won, and if he might have preferred to have died a young man full of ambition. And I thought of Zlee and what he would do now, surrender or fight to the end, and I wished that we could have sat and talked about the mountains and hills of Pastvina, or at least said good-bye to each other like brothers. I had lost all faith in the belief that I would see those I loved again, but I didn’t want to die and disappear like every other soldier who fought and died and decayed in the flood and layers of indifferent rivers and mud. And I was overcome with fear.

  I rose and threw my hands up, heard a rifle crack, and spun around as though someone had grabbed my right arm and heaved me. My fingers felt numb, and then as though they were on fire, and as I, too, lay on the ground in our trench among the bodies of all the others, one of the soldiers—an Italian, from the look of his uniform—entered the trench from the side and stood over me with his rifle pointed at my head.

  “Please,” I said in English.

  He fired. Dirt from the ground where the bullet struck beside me sprayed and stung my face.

  “Please,” I begged, not for myself, but for all of the men I had killed because I had been trained never to miss.

  He cursed, chambered another round, and raised his rifle again, when an English soldier ran up from behind him and pushed him away.

  “We don’t execute prisoners, mate.” He scowled at the Italian, yanked me to my feet, and smashed me in the ribs with the butt of his rifle. I doubled over in pain but willed myself not to drop to my feet again.

  “Bloody good shooting, you bastard,” he said, not knowing that I understood every word. Then he began to search me, even though I was in a position no sharpshooter would ever have considered a hide, or even been given an order to take up, as he looked for patches, field glasses, rifle scope, maps, or diagrams I might have made, all signs of a sniper. But all that I’d left back in the mountain ravine where Zlee lay dead and frozen, all but the lanyard, which Lieutenant Holub burned in a candle flame on the far side of the river before we made our final attack.

  The Italian cursed louder and mock-inspected his rifle, while the Englishman ignored him, pocketed my dagger, and shoved me down the wet and narrow corridor of mud and out into a wide-open and clearing sky.

  “Get a fucking move on,” he said, and I remember that, the accent, the scorn in that soldier’s voice, the way in which fighting a war seemed just another thing this man not much older than I had been trained to do well, and so did it, as I had done, for the fighting was over now, and I raised my arms above my head and felt blood as it dripped slowly and soaked into my filthy uniform sleeve, cooled in the air, and rested on my skin.

  PRISONERS WHO HADN’T BEEN MAIMED WERE FORCEMARCHED from the Piave to Varago. Roads were littered with the dead, Austrians killed while running or making a final stand, Italian soldiers yet unclaimed. Some looked as though they were slumped over with sleep and that a shout as we passed might rouse them; others were caught in bizarre attitudes and poses, twisted, spitting, begging. One blackened figure knelt with head down and hands open, as though waiting to receive a blessing. Overhead, tight squadrons of planes buzzed loud and low, and the echoes of artillery still rumbled in the east. Not one of us—hundreds of us—said a word as the Italians barked orders and took whatever chances they could to abuse us. For the first time since becoming a soldier, I despised my enemy, now that I was unarmed and no longer had the desire or the means to kill him.

  We marched south by southwest. The clouds lifted and I could tell by the sun in which direction it was we were going. A young Italian patrolling our column (no more than a boy in a uniform that shined for not having been washed yet) hit me in the shoulder with some martial-looking ornamental staff and the pain that shot down my arm to my hand became searing and relentless, so that I halted and tottered and nearly dropped, but the prisoner behind me (a Bosnian, his accent thick and guttural, though I understood him) said to be strong and held me up.

  “Halt den Mund!” the boy shouted in German, and I stood, took a deep breath, and stepped back into line. Through the filthy puttee that I had taken off my leg and wrapped around my hand, I could feel only my thumb. The rest might just as well have been hacked off and discarded.

  We were marched to a concentration camp on the outskirts of a town they called San Biagio di Callalta. The camp was a sorting station for Austrian prisoners of war, and from there we followed the road to Treviso and stopped in another camp near the town of Noale, where they began separating us according to nationality. I found myself among Czechs and Slovaks entirely, in spite of the fact that I answered in German every question I was asked.

  In the camps, there was talk of the Czecho-Slovak Legion, an army being mustered to defend the borders of the new country, and men who bore the lynx-eyed features of the Slavs saw to it that we had a bath, bread, meat, fresh drinking water, and a tarpaulin to sleep under. It was hard to believe, until, in the morning, they offered every one of us a gun and freedom from Italian prison if we agreed to put on another uniform and fight to protect our nation from a weakened but vengeful Hungary. “Those same princes who had deserted us in battle when we needed them most,” they said, men who (I suspected) had never seen battle.

  What was a Czecho-Slovak to me, though, a boy raised among Carpathian peasants in a Magyar culture, professing loyalty in a poor school to a Habsburg, and speaking a language in secret they spoke in a land called America? What could those Czech propagandists tell me about nationality? Yet, on and on they went, the Bohemian officers of the legionnaires, telling us that the Hungarian king had kept us in his pocket for centuries, that our own nation was a right to us, and that a Czecho-Slovak division was already being trained to f
ight against the Austrians in the mountains.

  “We are giving you the chance to fight now for yourselves!” they said with a flourish that seemed more bombastic than persuasive.

  I said no, and didn’t say that I had hunted and put bullets through more than one man who wanted to desert, Czech or Slovak, Austrian or Hungarian. It didn’t matter. I had killed enough for several countries and was happy to stay in prison, where I belonged, not under the command of men who had scheduled trains during most of the war and now made one another captains for yet another army they’d gladly watch march into battle. To them, I must have looked like just another conscript who needed food and a doctor. Get him that, they reasoned, and we’ll get ourselves a soldier.

  The next day, I marched to Padua with a handful of men more unable than unwilling to fight, mostly Slovaks and Rusyns, stripped now of the luxuries we had been given the day before and pushed into the holding pens of Austrian and Honvéd prisoners of war, most of whom looked as though they wouldn’t last the night.

  When I awoke in that camp, I couldn’t get up off the ground on which I had been sleeping. Those of us who could walk were being rounded up and put onto trains, though no one spoke of where, and although I tried (fearing the alternative), I couldn’t move into formation, I was so wracked with pain and shivering (and may even have been babbling, although all the world seemed suddenly quiet to me). An Italian guard began kicking me and shouting “Andiamo!” and then moved to shoulder his rifle when one of the English soldiers at the camp ordered two women orderlies to get a litter and put me in line to see a doctor.