The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [25]
Each day, we disappeared into the woods, wanting to see and not be seen. Most of us they had chosen in twos, and so we worked in twos, Zlee and I seemingly inseparable now as spotter and shooter. After we were dismissed into the forests in teams, the remaining men fanned out to find us, just as my father and I had done in the mountains years ago, hunter and hunted making notes on details of an occupied position, until the hunter ultimately revealed his target. If the hunted—watching from the hide—had more information on the hunter, the teams switched roles. The one with better notes got the kill. Sometimes it was as insignificant as the fold in a man’s cap.
Zlee and I started out against a pair of Tiroleans from the Landesschützen, severe and insular men of the Alpine regions who had remained loyal to the Habsburgs. They kept to themselves and seemed especially derisive of the standard Austrian officers. They hated Slavs, too. It didn’t matter that we were fighting for the same king.
We found them easily enough because they whispered to each other in their mountain dialect as they hid in the socket of two large boulders, which created a kind of sounding board. They must have thought we couldn’t hear them if we couldn’t understand them, and so they cursed us when Zlee inched his head over the top of the rock, looked down, and said in a whisper, “Boom.” I had a page of notes on them, even jotting down a word I transliterated from their Austrian, which Bücher knew I could not have known, and he called them “useless jokers,” and sent them back to their regiment. Once Zlee and I were given the chance to disappear, no one found us, not even Bücher, who had his own perch with a telescope, from which he made notes—good ones, too.
It was just as well that we couldn’t be found, because, but for the sergeant major’s attention, we were ignored. The men we trained with were mostly Austrians, and the training we got was unique to the man sent to instruct us. In spite of Bücher’s insistence that the best weapon the empire had was the men who lived and survived in her mountains, captains who did the recruiting chose as sharpshooters young Austrian men who knew the luxury of sport hunting and who arrived in Klagenfurt with their own rifles, like gentlemen showing up at school with their own horses. That’s where I saw my first Schoenauer, a beautiful and powerful rifle with the precision of a surgical instrument. I saw the Norwegian model of the Krag, German Mausers and Gewehr 98s sent down from the western front, and a few other peculiar cannons that looked as though they should have been left in the nineteenth century. But the weapon didn’t make the shot, and in the end more than a few of those gentlemen were sent home with their rifles, where they’d live to hunt game-park deer, not Italian soldiers.
Twenty-five of us remained by the third week, and that’s when we took to the range again, this time firing a long-barrel Mannlicher 95 with a double-set trigger and fitted with an optical sight, the physical effect of which was still something new for Zlee and me, despite the fact that we had been carrying them around and caring for them for weeks. We were trained to make head shots and aimed for the teeth, which seems ludicrous until, on a cold morning, across the distance of a valley through refracted light, you can suddenly see a man’s breath, see that he’s speaking to a comrade, or perhaps only to himself, having a smoke, singing a song he loves, or maybe giving voice to some prayer, words that will be his last. It was hand-to-hand combat, except that the enemy