The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [26]
As a team with rifle, rounds, field glasses, and maps, Zlee and I were a rarity, spotter and shooter equally good at both. Bücher called us die Zwillinge, “the twins.” And then, almost as quickly as it began, just shy of a month of training in that mountain forest by the lake and on ground soft and thawing in the sun, we were pronounced ready, given gold-colored sharpshooter cords for our uniforms, told to keep silent and alert, and sent off to the front, unaware of what kind of war awaited us there.
LIKE MOST OF THE TROOPS ON THAT TRAIN, MEN WHO STRODE along the ravines and through forests from Ljubljana west to the river town of Most na Soc•i, Zlee and I had yet to see battle, and we were a spirited, if tentative, bunch, some men singing, others shouting boastful taunts to unseen and unknown Italians, until, idle and waiting at the station platforms of small and emptied Slovenian towns, we saw our first trains of the wounded push past.
Closer to the lines, we came upon the field hospitals and casualty-clearing stations, where the lives of those men in all their misery were born.
Because this was where trains were constantly switching, we stopped and were held there, which must have been some mistake if anyone had the morale of new soldiers in mind. Some joked, others praised the valor of the wounded, but most of us just looked away or made the sign of the cross to hide our unease, unease at the sight of figures prone on stretchers or laid out on the frozen ground, some screaming and crying for their mothers like hurt children, others emitting a rhythm of slow moans, as though their breath had to pass through the reed of a bassoon. Some never uttered a sound. Soldiers old enough to have facial hair at that time wore their best imitations of Franz Jozef’s handlebar mustache. On the gray and emaciated lips of the dying, though, those mustaches appeared unkempt and spindling imitations of the real thing.
I don’t know how many hours we waited, or for what or whom we were waiting. Trains that had arrived behind us had inched out of there long ago. It seemed an eternity passing and chipping away at our collective desire at that moment to hurl our young wills into what battle awaited us, believing somehow that we would be saved and emerge unscathed, while others, though lost, should live on in our memories as heroes, so that the borders our train approached might remain drawn as though time itself had drawn them.
From the siding, we could hear long-range artillery dropping randomly in the distance, indistinguishable from the thunder of a storm passing, or commencing. One stretcher would get ferried into a tent, while others still waited outside, the look on the ones left behind, if they looked at all, an aspect of dismay and surprise. I watched a young woman without expression on a face that might once have been pretty carrying a large bucket like it was just another basin of wash water, the bucket pressed against an apron soaked in blood. She stopped beside a cistern I hadn’t noticed before (or, if I had, couldn’t recognize what its contents were) and dumped her care of body parts into a swill of larger limbs. On her way back to the tent, she leaned over one of the silent, mustached officers, who looked as though he had fallen asleep, and pulled the dirty wool blanket that had accompanied him to these grounds over his face. Then she disappeared.
And at about the time I saw the sun dropping through a break in the clouds to the west, the conductor whistled that we were to depart, and the company commander shouted at a group of men who were smoking and had started a game of cards, so that some brushed their winnings into their hats and they all swung aboard as the train lurched, and we were off, not stopping again on that pilgrimage from which most of us would never return, until we had reached the front.
EXCEPT FOR THE INTERMITTENT EXERCISE OF ARTILLERY RANGING or harassing, the Soca Valley was quiet in the early spring of 1917. There had been many defeats the year