The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [28]
And so, that evening we were told to rest and ready our weapon, and by midnight we were hidden and silent and waiting in an abandoned kaverne with an escape route through a tunnel out the back.
MY FIRST KILL WAS A MEMBER OF THE BERSIGLIERI, THE ELITE Italian infantry, though to me he was just a solider who got as close as possible to the forward line on motorcycle and then marched several hundred yards carrying a leather pouch toward a manned trench. Zlee spotted him when he was still on his bike, which made one hell of a racket in the quiet dawn. From our position, and according to orders, we had been expecting only to report on movement that day, but there seemed an arrogance to this man, his arrival, his singular message, the ridiculous cap he wore, which had something like plumage sticking from the top of it, and the rage that I had carried to this war found itself focused. From where we stood behind our shield of rock and dirt, the front was two hundred yards away. I had the man in my sights from the moment Zlee said, “Moving target, five hundred yards.” I’ll lose him when he ducks into a dugout, I thought, but he marched right up and stood in a part of their trench that rose to his shoulders and left his neck and head exposed. I aimed for his ear, just below that goddamn peacock’s head of a helmet he wore, and pulled the trigger.
“That’s a kill,” Zlee said as I watched the man’s profile disappear, the first life I had ever taken.
I bolted another round, held, and waited. There was scrambling and someone yelled “Cecchini!” A face rose in that same position, this time looking right at me through the crosshairs, as though someone had painted them on his teeth, and I fired.
“Two,” Zlee said, but I knew, and I will tell you that I never once wondered who those men might be, if they were in love with anyone or if they had families. They were the enemy, and they would stand and fight and try to kill as many men as I might pass in the night to or from the trenches that separated us not just in battle but—we were told—by the will of God, and so I killed as I had been instructed and believed that death and death alone would save me.
Five minutes later, short-range artillery destroyed the kaverne Zlee and I had used for cover, but we were long gone from there and saw the damage only when we walked past on our way to another hide two weeks later.
Weeks. That’s how we measured time, a week on patrol there in the mountains surrounding Görz as the winter snows gave way to mud and mist and freezing rain, and a week’s rest, during which we rarely did more than maintain equipment, or travel to Ljubljana, where prostitutes, painted and starving, ducked their heads out from alleyways along the river that ran beneath the castle walls, and they begged us for food when they saw that we were only soldiers with no money, which made me feel lonely and then just made me wish we were back on patrol in the mountains, engaged in the careful measure of a not so different kind of hunt.
By April, our commanders wondered where the Italians would attack, not when. Zlee and I were put into service to determine the extent of troop movements, although there was little we could see because of the constantly poor weather that month, mostly rain, and fog from the spring melt, but also the occasional snow squall when the temperatures dipped fast. On one night, the skies cleared enough to reveal a gibbous moon and offer visibility a few miles across the valley, and that’s when we discovered deserters going over to the Italians.
There was talk—rumors fed by Slav nationalists—that the English and Americans were going to help the Czechs and Slovaks set up a sovereign state, if Austria and Hungary could be defeated. With the fall of Görz and the attrition of soldiers, supplies, and ammunition at the front,