The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [32]
And hell followed. Three thousand guns—long-range, medium-range, trench mortars, everything—opened fire on us and every other Austrian position from Plava to the Adriatic for two days straight, so that no one or no thing could run, move, or even breathe, a hell in which I prayed to God that I might die so that the banishment toward it would end as quickly as it had begun.
They say the earth is a soldier’s mother when the shells begin to fall, and she is, at first, your instinct not to run, but to dig and hold and hug as much of that earth as you possibly can, down, down, down into the dirt, with your fingertips, hands, arms, chest, thighs, and feet, until you are like a child clinging with his entire body to comfort after a nightmare.
But minutes of this, then hours, and days, and you wonder, How many days? Because the earth herself can’t stop shaking and disintegrating as the shrieks and howls rain in like otherworldly miscreations on wing who know —know—where you are hiding and want not just to kill but to annihilate you, their hissing and infuriate ruts as they approach the last sound you’ll ever hear.
In that initial wave, our forward position saved our lives. Lines flanking us to the right and left took hit after hit and the longer-range guns seemed to be inching ahead with each bombardment, stalking our counterbattery fire, command posts, and supply dugouts, so that any response or counterattacks would have to struggle to follow. Yet the Italians seemed interested not in accuracy but fury, and Zlee and I pressed down beneath the cover of canvas we’d used for camouflage and a wall of sandbags we pushed up to take shrapnel for four hours of nonstop shelling, some explosions so close I could feel air being sucked from my lungs.
At what we guessed was late morning, there was a lull. We took our chances and threaded through the warren of dugouts, ledges, and trenches that made up our forward line, the men still in positions that hadn’t been completely destroyed looking like gray mannequins in a desolate uniform shop, some doe-eyed and terrified, others appearing resigned to their deaths already. The sergeant who had gone out with us to shoot deserters got hauled past on a stretcher by two bearers, his mouth opened in a scream we couldn’t hear (for the bombardment had rendered us deaf) and his chest laid open so clean, I could see his heart beating wildly beneath the bones of his rib cage. The captain’s dugout had taken a direct hit. Nothing and no one there by the time we reached it but a horse on its haunches pawing the dirt, and the coppery stink of blood and burned flesh all around.
By noon, the Italians were at full force again, and we had made it to Major Márai’s tent just beyond the reserves. He said he wanted us to stay out of the lines and head back to Mount Santo, where they suspected the Italians would attack in strength when the artillery barrage was finished. We were to take any shots we had on high-value targets—officers, cannoneers, scouts.
After a day’s hike with a separate regiment, Zlee and I took position on the upper reach of Mount Santo in the ruins of an old monastery’s gatehouse, long since reduced to rubble by artillery. The night before, we had eaten field rations of biscuits and hard tack with the same Croats who had fed us when we were ranging from those hills. And at dawn on the fourteenth, the Italians came over the top.
The brigade sent to retake that mountain knew the mixed terrain on the western slope and had been hiding its regiments among the massive stones and stands of trees under the ongoing cover of artillery fire, so that the soldiers defending the mountain were caught off guard, weakened and shell-shocked as they were, as wave after wave of Italian fanti burst from their positions like water from an earthen dam and charged up the steep and bald slopes of