The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [33]
So holy was it considered, though, that a Czech major general named Novak ordered those same Croat defenders to return the fight on that mountain just when the Italians were at their most vulnerable—in victory. The counterattack was swift and surprising, early in the morning of the next day. From the close-quartered position of the mouth of a collapsed kaverne, Zlee and I watched as the wearied but confident Italians rose from their sleep to the din, stumbled and rubbed their eyes, and there they died in a chaos of bizarre yelps and war cries from the mouths and bellies of men bent on vengeance, and seemingly astonished to find themselves alive.
THE WHOLE OF SUMMER, BATTLE RAGED, THE BLOODY STALEMATE of attack and counterattack proving ineffective for all but the winnowing of souls, so that I came to believe that our stand there on the Soca could not survive, and I wondered more darkly in the back of my mind if we—our empire, our army, the land on which my father had taught me, too, how to survive—had been abandoned by the emperor’s God for some sin long forgotten or even unknown to those of us sent to atone for it, an atonement Zlee and I were yet kept from by the simple fact that we were a more useful tool kept alive, though all it would take was for one of us to be hit by a shell, or brought down by something as simple as dysentery, and the other would be useless and so sacrificed.
And no doubt we would have been ordered in the end to stand and die there on the slopes of those mountains, along with half a million other men I’d slipped past silently in a trench or shared tea with in the Austrian Landwehr when the Italians launched their eleventh battle on the southern front at the end of that summer had we not been ordered north to Kobarid with a new regiment of Austrian Sturmtruppen, without knowing or even questioning why.
The Tolmin bridgehead was only a day behind us when the Italians let loose from their positions and fought to cross the Soca, holding their lines this time. In its first two days alone, the August shelling exceeded the onslaught we had faced in May and left entire divisions of men wiped out, save for a few freakish survivors. Onto the Bainsizza Plateau the Italians charged, resisted only here and there where air reconnaissance had failed to identify a well-dug-in company of Austrian riflemen and machine gunners. And on a day when Emperor Karl was said to have surveyed the lost battleground from Cepovan Hill with Borević at his side, the order was given to retreat from the Bainsizza in order to save what was left of his loyal army, Borević himself hoping at least to keep the northern borders of the Austrian Littoral intact, along with the southern prize of Trieste, but leaving the Soca south of Luzia to be revered by Italian soldiers and poets as the Isonzo.
We watched, too, that day, like chosen ones who turn back to see their city burn, and surveyed the battle from the northern heights that rose above that river. None of the men, Austrian or Italian, had faces as they had when we stood with or against them in battle. It was the crawl of the fight we witnessed sweeping steadily east below, the scene broken only by the concentration of artillery on some holdout sectors, until the mountain breeze pushed out the cloud of smoke and Italian helmets continued to poke along the plain and were contested only intermittently. Then, at our new captain’s