The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [34]
IN THE SMALL RIVER TOWN OF KOBARID, TUCKED INTO A shaded and rugged valley where only a single church with a rounded bell tower rose above the tiled roofs of the houses of farmers and merchants who cared little for whether the rest of the world referred to their home (as obscure before the autumn of 1917 as some Tasmanian cove) by a name Slavic or Italian, we ranged among the Austrian Sturmtruppen with whom we had retreated, and a number of German forces who had come south from the western front.
There was no peace or active cease-fire on the river this far north, but the animus of battle was absent, at least for the time being, and we returned to the exercise of watching and ranging, taking the occasional shot at some poorly disciplined or perhaps new recruit in the trenches that faced us to the west, but we found that we were killing less and less, not because our skills were weakening but because our adversaries were digging in—whether out of fear or preparation for some engagement to come, we were unable to tell.
Perhaps, though, they had their scouts, too, who might have witnessed what we were becoming, old soldiers who seemed to have marched into a new war. As sharpshooters, Zlee and I were trained to be invisible and silent. But for rounds of ammunition, field rations, and water, we stripped away or left in reserve what the standard infantry soldier needed—and wanted—in his pack to survive, so that we could move in and out of hides like jewel thieves.
But the Sturmtruppen of the Armeeoberkomando carried with them what seemed like the crucial elements of an entire supply truck on their belts and backs—double rations of food, water, gas masks, filters, hand grenades, flashlights, spades, pickaxes, wire cutters, medical kits, compasses, whistles, trench daggers, bayonets, pistols, carbines, and on and on—and still they moved as though every limb of every man followed the orchestrated touches of an overlord, all-seeing, all-knowing, indefatigable, and swift. They drilled in separate units, and although their uniforms never matched a single shade of Austrian gray, their steps did, so that from the distance that Zlee and I often observed them, they appeared a flock of disparatefeathered doves who nevertheless clung in flight to a formation that bolted forward in an instant, left or right, without a single frayed or lagging edge.
The men of our own army were like ambitious recruits compared to the German soldiers who swelled not just our ranks but our morale, men the likes of which we had never seen, soldier paragons who looked as though they could—and would—rise and do battle at a moment’s notice, even from the deepest reaches of sleep. They were distinguishable only by the visorless Feldmütze they wore and their indifference to all but the dutiful carrying out of orders, as though they were the very laws of cause and effect. And yet, in reserve, where we maintained rifles and listened to flat-toned stories of days on the Somme (where they said a man was lucky if he could say he had kept himself alive for an hour, let alone the length of a day), they were humorous and good-souled men who laughed at our German (which marked us as Slavs), shared their food and drink equally, never quarreled, and showed respect to anyone who moved with the same command-abiding precision with which they moved. The world and the war—life and death—were that simple.
When Zlee and I first arrived at the southern front in those spring months that lengthened to feel like years, and ran afoul of Austrian line officers who were convinced that their place above subordinates was given to them by the divine right of kings, we cultivated our own aloofness as sharpshooters to avoid the whimsical orders that issued from those men when they felt the need to be obeyed. But among the Austrian and German troops we fell in with that autumn in Kobarid, we felt the camaraderie of skill and demeanor, and so began to believe again in the possibility of victory in that