The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [35]
Gradually it became clear to our high command that the strength of the Italians on the Bainsizza Plateau came at the expense of troops left to defend their lines to the north. This, and the rumors swirling that General Cadorna had no intention of waging war so close to winter, and that even he, their commander in chief, had retreated to quarters in the mountains to write his memoirs. To us, though, what mattered was the martial practice of routine, each soldier to his regiment, and Zlee and I on our own. With permission from our sector captain (after hearing a group of men from the Black Forest say they longed only for something close to the food they had once enjoyed there), we shot a stag in the woods east of our own lines and delivered it up to the mess sergeant, who turned it into a venison stew, which he served with brown bread and beer, items which had showed up mysteriously from Bohemia. There was a feeling of renewed strength among our company that night, and we rested well, free from the threat of random artillery and mortar fire, and woke the next day to a morning cold and clear there on the river, the air smelling of autumn and cookstoves.
That was a Monday and near the end of October, which I remember because a priest had come to say Mass the day before. We knew not a word of his Latin and took Communion perfunctorily, then stood around wide-eyed and waiting for the cook to dole out our huntsman’s feast. But before Zlee and I could claim our fair share, we were summoned to the captain’s tent, where we saw again Sergeant Major Bücher, who had trained us in Klagenfurt.
“Die Zwillinge,” he said when we entered, and smiled his broad smile, his tunic adorned with the ribbon of the Bavarian Military Service Order. “You have kept well, I see.”
We saluted and he took a step toward us with arms crossed behind his back, as though in the attitude of inspection.
“We have kept, Herr Bücher,” Zlee said, and at this the man nodded, turned, and lowered his head.
Never, when I set out from Pastvina—all of the world I knew—did I imagine that war would become such a lonely and peregrinated life. A soldier lives by nature in the company of others like him, protecting, trusting, and much of the pull away from my father and my village was one born of a desire for common conviction among that company. We believed in the right of the emperor in those days, and any man who took up arms believed it to the end, an end no one feared, for, if it came, it carried purpose and the promise of a kingdom greater even than the one for which we were willing to fight and die.
And then a skill we honed out of need put Zlee and me on the path of an isolated, if not a privileged, existence within that fraying quilt of cultures, tongues, and commanders so at odds and yet capable of taking orders so that men stood and fought and died, and other men took their place, and any notion of camaraderie or company I once had disappeared in the detached deployment of men like us who worked on the periphery of rank and regimental assignment in what they called a modern war, but which bore our mortality along like any other.
None of this I questioned as we moved from place to place, often only hours before destruction rained down upon whoever or whatever remained there, and Zlee and I kept marching forward, believing that this was our fate and no man or weapon could touch us. Until I saw our old mentor that day.
I was glad to lay eyes on Bücher again and probably stood ever so slightly taller in that tent as a result, but I wondered, too (like a child who is playing with a difficult puzzle and to whom the position of a long-passed-over piece suddenly becomes clear), if there wasn’t simply a human hand in what I had attributed to some divine purpose, someone, not something, directing us like a general moving an army on a map, though