The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [36]
He paced back and forth a few steps and then said to our captain in German, “Attach them to Klammer’s regiment. Though Prosch, the bastard, doesn’t deserve them.”
To us, he said that, while we had trained hard with these men for the offensive that was imminent, he had a request from the Austrian high command for a team of sharpshooters to report to Fort Cherle in the high mountains near Lake Garda, where an Italian sniper had been taking his toll on the men there.
“It will be a long and difficult passage,” he said, “and the war may even be over before you get there, but this is what I trained you to do. To hunt and to kill what you are hunting. Not storm bridges.” He snapped to attention, dismissed us, and said, “Godspeed, my friends.”
Two days later, in a cold and shrouding mist, while German and Austrian special forces smashed through the unsuspecting Italian lines at Kobarid and commenced an attack that collapsed Cadorna’s army and forced it to retreat as far as the shores of the Piave River, Zlee and I hiked north and west into the Karnische Alpen and jagged Dolomiten, peaks and valleys already covered in wet and deep snows that forced the unit of Tiroler Landesschützen with whom we traveled onto skis and snowshoes as we crossed the northern littoral, away from the rivers of Italy, and back into the mountains.
THE NORTHWESTERN CARPATHIANS, IN WHICH I WAS RAISED, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might—millennia later—be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.
And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and the next, when the time came for that.
In Tolmezzo, we picked up another unit of Landesschützen, along with a Bergführer, and separated so that each team would be no more and no less than a day apart, ours leaving one day later. We hiked through the Wolayer Pass to Kötschach-Mauthen (the names of places told to us by our mountain guide), and roads gave way to footpaths, and footpaths disappeared into forests, and what towns and hamlets we came to and passed through, then, didn’t matter enough to name, so we hiked in silence, as the soldiers with whom we trekked were inclined.
And they—these soldiers of the east Tirol—bore the years of their own detached fighting in the distinct terrain of the high Alpine war. When we stopped to rest and take water and food, and they removed their protective clothing, I saw fingers missing from frostbite, unkempt beards, and deep carved lines radiating from the edge of their eyes and across scabbed and leathery faces. And although we remained silent as we moved, over tea they (who seemed to know who and what we were) would remind us, in a tone strangely hieratic and as though they could see into our disappointment at having been ordered away from the Soca, that this, too, was a front, these mountains borders that separated centuries of their own culture, convictions, and quiet life from the new, false sense of nation that the Italians in their folly had already succumbed to, and of this we had no doubt as we fell back into formation and followed our guides along some path that remained invisible to us and yet to them had been carved in stone by great-great-grandfathers long ago.
As the days wore on, the cold