The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [37]
But even these periods of rest were seen as necessary to the nature of the landscape, and never did I sense any form of boredom or acedia entering into the disposition of those men, so Roman and stoic in the makeup of body and soul were they. When the front that had brought weather cleared out, we rose and pushed on as ordered.
There was nothing to gain by kindness in that war, but those men drew us into their numbers and gave to us from their own store the woolen socks and balaclavas and mittens made of rabbit skin that they wore as we hiked and waited, hiked and waited, week after week, the landscape breathtaking, the altitude increasingly punishing, and we followed the arc of the range south by southwest and into the Dolomiten, where we replaced our alpenstocks with ice axes and strapped nailed soles to our boots and roped ourselves together as we climbed, with Zlee and me in the middle of the team so that the veteran guides could both lead in front and bring up the rear, the paths we walked now discernible only to those guides. And for a few late-autumn days, during which we hiked steadily and without rest until we came to the mountaintop refuges along our way and slept, I felt a sense of peace in that war, within myself, and without, amid the unexpected beauty of those peaks that lured and threatened us like enemies themselves, though a threat unlike the arbitrariness of battle on the Soca, because the mountains seemed in equal measure exacting and prepared to forgive.
Even so, we were reminded of how indiscriminate and cold this enemy who would survive us all was as we approached Mount Marmolada and proceeded up the face, a full traverse the only option we were given. A father and his son, who had joined the Landesschützen together and who knew the mountains so well that they could point out critical discrepancies in the maps issued from the high command, were the last two on our rope and saw too late the thin ice layer that masked the crevasse over which we had all passed, blinded and hunched by exhaustion and the weight of our packs, and the old man dropped through like a stone, pulling the line taut in an instant and his son in a rapid slide toward him, so that the boy (I say this remembering that I was just eighteen at the time, but this lad, strong as he was, could not have been a day over fifteen) had to lean back and dig his heels into the snow as he yelled “Absturz!” to Zlee and me, and we dropped and dug in hard with our axes. But the shock and dizziness weakened his footing and he began to slip as the crumbling layer through which his father had broken cracked and shattered and the rope moved through it like wire through wax, so that he, too, now fell as the top gave way beneath him.
Slowly, the weight of two men dangling from that rope began dragging Zlee and me to the edge of the crevasse, until I could peer down into its faint blue and see the boy struggling to right himself in near daylight, while the old man twisted on the darkened bitter end. As we tried to haul them out of that grave, the rope began to slice and fray against the hard crust, our own footing gradually giving way, and I saw the boy look down at his father (whose figure had stopped spinning) and up again at me, then pull his knife out of its sheath, cut the rope above his head, and disappear into the ice.
We continued on, over less daunting peaks, but with the storms and the weather becoming more severe, until one day we forded steep falls, which we were told were the headwaters of the Adige, and in what little talk there was among these men, there was mention of Advent soon, and at the next refuge a makeshift wreath of fresh spruce and paraffin