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By Root 305 0

stood at the edge of Austrian territory in the high mountains northeast of Lake Garda and straddled the northern Alpine front. From its barricades and walls, its guns traded defensive fire with Italian posts at Campomolon, although it seemed like hubris to believe that these positions had reach enough to claim or even prove that they defined lines and borders in those mountains. All of its firepower was trained forward and to the south, and we were told by a gunnery captain that its roof could withstand sustained direct hits of artillery and that its walls (belowground and encircled by a kind of dry moat) were meant to absorb the impact of shells. Outside, though, a soldier on lookout was in greater danger of being wounded or killed by the limestone shards that a well-placed shell could produce than he was by an army climbing out of the surrounding valley and storming its ramparts.

And as though to dramatize the senseless and unsuspecting terror of the place for us, in the first week of the new year, the Italians began a steady barrage from their 149-mm cannons, enough to make one wonder if perhaps they hadn’t chosen this fort as the one place where they would wage an unlikely assault. The rounds were steady and frequent and their accuracy was gaining. Zlee and I were called up to a gunner’s post to assess what the fire might presage, and as we climbed into one of the mounts, a near-direct hit slammed into the wall of the moat that surrounded the fort. When we lifted our heads and shook off the dirt, we turned to the two gunners who were manning the M9. Like twins themselves attached to that gun in life and death, they sat unblinking and in disbelief on the iron grillwork of the steps, an ort of sharp limestone in the neck of each, blood pumping out and pouring into their uniforms at the chest every time they gasped for breath, until, in what was perhaps only a few seconds, they took their last. That fort was the remnant of wars no country would ever see again, and I quickly came to despise it, even before I knew what awaited when it came time for me to climb down off of that mountain with the will to fight for the only hope left: to see my father again.

IN MID-JANUARY—IT WAS 1918, THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR—Zlee and I saw for the first time the work of our adversary. At first, Prosch and his men believed it was random fire and Italian luck that was taking a slow toll on the men who stood lookout at dawn, or who didn’t come back from the early-morning hunting party in search of goat. But once they saw that luck had nothing to do with placing a bullet in the head of a man in the same spot every time, they realized they were being hunted by a sniper. The only thing random about him was the frequency with which he killed, this only adding to the cost of morale at the fort, as well as men on lookout. There was no frequency, at least any that they could discern. Three days, one week, a month would go by, and then two kills two days in a row, followed by another lull. No pattern emerged, and no artillery seemed able to deter him, or them.

Prosch was the son of a Viennese colonel and he insisted that he be sent his own sharpshooter to hunt for the sniper. A small party of four Landesschützen had showed up in September. They’d gone out, and only one had come back, pale with the loss of blood and dehydrated and able to give up no information on the others, or the sniper, before he died. Two Austrian sharpshooters had been sent in October, just before the advance at Kobarid, and they had been found dead in a cave less than a mile above Cherle, the shooter appearing asleep over the sights of his rifle, the spotter killed with a bullet to the head. Prosch had sent an outraged cable to Ljubljana, and within days, Zlee and I were trudging through those mountain passes because Bücher had become well known and respected at the Austrian high command.

After the harassing fire of New Year’s, we wondered, but never questioned, why Prosch kept putting us on lookout just before dusk, when, on that morning in mid-January, one of the two