The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [44]
I shot a scrawny red deer at dusk that day, and a pregnant doe the next. The men with me hauled them out of the forest and gutted them at the fort, where a thin venison stew was served in the mess hall at every meal, the cook even making use of the tongue and the brains. For a week after, I was on what felt like perpetual guard duty at dawn every morning, Prosch no doubt hoping I’d be the next sentry to take a bullet in the face, until the high command requested that Fort Cherle send a platoon of men to the fort in Luserna and await for further instruction there, and I was stripped of my lance corporal’s star, issued an ill-used carbine, and made the forty-first man in that platoon when we fell in and moved out the following day.
Soldiers rarely get to glimpse the maps of the high command and they maneuver out of discipline and duty to those positions where they are ordered, pawns needed to stand and hold until the enemy is drawn out and exposed, at the expense of many pawns. Prosch knew that an Austrian offensive was being planned for June, a pincer attack similar to what the Germans had helped us achieve at Kobarid, and that the two points of the fight would be on the Piave River and in the mountains of the Trentino, where Fort Cherle would provide supporting fire and sharpshooters would remain invaluable. But in the mud trenches of a river plain, there was room for nothing but cannon fodder, so he handed down my death sentence, betting that I might kill a few more Italians before it was my turn for the firing squad of dysentery, machine guns, and long-range shells.
But I had neither the vision of command nor the recourse to question an officer, and so I marched east that spring with the ragged souls of that platoon, led by a lieutenant so green no one seemed to know his name, or even cared to inquire. At Luserna, we joined two more platoons and were put under a captain who had never commanded a company, and sent through the Valsugana along the Brenta until we came to the upper Piave River, and then marched south along the line that Austria held precariously.
It was early April when we came to the edge of the Asiago Plateau and began our descent toward a river island called Papadopoli, and I glimpsed for the first time the heights to which I’d climbed into those mountains when Zlee and I made our approach from the Soca, what seemed now like years ago. The men of our company had slogged hard through deep, wet snow and then the impassable mud conditions that came with the spring melt, and we were hungry and exhausted and believed (there was scant evidence that our army could push any farther past this river, or even hold its line defensively) that the mud plains and beds that continued to widen would become our graves.
One morning as I looked down at the river flowing below through a valley already turning into a tapestry of greens, yellows, and whites as far as the blue of the Adriatic, and back to the still snowcapped and windblown mountain range behind, rising all at once far into the Alps, I realized that I had no desire and no drive to fight anymore, no rage at having been wronged somehow, no belief in the right and purpose of kings. I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I’d once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered—if I could slip out of camp unobserved—whether I just might be able to stay hidden and uncaptured until this war came to an end. But in the same moment this will to live overtook me, we were ordered to fall in, and so we shouldered our packs and rifles and set out like thin sheep kept in line with the promise of food and sleep, too numb to expect our slaughter. And we marched no better.
DAYS DRAGGED ON, THE WEATHER WET, COLD, AND UNSETTLED. What food we had became scarcer and scarcer as we moved closer to the heart