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By Root 316 0

of the army I’d once known from the hills of Görz, and by the time we reconnoitered with the regiment to which we’d been assigned, we were down to two days’ ration. As a whole, the regiment fared worse. Stretched, their food (what our company could have eaten in twenty-four hours) would last three days. Fuel for their trucks was long spent, so they walked and moved slowly as a result. And all but two horses had died from disease or exhaustion, a lack the soldiers as well as the officers felt, since horses became meat when they were no longer a good means of transport. The men—among whom I was just another Infanterist, a private, determined to stay alive—turned as gray and thin as the spring snow on the side of the road. Some ate what they found rotting in towns we passed through, or drank deliriously from wells fouled and abandoned. When they couldn’t move from their own vomit and diarrhea, we left them with what good water we could spare and moved on.

We arrived at our position on Easter of that year (the sight of a sad and slight old priest dressed in white vestments and setting up for Mass on the altar of a box of ammunition my memory of the day) and camped on the Montello rise, where we had a commanding view of the Italian trenches to the west of the Piave, and I fell ill with a fever that same night. The last conscious things I remember were the purposeful movements of the lieutenant, who still commanded our platoon, to make a comfortable bed for me to lie in while I sweated and shook, and the look of concern on his face as he knelt over me and mopped my forehead with a rag he soaked in a bucket of river water.

We had never exchanged more than passing comment in our entire march south, but he seemed a tempered and rational man, even second-guessing a sergeant’s estimate of range in the mountains and—out of nowhere—asking me what I thought, and so I told him that I believed that the target was at least a thousand yards farther than what he’d been offered, to which he nodded his assent, and which turned out to be true. He whispered softly (though with urgency) to me that night and coaxed me to drink a brew of herbs he said, as though speaking to himself (because he thought that I had already lost consciousness and couldn’t hear him), that he had bartered from a Hungarian and boiled down, and then told me to sleep while he sang an old Slovak song that I had learned as a boy about a shepherd who has a vision of the Virgin Mary and becomes a great soldier for Christ.

And in my delirium, I dreamed of my mother once again. This time, we were walking together and I was telling her about my life in Pastvina and how I missed my father now that I understood the wisdom I had mistaken for weakness, and that I wished she could have been with us there to watch over him as she had watched over me. She didn’t speak, but kept staring with the same bright and shimmering face of the woman who had first come to me as a boy, on the boat from America to the old country.

Then, in the distance, I heard what sounded like a train approaching, the sound of its wheels and engine growing and growing until it was clear that it was coming toward us. Suddenly I couldn’t move and she let go of my hand, her face changing to the stern pose she wore in the daguerrotype, although the image of her still clear and distinct in front of me. And she said, “Jozef! Hurry. Come to me!”

But I couldn’t move. I was pinned down and felt as though I was being smothered. “Jozef,” she was almost yelling now, “you must!”

But as she said this, her image began to fade, even as she implored me more and more to go with her, until her voice trailed off into a beseeching echo, and the oncoming train roared overhead, with nothing in its wake but the dark and a few faint wails like that of a baby, or a lost boy.

I woke, to find the lieutenant standing in the trench with his back to me and looking out over the no-man’s-land of the river plain. He heard me stir and turned.

“That was a long night, sir,” I said, my own voice sounding hollow.

“Night? You were out for three