The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [46]
He stood and hobbled on one foot for a moment, then placed more weight slowly on the other. I asked him what had happened and he said that on the third day British planes had begun a wave of bombing and strafing runs over our positions. A new unit coming up to the line led them straight to our company, and they went at us all day like hornets from an overturned nest. On their last run, the lieutenant saw the plane that was coming in directly for us. I was huddled in a blanket. He wrapped me tighter and pushed me into the corner of the trench, then threw himself on top of me as the plane opened up with a burst of machine-gun fire. All around him men who couldn’t find cover were shot to pieces, those not killed outright screaming from the burning of the wounds the plane’s guns inflicted. Another one came in along the same line and dropped a shrapnel bomb as it banked up and away from the trenches and our poor attempts to return fire. The bomb fell just behind of where the lieutenant and I had taken cover, and a piece ripped along the dirt wall and tore into the side of his calf.
“The bleeding stopped this morning,” he said, and showed me the muddy bandage he had found to dress the wound. “I’ve been drinking more of this Gypsy brew than you have. But I’ll live to fight.”
I must have looked dazed, still, from the fever, but he knew what I was thinking. Just another foot soldier who should have been sent to a field hospital in reserve, from which everyone knew he’d never return, and yet there I was, left to ride out the same fever that had been striking hard up and down the lines. The lieutenant took the gold-colored sharpshooter lanyard I had removed and kept secreted in my breast pocket, and he said, “You don’t want to have this on you if you’re captured, and with what’s coming, I’m going to need someone who can shoot.”
His name was Holub, his father a Czech from Vienna and his mother a Slovak from Pozsony. He was in his final year of university, where he studied philology, when he was conscripted and sent to the front in the fall because of the army’s desperate need for line officers. He had been cold, hungry, seen men dead and dying, he said, but had never been in battle, and he hoped that he would get the chance to fight the Italians before he died in this damn trench. I was silent the whole time he spoke, grateful to my savior but tired of the war and talk of Austria’s superiority, and I hoped, too, for his sake, that Lieutenant Holub would see battle soon and that it would be fierce and unrelenting and that he would die quickly and well.
BY MAY 1918 WE WERE BEING RESUPPLIED WITH EVERYTHING from horses and trucks to artillery, bullets, coffee, and plum brandy. Our own air support dropped food—tins of meat and loaves of bread, along with battle rations of hardtack—and officers made sure that men at the front had what they needed to maintain as much morale as one could hope for under the circumstances.
Early June and the last of the troops ordered to the front along the Piave had sneaked beneath their cover of camouflage and taken up position in the alleys of defense we had sculpted out of the stripped and barren mud. Men deserted when they saw squadrons of those British planes take control of the skies, and when they looked to the left and right of them and saw not an army ready to burst from those trenches for a fight, but thinned pockets of sick and dirty men weary from having survived a destruction.
And yet, and yet. Those who rose to stand-to every morning still believed in the genius of Borević and the divine guidance of our emperor. It was that kind of world. The Italians were hated fiercely, and there were still enough veterans of Kobarid around who had watched them turn and flee (“Like rats!” they said, laughing with derision) in the autumn of 1917 to tell their comrades that soon, if they fought “as hard as we fought on the Soca,” well-provisioned