The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [47]
“Soldiers!” the generals exhorted us in a message on the eve of battle, “Your fathers, your grandfathers, and your ancestors have fought and conquered the same enemy with the same spirit. You will not fall below them. You will rise above, and overthrow everything before you.”
On the morning of the fifteenth of June, our guns began at 0300, throwing across the river at the Italians everything we had left. For two hours, our artillery pounded the far shore and I listened and waited in the ranks with indurate men whose disdain for death had become a filth they let cover themselves and seemed even to display like a talisman, and new recruits who longed to fight instead of starve at home now saw battle for the first time and wept, wet themselves, or tried to run, even after a captain, to make an example, put a bullet through the head of a fresh cadet whose hysterics threatened to unman everyone within earshot of his howls.
We had dug in well with what time, food, and tools were given us. We used riveting of logs, straw, and wire mesh to shore up the banks of mud and stone, so that even though the odd shell or lucky aim dropped directly into our trench works and took its toll of whatever soldier stood his ground there, we underwent the torture of holding hard to our resolve with forbearance, terror, and resignation.
Light came with mist and the smoke of battle, and into it sappers moved like ants to construct pontoon bridges that would let us ford the swollen river. Little more than an hour later, we were given orders to fix bayonets and move out, and I felt a sense of freedom—not fear—as I went over the top and moved onto the floodplain without hesitation, as though my entire being had been let loose by a trigger pull.
The wet ground sucked at our feet, but we struck fast, astounded and buoyed up by the accurate and punishing support our own artillery provided for us in the dawn. At the water’s edge, the bridge sections banged and jostled against their fittings as they floated on the thick current, and, still trotting, we bent low to cross them, hoping the anchors at both ends would hold until every man had gone over.
There were other dangers. Our big • koda guns hadn’t managed to take out all of the Italian machine-gun nests, and these strafed the bridges when the first units attempted to pass and killed more than half of our men before trench mortars found the right positions. British planes began coming in waves for more bombing runs, so we held back when we heard the drone of their approaching. And when the stream of men surged again, Italian riflemen plied their trade along the banks. Lieutenant Holub went over the top and onto the bridge with us, and when I saw him stumble as we were midstream, I thought his leg had given out, or that he had been hit, but it was the soldier in front of him who had been shot full in the chest, so that Holub tripped on him as the man dropped and rolled into the water, and we pressed on at the double.
When we reached the other side, we took up position in an abandoned Italian trench. All but one of our platoon had made it across, and we regrouped in order to continue our advance. There was little in front of us, though. The cannoneers had done their work. Limbs and litter were everywhere, the bodies of stretcher bearers lying next to the men they had come to remove, and on the wind the bitter taste of gas mingled with the smell of burning pine. By day’s end, we had advanced west, uncontested, into a forested rise, from which we could look back out over the Piave. Some of the dead we had seen wore English uniforms, their Lewis guns (which we had heard about) smashed relics of their firepower nearby, and so we knew that the Italians, who still outnumbered us, had Western support on the ground as well as in the air. It was only a matter of time before we found the place at which they had ceased to retreat and turned to make their stand, and it came to us on the next day with a counterattack in the morning, which by noon