The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [48]
But we lost many men, too. To the north of our position, a group of Italian soldiers penetrated the trench with grenades and fell into hand-to-hand combat until they were killed with knives and pistols. Reinforcements we had expected on the following day never arrived, and we barely held off another counterattack because of the high ground we maintained.
Two days later (it might have been the nineteenth or the twentieth of June, but I had no way of keeping track of days within the month, only the rising and setting of the sun), two new companies made it to our side—part, another new lieutenant among them said, of an entire division of men thrown into the fight by General von Wurm, in the hopes of opening a gap in the Italian lines and pushing through once and for all.
The next day, we stood to with bayonets fixed, and Holub said to me in the trench, as though a veteran of battle, “Stay right beside me,” and we went over the top into a wall of Italian machine-gun and rifle fire, the enfilade so close that we were pinned down instantly, and I felt the heat of the rounds, wondered how it was I hadn’t been hit and killed, turned to Holub for direction, and saw his body lying next to me, eyes wide open as he stared at the sky, his chest and belly torn apart. Officers in the rear ordered men to advance, and those men were mowed down. When the attack was abandoned, we crawled back into our position and sat numb and indifferent, like prisoners who had just received a stay of execution, until new orders came on the morning of the following day: a fullscale withdrawal back to the east bank of the Piave.
Because we were in one of the forward positions of the advance, our company made up the flank in retreat. Horses, trucks, artillery caissons, and men poured over the Piave under even greater danger from aircraft and machine guns now, because our supporting guns had gone silent from ever more accurate Italian fire and the continuous, lethal presence of British planes. The Italians were hungry for their revenge, now that it was clear that we had nothing, nothing left at all. They weren’t going to let an enemy who had humiliated them on their own soil simply walk across the river to lick his wounds. When I took up my defensive position on Papadopoli Island with what was left of our platoon and prepared to retreat the unlikely half mile across the eastern branch of the river to safety, I heard the whistle for an attack come from the Italian side, and so I could do nothing else but take up my weapon to stand and defend the troops retreating.
At eighty yards, the machine guns to the left of me opened up on soldiers moving quickly in a forward advance. The gunners let go in tight, short bursts, aiming for where the men ran bunched up. I drew down on the ones quick enough to break for cover and dropped them with single shots to the waist. Another fellow rifleman to my right—a boy no older than sixteen—fired with a control and accuracy so well trained and deadly that I believed for a moment that it was Zlee at my side and that we’d get out of this alive. But the waves of men coming over those embankments seemed to grow higher and higher. Our defensive artillery, and any commander who might order men to come up and fight, had turned to the logistics of flight and left us to fend for ourselves in this position, which was becoming more sacrificial than defensive, and it was only a matter of time before we ran out of ammunition and were overtaken by the storm.
Upriver, no more than a hundred yards, I saw an enemy unit make it to our barbed wire and begin cutting, and I realized that the division in charge of these positions had chosen ground that left a gap of cover between the machine guns’ range and our trenches. I heard a few explosions and their guns stopped. I knew that soon the fight would come down to grenades and knives. I bolted a new round, and as