The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [49]
I pushed the dead men and their gun tripod over and got down in a prone position behind them. My nameless comrade of the trench kept firing at the unit advancing in front of us until more than he could kill with one rifle came at him and he fell back from a bullet in the face, and I was alone, to fight, retreat, or die like those whose bodies lay off to the side as though they were asleep in spite of the din surrounding us.
When I stood to return fire, I saw a new wave of infantry, hushed and spurred, advancing upon the island. Two men with a light machine gun dropped into a shell hole out in front of me, and I waited for the soldier feeding the belt to lift his head to see where I had taken position, and when he did, I shot him and ducked for cover again. Some enemy rifle fire ensued, but I had silenced the machine gunners, or so I thought, when a burst opened up above me, stopped, and then hammered—as though enraged at the delay I had caused them—into the now ripped-up carcasses of the dead men covering me.
I had one more round in my clip, and Zlee’s ghost had fallen too far from me to crawl to him for what cartridges might remain in his field pouch, and I knew that the next time I stood would be my last. I thought of my father and wondered what it would be like to live a life as long as his, if I would have become him in the end, weaker but wiser from all that’s lost as well as hard-won, and if he might have preferred to have died a young man full of ambition. And I thought of Zlee and what he would do now, surrender or fight to the end, and I wished that we could have sat and talked about the mountains and hills of Pastvina, or at least said good-bye to each other like brothers. I had lost all faith in the belief that I would see those I loved again, but I didn’t want to die and disappear like every other soldier who fought and died and decayed in the flood and layers of indifferent rivers and mud. And I was overcome with fear.
I rose and threw my hands up, heard a rifle crack, and spun around as though someone had grabbed my right arm and heaved me. My fingers felt numb, and then as though they were on fire, and as I, too, lay on the ground in our trench among the bodies of all the others, one of the soldiers—an Italian, from the look of his uniform—entered the trench from the side and stood over me with his rifle pointed at my head.
“Please,” I said in English.
He fired. Dirt from the ground where the bullet struck beside me sprayed and stung my face.
“Please,” I begged, not for myself, but for all of the men I had killed because I had been trained never to miss.
He cursed, chambered another round, and raised his rifle again, when an English soldier ran up from behind him and pushed him away.
“We don’t execute prisoners, mate.” He scowled at the Italian, yanked me to my feet, and smashed me in the ribs with the butt of his rifle. I doubled over in pain but willed myself not to drop to my feet again.
“Bloody good shooting, you bastard,” he said, not knowing that I understood every word. Then he began to search me, even though I was in a position no sharpshooter would ever have considered a hide, or even been given an order to take up, as he looked for patches, field glasses, rifle scope, maps, or diagrams I might have made, all signs of a sniper. But all that I’d left back in the mountain ravine where Zlee lay dead and frozen, all but the lanyard, which Lieutenant Holub burned in a candle flame on the far side of the river before we made our final attack.
The Italian cursed louder and mock-inspected his rifle, while the Englishman ignored him, pocketed my dagger, and shoved me down the wet and narrow corridor of mud and out into a wide-open and clearing sky.
“Get a fucking move on,” he said, and I remember that, the accent, the scorn in that soldier’s voice,