The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [50]
PRISONERS WHO HADN’T BEEN MAIMED WERE FORCEMARCHED from the Piave to Varago. Roads were littered with the dead, Austrians killed while running or making a final stand, Italian soldiers yet unclaimed. Some looked as though they were slumped over with sleep and that a shout as we passed might rouse them; others were caught in bizarre attitudes and poses, twisted, spitting, begging. One blackened figure knelt with head down and hands open, as though waiting to receive a blessing. Overhead, tight squadrons of planes buzzed loud and low, and the echoes of artillery still rumbled in the east. Not one of us—hundreds of us—said a word as the Italians barked orders and took whatever chances they could to abuse us. For the first time since becoming a soldier, I despised my enemy, now that I was unarmed and no longer had the desire or the means to kill him.
We marched south by southwest. The clouds lifted and I could tell by the sun in which direction it was we were going. A young Italian patrolling our column (no more than a boy in a uniform that shined for not having been washed yet) hit me in the shoulder with some martial-looking ornamental staff and the pain that shot down my arm to my hand became searing and relentless, so that I halted and tottered and nearly dropped, but the prisoner behind me (a Bosnian, his accent thick and guttural, though I understood him) said to be strong and held me up.
“Halt den Mund!” the boy shouted in German, and I stood, took a deep breath, and stepped back into line. Through the filthy puttee that I had taken off my leg and wrapped around my hand, I could feel only my thumb. The rest might just as well have been hacked off and discarded.
We were marched to a concentration camp on the outskirts of a town they called San Biagio di Callalta. The camp was a sorting station for Austrian prisoners of war, and from there we followed the road to Treviso and stopped in another camp near the town of Noale, where they began separating us according to nationality. I found myself among Czechs and Slovaks entirely, in spite of the fact that I answered in German every question I was asked.
In the camps, there was talk of the Czecho-Slovak Legion, an army being mustered to defend the borders of the new country, and men who bore the lynx-eyed features of the Slavs saw to it that we had a bath, bread, meat, fresh drinking water, and a tarpaulin to sleep under. It was hard to believe, until, in the morning, they offered every one of us a gun and freedom from Italian prison if we agreed to put on another uniform and fight to protect our nation from a weakened but vengeful Hungary. “Those same princes who had deserted us in battle when we needed them most,” they said, men who (I suspected) had never seen battle.
What was a Czecho-Slovak to me, though, a boy raised among Carpathian peasants in a Magyar culture, professing loyalty in a poor school to a Habsburg, and speaking a language in secret they spoke in a land called America? What could those Czech propagandists tell me about nationality? Yet, on and on they went, the Bohemian officers of the legionnaires, telling us that the Hungarian king had kept us in his pocket for centuries, that our own nation was a right to us, and that a Czecho-Slovak division was already being trained to fight against the Austrians in the mountains.
“We are giving you the chance to fight now for yourselves!” they said with a flourish that seemed more bombastic than persuasive.
I said no, and didn’t say that I had hunted and put bullets through more than one man who wanted to desert, Czech or Slovak, Austrian or Hungarian. It didn’t matter. I had killed enough for several countries and was happy to stay in prison, where I belonged, not under the