The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [51]
The next day, I marched to Padua with a handful of men more unable than unwilling to fight, mostly Slovaks and Rusyns, stripped now of the luxuries we had been given the day before and pushed into the holding pens of Austrian and Honvéd prisoners of war, most of whom looked as though they wouldn’t last the night.
When I awoke in that camp, I couldn’t get up off the ground on which I had been sleeping. Those of us who could walk were being rounded up and put onto trains, though no one spoke of where, and although I tried (fearing the alternative), I couldn’t move into formation, I was so wracked with pain and shivering (and may even have been babbling, although all the world seemed suddenly quiet to me). An Italian guard began kicking me and shouting “Andiamo!” and then moved to shoulder his rifle when one of the English soldiers at the camp ordered two women orderlies to get a litter and put me in line to see a doctor.
There, the first women I had seen since Slovenia in the spring of 1917 undid the poor dressing on my hand, washed it in iodine, and wrapped it in clean linen before making a note on a piece of paper pinned to me. One was a small, oddly plump girl with a gray and pockmarked face, a local drafted into service, her white dress yellowed under the arms and soaked with blood around her chest and belly. I remember feeling self-conscious in my delirium, realizing I must smell worse to her than she did to me, and yet she took such care, all in silence.
When the doctor arrived, he spoke to himself out loud, believing, I guessed, that he was alone among a sea of triumphal victors and their beaten foes, neither one of whom spoke his language.
“These men look as though they’ve been living on grass and horse flesh,” he said, sounding more irritated than concerned. “Not a Boche among them. What the hell kind of army is this?”
I wanted to tell him that he was right, we had been, and there was the occasional cup of tea brewed with ditch water, when we had a chance to make a fire to boil it.
All the while, he worked on my hand with distracted swiftness and telegraphed his moves by narrating them, as though consulting some other doctor in the room, though he was the only one, as far as I could tell. “Infection? Damn near. Clean shot from fairly close up. Fifth gone. Ring finger? No use. Take them both. Nurse! I’ll need a tray and sutures, and change that bloody apron! No English. Christ! Okay, Fritz. Lie down. You’ll never play the piano again.”
After the amputation, they kept me in a bed at that poor excuse for a hospital, changed my bandages daily, and fed me. When I could stand and the risk of infection had passed, they gave me new clothes (some dead Austrian’s old uniform) and shipped me out with the rest of the prisoners.
All of the trains I rode from there were old boxcars bolted shut, and I never saw daylight until we reached what a chipped and peeling sign at the station said was Livorno. And there we were boarded into the hold of an old coal-steamer ferry, which chugged across a lurching sea and landed on the island of Sardinia. The harbor town was deserted as we disembarked. Or perhaps its locals remained out of sight while this boatload of despised Austrians boarded the trains those locals rode every day from one town to another, and we disappeared in order and silence to the sentences that awaited us.
After a long journey that I reckoned was taking us south, the train stopped at a siding that could have been any stretch of track that dead-ended in a desert, or a quarry, or at the base of a mountain—anywhere that was nowhere—and we were separated by rank, marched through the gates of a compound that had been built long ago, given showers, deloused, handed clothes to wear that felt like burlap, led four