And no doubt we would have been ordered in the end to stand and die there on the slopes of those mountains, along with half a million other men I’d slipped past silently in a trench or shared tea with in the Austrian Landwehr when the Italians launched their eleventh battle on the southern front at the end of that summer had we not been ordered north to Kobarid with a new regiment of Austrian Sturmtruppen, without knowing or even questioning why.
The Tolmin bridgehead was only a day behind us when the Italians let loose from their positions and fought to cross the Soca, holding their lines this time. In its first two days alone, the August shelling exceeded the onslaught we had faced in May and left entire divisions of men wiped out, save for a few freakish survivors. Onto the Bainsizza Plateau the Italians charged, resisted only here and there where air reconnaissance had failed to identify a well-dug-in company of Austrian riflemen and machine gunners. And on a day when Emperor Karl was said to have surveyed the lost battleground from Cepovan Hill with Borević at his side, the order was given to retreat from the Bainsizza in order to save what was left of his loyal army, Borević himself hoping at least to keep the northern borders of the Austrian Littoral intact, along with the southern prize of Trieste, but leaving the Soca south of Luzia to be revered by Italian soldiers and poets as the Isonzo.
We watched, too, that day, like chosen ones who turn back to see their city burn, and surveyed the battle from the northern heights that rose above that river. None of the men, Austrian or Italian, had faces as they had when we stood with or against them in battle. It was the crawl of the fight we witnessed sweeping steadily east below, the scene broken only by the concentration of artillery on some holdout sectors, until the mountain breeze pushed out the cloud of smoke and Italian helmets continued to poke along the plain and were contested only intermittently. Then, at our new captain’s orders, we turned away, shouldered our rifles, and hiked in silence and single file.
IN THE SMALL RIVER TOWN OF KOBARID, TUCKED INTO A shaded and rugged valley where only a single church with a rounded bell tower rose above the tiled roofs of the houses of farmers and merchants who cared little for whether the rest of the world referred to their home (as obscure before the autumn of 1917 as some Tasmanian cove) by a name Slavic or Italian, we ranged among the Austrian Sturmtruppen with whom we had retreated, and a number of German forces who had come south from the western front.
There was no peace or active cease-fire on the river this far north, but the animus of battle was absent, at least for the time being, and we returned to the exercise of watching and ranging, taking the occasional shot at some poorly disciplined or perhaps new recruit in the trenches that faced us to the west, but we found that we were killing less and less, not because our skills were weakening but because our adversaries were digging in — whether out of fear or preparation for some engagement to come, we were unable to tell.
Perhaps, though, they had their scouts, too, who might have witnessed what we were becoming, old soldiers who seemed to have marched into a new war. As sharpshooters, Zlee and I were trained to be invisible and silent. But for rounds of ammunition, field rations, and water, we stripped away or left in reserve what the standard infantry soldier needed — and wanted — in his pack to survive, so that we could move in and out of hides like jewel thieves.
But the Sturmtruppen of the Armeeoberkomando carried with them what seemed like the crucial elements of an entire supply truck on their belts and backs — double rations of food, water, gas masks, filters, hand grenades, flashlights, spades, pickaxes, wire cutters, medical kits, compasses, whistles, trench daggers, bayonets, pistols, carbines, and on and on — and still they moved as though every limb of every man followed the orchestrated touches of an overlord, all-seeing, all-knowing, indefatigable, and swift. They drilled in separate units, and although their uniforms never matched a single shade of Austrian gray, their steps did, so that from the distance that Zlee and I often observed them, they appeared a flock of disparatefeathered doves who nevertheless clung in flight to a formation that bolted forward in an instant, left or right, without a single frayed or lagging edge.
The men of our own army were like ambitious recruits compared to the German soldiers who swelled not just our ranks but our morale, men the likes of which we had never seen, soldier paragons who looked as though they could — and would — rise and do battle at a moment’s notice, even from the deepest reaches of sleep. They were distinguishable only by the visorless Feldmütze they wore and their indifference to all but the dutiful carrying out of orders, as though they were the very laws of cause and effect. And yet, in reserve, where we maintained rifles and listened to flat-toned stories of days on the Somme (where they said a man was lucky if he could say he had kept himself alive for an hour, let alone the length of a day), they were humorous and good-souled men who laughed at our German (which marked us as Slavs), shared their food and drink equally, never quarreled, and showed respect to anyone who moved with the same command-abiding precision with which they moved. The world and the war — life and death — were that simple.
When Zlee and I first arrived at the southern front in those spring months that lengthened to feel like years, and ran afoul of Austrian line officers who were convinced that their place above subordinates was given to them by the divine right of kings, we cultivated our own aloofness as sharpshooters to avoid the whimsical orders that issued from those men when they felt the need to be obeyed. But among the Austrian and German troops we fell in with that autumn in Kobarid, we felt the camaraderie of skill and demeanor, and so began to believe again in the possibility of victory in that war, after having lost so many battles, a victory, we would soon find out, that was being mapped out in the mountains above the plateau the generals had conceded to their enemy in order to save themselves and their imperial army.
Gradually it became clear to our high command that the strength of the Italians on the Bainsizza Plateau came at the expense of troops left to defend their lines to the north. This, and the rumors swirling that General Cadorna had no intention of waging war so close to winter, and that even he, their commander in chief, had retreated to quarters in the mountains to write his memoirs. To us, though, what mattered was the martial practice of routine, each soldier to his regiment, and Zlee and I on our own. With permission from our sector captain (after hearing a group of men from the Black Forest say they longed only for something close to the food they had once enjoyed there), we shot a stag in the woods east of our own lines and delivered it up to the mess sergeant, who turned it into a venison stew, which he served with brown bread and beer, items which had showed up mysteriously from Bohemia. There was a feeling of renewed strength among our company that night, and we rested well, free from the threat of random artillery and mortar fire, and woke the next day to a morning cold and clear there on the river, the air smelling of autumn and cookstoves.
That was a Monday and near the end of October, which I remember because a priest had come to say Mass the day before. We knew not a word of his Latin and took Communion perfunctorily, then stood around wide-eyed and waiting for the cook to dole out our huntsman’s feast. But before Zlee and I could claim our fair share, we were summoned to the captain’s tent, where we saw again Sergeant Major Bücher, who had trained us in Klagenfurt.
“Die Zwillinge,” he said when we entered, and smiled his broad smile, his tunic adorned with the ribbon of the Bavarian Military Service Order. “You have kept well, I see.”