We saluted and he took a step toward us with arms crossed behind his back, as though in the attitude of inspection.
“We have kept, Herr Bücher,” Zlee said, and at this the man nodded, turned, and lowered his head.
Never, when I set out from Pastvina — all of the world I knew — did I imagine that war would become such a lonely and peregrinated life. A soldier lives by nature in the company of others like him, protecting, trusting, and much of the pull away from my father and my village was one born of a desire for common conviction among that company. We believed in the right of the emperor in those days, and any man who took up arms believed it to the end, an end no one feared, for, if it came, it carried purpose and the promise of a kingdom greater even than the one for which we were willing to fight and die.
And then a skill we honed out of need put Zlee and me on the path of an isolated, if not a privileged, existence within that fraying quilt of cultures, tongues, and commanders so at odds and yet capable of taking orders so that men stood and fought and died, and other men took their place, and any notion of camaraderie or company I once had disappeared in the detached deployment of men like us who worked on the periphery of rank and regimental assignment in what they called a modern war, but which bore our mortality along like any other.
None of this I questioned as we moved from place to place, often only hours before destruction rained down upon whoever or whatever remained there, and Zlee and I kept marching forward, believing that this was our fate and no man or weapon could touch us. Until I saw our old mentor that day.
I was glad to lay eyes on Bücher again and probably stood ever so slightly taller in that tent as a result, but I wondered, too (like a child who is playing with a difficult puzzle and to whom the position of a long-passed-over piece suddenly becomes clear), if there wasn’t simply a human hand in what I had attributed to some divine purpose, someone, not something, directing us like a general moving an army on a map, though our mover wore an overcoat and a wooden leg and we were the only two pieces he pushed on that map, and I had a bad feeling about where it was Sergeant Bücher was about to send us.
He paced back and forth a few steps and then said to our captain in German, “Attach them to Klammer’s regiment. Though Prosch, the bastard, doesn’t deserve them.”
To us, he said that, while we had trained hard with these men for the offensive that was imminent, he had a request from the Austrian high command for a team of sharpshooters to report to Fort Cherle in the high mountains near Lake Garda, where an Italian sniper had been taking his toll on the men there.
“It will be a long and difficult passage,” he said, “and the war may even be over before you get there, but this is what I trained you to do. To hunt and to kill what you are hunting. Not storm bridges.” He snapped to attention, dismissed us, and said, “Godspeed, my friends.”
Two days later, in a cold and shrouding mist, while German and Austrian special forces smashed through the unsuspecting Italian lines at Kobarid and commenced an attack that collapsed Cadorna’s army and forced it to retreat as far as the shores of the Piave River, Zlee and I hiked north and west into the Karnische Alpen and jagged Dolomiten, peaks and valleys already covered in wet and deep snows that forced the unit of Tiroler Landesschützen with whom we traveled onto skis and snowshoes as we crossed the northern littoral, away from the rivers of Italy, and back into the mountains.
THE NORTHWESTERN CARPATHIANS, IN WHICH I WAS RAISED, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might — millennia later — be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.
And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and the next, when the time came for that.
In Tolmezzo, we picked up another unit of Landesschützen, along with a Bergführer, and separated so that each team would be no more and no less than a day apart, ours leaving one day later. We hiked through the Wolayer Pass to Kötschach-Mauthen (the names of places told to us by our mountain guide), and roads gave way to footpaths, and footpaths disappeared into forests, and what towns and hamlets we came to and passed through, then, didn’t matter enough to name, so we hiked in silence, as the soldiers with whom we trekked were inclined.
And they — these soldiers of the east Tirol — bore the years of their own detached fighting in the distinct terrain of the high Alpine war. When we stopped to rest and take water and food, and they removed their protective clothing, I saw fingers missing from frostbite, unkempt beards, and deep carved lines radiating from the edge of their eyes and across scabbed and leathery faces. And although we remained silent as we moved, over tea they (who seemed to know who and what we were) would remind us, in a tone strangely hieratic and as though they could see into our disappointment at having been ordered away from the Soca, that this, too, was a front, these mountains borders that separated centuries of their own culture, convictions, and quiet life from the new, false sense of nation that the Italians in their folly had already succumbed to, and of this we had no doubt as we fell back into formation and followed our guides along some path that remained invisible to us and yet to them had been carved in stone by great-great-grandfathers long ago.
As the days wore on, the cold slowed us more than the snow, and had we not the shelter of a mountain refuge each night along the way, we might have survived one bivouac in that terrain but perished by the morning, so fast and hard would those temperatures change, bringing blizzards that kept us snowbound sometimes for days, and the journey that should have taken a few weeks by foot looked more likely to stretch into months.
But even these periods of rest were seen as necessary to the nature of the landscape, and never did I sense any form of boredom or acedia entering into the disposition of those men, so Roman and stoic in the makeup of body and soul were they. When the front that had brought weather cleared out, we rose and pushed on as ordered.
There was nothing to gain by kindness in that war, but those men drew us into their numbers and gave to us from their own store the woolen socks and balaclavas and mittens made of rabbit skin that they wore as we hiked and waited, hiked and waited, week after week, the landscape breathtaking, the altitude increasingly punishing, and we followed the arc of the range south by southwest and into the Dolomiten, where we replaced our alpenstocks with ice axes and strapped nailed soles to our boots and roped ourselves together as we climbed, with Zlee and me in the middle of the team so that the veteran guides could both lead in front and bring up the rear, the paths we walked now discernible only to those guides. And for a few late-autumn days, during which we hiked steadily and without rest until we came to the mountaintop refuges along our way and slept, I felt a sense of peace in that war, within myself, and without, amid the unexpected beauty of those peaks that lured and threatened us like enemies themselves, though a threat unlike the arbitrariness of battle on the Soca, because the mountains seemed in equal measure exacting and prepared to forgive.