Even so, we were reminded of how indiscriminate and cold this enemy who would survive us all was as we approached Mount Marmolada and proceeded up the face, a full traverse the only option we were given. A father and his son, who had joined the Landesschützen together and who knew the mountains so well that they could point out critical discrepancies in the maps issued from the high command, were the last two on our rope and saw too late the thin ice layer that masked the crevasse over which we had all passed, blinded and hunched by exhaustion and the weight of our packs, and the old man dropped through like a stone, pulling the line taut in an instant and his son in a rapid slide toward him, so that the boy (I say this remembering that I was just eighteen at the time, but this lad, strong as he was, could not have been a day over fifteen) had to lean back and dig his heels into the snow as he yelled “Absturz!” to Zlee and me, and we dropped and dug in hard with our axes. But the shock and dizziness weakened his footing and he began to slip as the crumbling layer through which his father had broken cracked and shattered and the rope moved through it like wire through wax, so that he, too, now fell as the top gave way beneath him.
Slowly, the weight of two men dangling from that rope began dragging Zlee and me to the edge of the crevasse, until I could peer down into its faint blue and see the boy struggling to right himself in near daylight, while the old man twisted on the darkened bitter end. As we tried to haul them out of that grave, the rope began to slice and fray against the hard crust, our own footing gradually giving way, and I saw the boy look down at his father (whose figure had stopped spinning) and up again at me, then pull his knife out of its sheath, cut the rope above his head, and disappear into the ice.
We continued on, over less daunting peaks, but with the storms and the weather becoming more severe, until one day we forded steep falls, which we were told were the headwaters of the Adige, and in what little talk there was among these men, there was mention of Advent soon, and at the next refuge a makeshift wreath of fresh spruce and paraffin candles unburned and waiting sat on the table, left by villagers or the unit of Landesschützen that had been here before us (although days or weeks before, we weren’t sure), and yet there was little else to mark the time since we had left Kötschach and begun our long descent toward the Asiago Plateau, so unremitting was our trek of ascents and descents through the seemingly endless and impassable world of forest, rock, and snow.
And on the last day of November, at an outpost where our team caught up with the unit we had been dogging, Commander Klammer passed around a clear glass bottle of grappa to celebrate his patron, Saint Andrew, and I remembered celebrating the same, my father’s name day, each year in Pastvina, the mutton, the rich red Hungarian wine (before he took to slivovica, and the only time drink was ever allowed), the reminder that the old man painted with a parted beard and a scroll brought wisdom and the Word, and this all foreshadowing the Savior the pious men surrounding me said was to come.
My father, who was drunk on so little in those days, used to say with a cherubic smile, although his tone had sounded sad, “There is God in all of this,” and I wondered that night in the mountains of Austria if he was right, or if he was bending to the fear that over the years had begun to encompass him, and I said out loud, “Where is God in all of this, Father? Where?” But he was silent there. No word. No wisdom. Was he where I had left him, his kiss dry, his eyes wet? Or was he silent now because he had gone from me? Zlee and I downed our toast of the strong drink that tasted like grapes soaked in turpentine and butter, heard someone who had just been told why it was we were on that odyssey whisper, “Armer Kerl,” slept fitfully for the cold, and woke before the sun was up to leave with this new unit of Landesschützen, the one that would take us, finally, to Fort Cherle, although, as it turned out, the storm of the winter was yet to descend, and it would be nearly another month of hiking and waiting in the high mountains before we arrived at that garrison.
I REMEMBER STILL, AS WE APPROACHED FORT CHERLE, THE new snow falling on the already deep pack we skied, and the strange lack of harassing fire from either the Italian or Austrian positions as we pushed up the access road that led to the back of the fort, and in the silence of the forest, I thought of Bücher. He had been right about the time it would take us to get there. Had he been right, too, about the fighting and the war?
We reported to Captain Edmund Prosch, a bored and phlegmatic officer assigned to this stalemated outpost. Or maybe he was happy there, away from battle on the open plains below, where our army now pursued with a thirst to destroy its enemy (it was said), news of which he had certainly received, for there was a tone of anticipated victory at Cherle, and everywhere, for that matter, along the northern front. After he looked us over and told us never to report to a commanding officer without having washed and shaved first, he bent down to his papers.
We waited, undismissed, until he looked up and said, as though this was the first day we had spent in the army — and the conversation with our superior officer had in fact been seamless—“You men will do as I say, and go where I tell you to go,” and then informed us that there would be Mass at midnight in the fort’s refectory. “Mandatory. You’re not Protestants, are you?” he asked as he turned back to the papers he kept riffling through, occasionally adding his signature.
I said that we weren’t, and he said, “Good. Let them desert to the English all they want, because I would just as soon shoot them coming at me as running away.”
And so we moved along the tunnels of that fort to a dank and makeshift chapel, listened in our weariness and the darkness lit by candlelight to the high Latin of the Christmas liturgy, with which we were wholly unfamiliar, and fell off to sleep afterward on folded blankets and steel racks bolted into crumbling bricks, where the cold emanated from the walls.
Fort Cherle stood at the edge of Austrian territory in the high mountains northeast of Lake Garda and straddled the northern Alpine front. From its barricades and walls, its guns traded defensive fire with Italian posts at Campomolon, although it seemed like hubris to believe that these positions had reach enough to claim or even prove that they defined lines and borders in those mountains. All of its firepower was trained forward and to the south, and we were told by a gunnery captain that its roof could withstand sustained direct hits of artillery and that its walls (belowground and encircled by a kind of dry moat) were meant to absorb the impact of shells. Outside, though, a soldier on lookout was in greater danger of being wounded or killed by the limestone shards that a well-placed shell could produce than he was by an army climbing out of the surrounding valley and storming its ramparts.
And as though to dramatize the senseless and unsuspecting terror of the place for us, in the first week of the new year, the Italians began a steady barrage from their 149-mm cannons, enough to make one wonder if perhaps they hadn’t chosen this fort as the one place where they would wage an unlikely assault. The rounds were steady and frequent and their accuracy was gaining. Zlee and I were called up to a gunner’s post to assess what the fire might presage, and as we climbed into one of the mounts, a near-direct hit slammed into the wall of the moat that surrounded the fort. When we lifted our heads and shook off the dirt, we turned to the two gunners who were manning the M9. Like twins themselves attached to that gun in life and death, they sat unblinking and in disbelief on the iron grillwork of the steps, an ort of sharp limestone in the neck of each, blood pumping out and pouring into their uniforms at the chest every time they gasped for breath, until, in what was perhaps only a few seconds, they took their last. That fort was the remnant of wars no country would ever see again, and I quickly came to despise it, even before I knew what awaited when it came time for me to climb down off of that mountain with the will to fight for the only hope left: to see my father again.