IN MID-JANUARY — IT WAS 1918, THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR — Zlee and I saw for the first time the work of our adversary. At first, Prosch and his men believed it was random fire and Italian luck that was taking a slow toll on the men who stood lookout at dawn, or who didn’t come back from the early-morning hunting party in search of goat. But once they saw that luck had nothing to do with placing a bullet in the head of a man in the same spot every time, they realized they were being hunted by a sniper. The only thing random about him was the frequency with which he killed, this only adding to the cost of morale at the fort, as well as men on lookout. There was no frequency, at least any that they could discern. Three days, one week, a month would go by, and then two kills two days in a row, followed by another lull. No pattern emerged, and no artillery seemed able to deter him, or them.
Prosch was the son of a Viennese colonel and he insisted that he be sent his own sharpshooter to hunt for the sniper. A small party of four Landesschützen had showed up in September. They’d gone out, and only one had come back, pale with the loss of blood and dehydrated and able to give up no information on the others, or the sniper, before he died. Two Austrian sharpshooters had been sent in October, just before the advance at Kobarid, and they had been found dead in a cave less than a mile above Cherle, the shooter appearing asleep over the sights of his rifle, the spotter killed with a bullet to the head. Prosch had sent an outraged cable to Ljubljana, and within days, Zlee and I were trudging through those mountain passes because Bücher had become well known and respected at the Austrian high command.
After the harassing fire of New Year’s, we wondered, but never questioned, why Prosch kept putting us on lookout just before dusk, when, on that morning in mid-January, one of the two men who had replaced us dropped with a bullet through his neck. Artillery responded in the direction of Campomolon, but no one had gotten a good fix on the shooter’s position because the morning was overcast and the air had a slight mist to it. Prosch ordered us to his office and told us to get what we needed from his lieutenant and “find that son of a whore, or pray that he finds you first.”
From the lieutenant and a bespectacled man in supply we got beeswax for our boots, a ration of biscuits, an extra canteen for water, and some small candles we used to melt snow in our cups, and then we stayed put at the fort. The temperatures had dipped well below freezing by nightfall and a sickle moon hung in the western sky, the air so crisp that it seemed to crackle when you inhaled. The next day we rose and ranged to the peak of Mount Cornetto, the best vantage point in the region of the surrounding territory, and safely to the north, but we only did this to escape the damp cells and crushing morale of the fort. In truth, we had no idea how we should go about finding the man or men who most likely thought and acted as we did, and we even wondered each time we stepped off of the access road to the fort and into the pine and rock ledges of the forest, if we’d emerge onto some height, glass our line of sight, and be killed right where we stood. But we changed our route every day, found several vantage points and possible hides, overnighted below the tree line each night in a hidden snow cave we carpeted with pine needles, and, after a week of this, reported back to Fort Cherle.
Prosch seemed surprised to see us, or at least he feigned surprise, and wanted to know why we weren’t out hunting our sniper, as we’d been ordered.
“Herr Hauptman, because he’s not out there,” Zlee said.
“How can you be so sure?” Prosch replied.
“It’s too cold, sir. So we’re ranging to find the most likely place for him to reappear when the weather breaks, and for us to position ourselves.”
“Splendid,” Prosch said. “I’ve been sent mountain men who have found it too cold to hunt in the mountains. Corporals Pes and Vinich, if one more man dies at the hand of this Italian while you are under my command, there will be no courts-martial. I will execute you both myself and have the stable boys pitch your bodies over a cliff. Do you understand?”
For the first time, I feared what a man was capable of doing to me in that war, a man weaker than I, and yet one whom I was bound to obey, at least in his presence. At that moment, I would have chosen to have been blown to bits by random artillery rather than to have had Captain Edmund Prosch be the last man to see me alive before a firing squad put a bullet through my heart.
But Zlee never flinched. “Herr Hauptmann, if you will forgive the solitary nature of our methods and allow me to explain.”
Zlee’s German sounded nothing like the high tone he had meant to use, even if sarcastically, but Prosch, who loved to be coddled almost as much as he loved to be feared, sat down and said, “Explain.”
And so Zlee told him that we suspected the sniper had been using the intermittent warming trends in the mountains to hunt in the early mornings, when the mist that rose from the melting snow provided a kind of directional cover for him, while it still allowed him to fire accurately using an optical sight, because the scope picked up more morning light than the naked eye. And in the thin mountain air, the closer he got to his target, the more accurate he’d be.
“He’s not firing from the next mountain over, sir,” Zlee said, “but more likely only a few hills.” We couldn’t know this for sure, but it was our best guess, and so we told Prosch something he wanted to hear.
Prosch asked why the other Austrian sharpshooters hadn’t known this and Zlee said that unfortunately they had overestimated the skill of their adversary. “If he were good at what he does, sir, he would be wearing a coat of field gray and fighting for Emperor Karl.” Although we ourselves suspected our target to be a local Austrian trained like us, yet who, for reasons only he knew, had switched sides.
Zlee then explained that we would do nothing until a warm front came through, in anticipation of which we would set out in the direction of the peak to the north of us, settle into our hide, and wait for the shooter to show himself.
“How do you propose to see him before he sees you, or, more likely, kills another one of my sentries?” Prosch asked. The corner of his mouth lifted to what looked like a faint smile every time he posed a question, and I wondered if he was using us and every other sharpshooter who had come through here for a bizarre game of cat and mouse that broke up the boredom of his war.
Zlee said that on the morning when the temperature rose above freezing, the sentry would be a mannequin, “the best likeness your man in supply can create.” We would attempt to get a visual on him, and at the very least would see his muzzle flash when he fired. With that, perhaps, we might be the ones to fire next.
Prosch stood, head down, for what seemed like too long, and then he looked up at us. “A ruse. Yes. I like it. Don’t worry, Corporal Pes, our sentry will be so lifelike, you’ll expect him to salute. All that will remain is for you and your twin to shoot straight, and well.”
It was almost a month before the mercury rose above zero in those mountains, an evening in late February, when full cloud cover came in after a day of strong sun and trapped the heat. Already, each week seemed to bring more daylight, and you could feel the moisture rising and evaporating in the air, so we reported to Prosch and had the night sentries replace the man who was to take over at 0400 with our dummy.
They gave him a cigarette at 0600 and had the sentry prop him up so that his face showed through a gun mount on the parapet. That same sentry had orders to lie on the floor next to the mock guard until 0800, or until someone fired in his direction, after which he was to yell as loud as he could, while still undercover, “Sharfschütze!” The artillery commander gave the forward gunners orders to wait for three minutes after the shot and then to fire in the direction of Campomolon, regardless of whether they could tell exactly from where the shot had come.