But I knew, too, that both shooters were long gone by now, not certain but convinced, perhaps, that I had been hit and fallen to my death. And so I waited for nightfall and retraced my steps back to Fort Cherle.
There was a full moon, but it was bitter cold. I wove some soft fir branches together to cover my head, and walked (when I could) with my bare hands thrust into my armpits. I risked being shot by the sentry if they had changed the password, but this seemed a small and ironic threat to me in the new dawn, and at the command “Halt!” I replied, “Don’t shoot,” then gave my name and rank and the password from three days before. There seemed some hesitation on the other side, until the men could see who I was by my uniform, and I was led like a prisoner into the fort.
I stood outside the iron door of Prosch’s office long enough to wish I had walked the other way until I could walk no farther, and then I was escorted inside. I was shivering from the cold, and Prosch, in my defeat, let me shiver.
“Our dummy took a bullet in the neck, just as planned, Corporal Vinich,” he said. “And when my sentry, the fool, stood to alert the gunners, he took a bullet in the head. Not as planned, Corporal Vinich.”
I tried to control my breathing while he paced.
“Corporal Pes?”
I said, “Dead, sir.”
“You leave your brother behind I see. And you disobey orders.”
I said that our orders were to hunt an enemy sharpshooter, not knowing that there were two. “But they knew,” I said. “About us they knew.”
Prosch walked slowly out from behind his desk, removed his sidearm — a gleaming German 9—and held it to my forehead. “Speak without being asked a direct question again, Corporal Vinich, and those words will be your last.”
We stood motionless and in silence like that as I waited for what he would do next, until Prosch holstered his weapon and turned back to face his wet stone wall.
“Make yourself useful,” he said to the wall. “Take two men from the kitchen for a hunting party and go find a deer or a goat or a goddamn mastodon. I don’t care. Shoot it and get us some meat. I’ll decide what to do with you tomorrow. Dismissed.”
I shot a scrawny red deer at dusk that day, and a pregnant doe the next. The men with me hauled them out of the forest and gutted them at the fort, where a thin venison stew was served in the mess hall at every meal, the cook even making use of the tongue and the brains. For a week after, I was on what felt like perpetual guard duty at dawn every morning, Prosch no doubt hoping I’d be the next sentry to take a bullet in the face, until the high command requested that Fort Cherle send a platoon of men to the fort in Luserna and await for further instruction there, and I was stripped of my lance corporal’s star, issued an ill-used carbine, and made the forty-first man in that platoon when we fell in and moved out the following day.
Soldiers rarely get to glimpse the maps of the high command and they maneuver out of discipline and duty to those positions where they are ordered, pawns needed to stand and hold until the enemy is drawn out and exposed, at the expense of many pawns. Prosch knew that an Austrian offensive was being planned for June, a pincer attack similar to what the Germans had helped us achieve at Kobarid, and that the two points of the fight would be on the Piave River and in the mountains of the Trentino, where Fort Cherle would provide supporting fire and sharpshooters would remain invaluable. But in the mud trenches of a river plain, there was room for nothing but cannon fodder, so he handed down my death sentence, betting that I might kill a few more Italians before it was my turn for the firing squad of dysentery, machine guns, and long-range shells.
But I had neither the vision of command nor the recourse to question an officer, and so I marched east that spring with the ragged souls of that platoon, led by a lieutenant so green no one seemed to know his name, or even cared to inquire. At Luserna, we joined two more platoons and were put under a captain who had never commanded a company, and sent through the Valsugana along the Brenta until we came to the upper Piave River, and then marched south along the line that Austria held precariously.
It was early April when we came to the edge of the Asiago Plateau and began our descent toward a river island called Papadopoli, and I glimpsed for the first time the heights to which I’d climbed into those mountains when Zlee and I made our approach from the Soca, what seemed now like years ago. The men of our company had slogged hard through deep, wet snow and then the impassable mud conditions that came with the spring melt, and we were hungry and exhausted and believed (there was scant evidence that our army could push any farther past this river, or even hold its line defensively) that the mud plains and beds that continued to widen would become our graves.
One morning as I looked down at the river flowing below through a valley already turning into a tapestry of greens, yellows, and whites as far as the blue of the Adriatic, and back to the still snowcapped and windblown mountain range behind, rising all at once far into the Alps, I realized that I had no desire and no drive to fight anymore, no rage at having been wronged somehow, no belief in the right and purpose of kings. I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I’d once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered — if I could slip out of camp unobserved — whether I just might be able to stay hidden and uncaptured until this war came to an end. But in the same moment this will to live overtook me, we were ordered to fall in, and so we shouldered our packs and rifles and set out like thin sheep kept in line with the promise of food and sleep, too numb to expect our slaughter. And we marched no better.
DAYS DRAGGED ON, THE WEATHER WET, COLD, AND UNSETTLED. What food we had became scarcer and scarcer as we moved closer to the heart of the army I’d once known from the hills of Görz, and by the time we reconnoitered with the regiment to which we’d been assigned, we were down to two days’ ration. As a whole, the regiment fared worse. Stretched, their food (what our company could have eaten in twenty-four hours) would last three days. Fuel for their trucks was long spent, so they walked and moved slowly as a result. And all but two horses had died from disease or exhaustion, a lack the soldiers as well as the officers felt, since horses became meat when they were no longer a good means of transport. The men — among whom I was just another Infanterist, a private, determined to stay alive — turned as gray and thin as the spring snow on the side of the road. Some ate what they found rotting in towns we passed through, or drank deliriously from wells fouled and abandoned. When they couldn’t move from their own vomit and diarrhea, we left them with what good water we could spare and moved on.
We arrived at our position on Easter of that year (the sight of a sad and slight old priest dressed in white vestments and setting up for Mass on the altar of a box of ammunition my memory of the day) and camped on the Montello rise, where we had a commanding view of the Italian trenches to the west of the Piave, and I fell ill with a fever that same night. The last conscious things I remember were the purposeful movements of the lieutenant, who still commanded our platoon, to make a comfortable bed for me to lie in while I sweated and shook, and the look of concern on his face as he knelt over me and mopped my forehead with a rag he soaked in a bucket of river water.