We had never exchanged more than passing comment in our entire march south, but he seemed a tempered and rational man, even second-guessing a sergeant’s estimate of range in the mountains and — out of nowhere — asking me what I thought, and so I told him that I believed that the target was at least a thousand yards farther than what he’d been offered, to which he nodded his assent, and which turned out to be true. He whispered softly (though with urgency) to me that night and coaxed me to drink a brew of herbs he said, as though speaking to himself (because he thought that I had already lost consciousness and couldn’t hear him), that he had bartered from a Hungarian and boiled down, and then told me to sleep while he sang an old Slovak song that I had learned as a boy about a shepherd who has a vision of the Virgin Mary and becomes a great soldier for Christ.
And in my delirium, I dreamed of my mother once again. This time, we were walking together and I was telling her about my life in Pastvina and how I missed my father now that I understood the wisdom I had mistaken for weakness, and that I wished she could have been with us there to watch over him as she had watched over me. She didn’t speak, but kept staring with the same bright and shimmering face of the woman who had first come to me as a boy, on the boat from America to the old country.
Then, in the distance, I heard what sounded like a train approaching, the sound of its wheels and engine growing and growing until it was clear that it was coming toward us. Suddenly I couldn’t move and she let go of my hand, her face changing to the stern pose she wore in the daguerrotype, although the image of her still clear and distinct in front of me. And she said, “Jozef! Hurry. Come to me!”
But I couldn’t move. I was pinned down and felt as though I was being smothered. “Jozef,” she was almost yelling now, “you must!”
But as she said this, her image began to fade, even as she implored me more and more to go with her, until her voice trailed off into a beseeching echo, and the oncoming train roared overhead, with nothing in its wake but the dark and a few faint wails like that of a baby, or a lost boy.
I woke, to find the lieutenant standing in the trench with his back to me and looking out over the no-man’s-land of the river plain. He heard me stir and turned.
“That was a long night, sir,” I said, my own voice sounding hollow.
“Night? You were out for three days, Vinich. I had to convince the captain for two of them that you were only exhausted from the march and that you’d be up in no time, and so he turned a blind eye.”
He stood and hobbled on one foot for a moment, then placed more weight slowly on the other. I asked him what had happened and he said that on the third day British planes had begun a wave of bombing and strafing runs over our positions. A new unit coming up to the line led them straight to our company, and they went at us all day like hornets from an overturned nest. On their last run, the lieutenant saw the plane that was coming in directly for us. I was huddled in a blanket. He wrapped me tighter and pushed me into the corner of the trench, then threw himself on top of me as the plane opened up with a burst of machine-gun fire. All around him men who couldn’t find cover were shot to pieces, those not killed outright screaming from the burning of the wounds the plane’s guns inflicted. Another one came in along the same line and dropped a shrapnel bomb as it banked up and away from the trenches and our poor attempts to return fire. The bomb fell just behind of where the lieutenant and I had taken cover, and a piece ripped along the dirt wall and tore into the side of his calf.
“The bleeding stopped this morning,” he said, and showed me the muddy bandage he had found to dress the wound. “I’ve been drinking more of this Gypsy brew than you have. But I’ll live to fight.”
I must have looked dazed, still, from the fever, but he knew what I was thinking. Just another foot soldier who should have been sent to a field hospital in reserve, from which everyone knew he’d never return, and yet there I was, left to ride out the same fever that had been striking hard up and down the lines. The lieutenant took the gold-colored sharpshooter lanyard I had removed and kept secreted in my breast pocket, and he said, “You don’t want to have this on you if you’re captured, and with what’s coming, I’m going to need someone who can shoot.”
His name was Holub, his father a Czech from Vienna and his mother a Slovak from Pozsony. He was in his final year of university, where he studied philology, when he was conscripted and sent to the front in the fall because of the army’s desperate need for line officers. He had been cold, hungry, seen men dead and dying, he said, but had never been in battle, and he hoped that he would get the chance to fight the Italians before he died in this damn trench. I was silent the whole time he spoke, grateful to my savior but tired of the war and talk of Austria’s superiority, and I hoped, too, for his sake, that Lieutenant Holub would see battle soon and that it would be fierce and unrelenting and that he would die quickly and well.
BY MAY 1918 WE WERE BEING RESUPPLIED WITH EVERYTHING from horses and trucks to artillery, bullets, coffee, and plum brandy. Our own air support dropped food — tins of meat and loaves of bread, along with battle rations of hardtack — and officers made sure that men at the front had what they needed to maintain as much morale as one could hope for under the circumstances.
Early June and the last of the troops ordered to the front along the Piave had sneaked beneath their cover of camouflage and taken up position in the alleys of defense we had sculpted out of the stripped and barren mud. Men deserted when they saw squadrons of those British planes take control of the skies, and when they looked to the left and right of them and saw not an army ready to burst from those trenches for a fight, but thinned pockets of sick and dirty men weary from having survived a destruction.
And yet, and yet. Those who rose to stand-to every morning still believed in the genius of Borević and the divine guidance of our emperor. It was that kind of world. The Italians were hated fiercely, and there were still enough veterans of Kobarid around who had watched them turn and flee (“Like rats!” they said, laughing with derision) in the autumn of 1917 to tell their comrades that soon, if they fought “as hard as we fought on the Soca,” well-provisioned Italian trenches would be theirs. And then on to Venice and Milan.
“Soldiers!” the generals exhorted us in a message on the eve of battle, “Your fathers, your grandfathers, and your ancestors have fought and conquered the same enemy with the same spirit. You will not fall below them. You will rise above, and overthrow everything before you.”
On the morning of the fifteenth of June, our guns began at 0300, throwing across the river at the Italians everything we had left. For two hours, our artillery pounded the far shore and I listened and waited in the ranks with indurate men whose disdain for death had become a filth they let cover themselves and seemed even to display like a talisman, and new recruits who longed to fight instead of starve at home now saw battle for the first time and wept, wet themselves, or tried to run, even after a captain, to make an example, put a bullet through the head of a fresh cadet whose hysterics threatened to unman everyone within earshot of his howls.
We had dug in well with what time, food, and tools were given us. We used riveting of logs, straw, and wire mesh to shore up the banks of mud and stone, so that even though the odd shell or lucky aim dropped directly into our trench works and took its toll of whatever soldier stood his ground there, we underwent the torture of holding hard to our resolve with forbearance, terror, and resignation.