Light came with mist and the smoke of battle, and into it sappers moved like ants to construct pontoon bridges that would let us ford the swollen river. Little more than an hour later, we were given orders to fix bayonets and move out, and I felt a sense of freedom — not fear — as I went over the top and moved onto the floodplain without hesitation, as though my entire being had been let loose by a trigger pull.
The wet ground sucked at our feet, but we struck fast, astounded and buoyed up by the accurate and punishing support our own artillery provided for us in the dawn. At the water’s edge, the bridge sections banged and jostled against their fittings as they floated on the thick current, and, still trotting, we bent low to cross them, hoping the anchors at both ends would hold until every man had gone over.
There were other dangers. Our big koda guns hadn’t managed to take out all of the Italian machine-gun nests, and these strafed the bridges when the first units attempted to pass and killed more than half of our men before trench mortars found the right positions. British planes began coming in waves for more bombing runs, so we held back when we heard the drone of their approaching. And when the stream of men surged again, Italian riflemen plied their trade along the banks. Lieutenant Holub went over the top and onto the bridge with us, and when I saw him stumble as we were midstream, I thought his leg had given out, or that he had been hit, but it was the soldier in front of him who had been shot full in the chest, so that Holub tripped on him as the man dropped and rolled into the water, and we pressed on at the double.
When we reached the other side, we took up position in an abandoned Italian trench. All but one of our platoon had made it across, and we regrouped in order to continue our advance. There was little in front of us, though. The cannoneers had done their work. Limbs and litter were everywhere, the bodies of stretcher bearers lying next to the men they had come to remove, and on the wind the bitter taste of gas mingled with the smell of burning pine. By day’s end, we had advanced west, uncontested, into a forested rise, from which we could look back out over the Piave. Some of the dead we had seen wore English uniforms, their Lewis guns (which we had heard about) smashed relics of their firepower nearby, and so we knew that the Italians, who still outnumbered us, had Western support on the ground as well as in the air. It was only a matter of time before we found the place at which they had ceased to retreat and turned to make their stand, and it came to us on the next day with a counterattack in the morning, which by noon we had barely repelled. We had the better position, fortified with several Schwarzloses, and so held our ground with machine-gun and rifle fire against the endless charge of the enemy.
But we lost many men, too. To the north of our position, a group of Italian soldiers penetrated the trench with grenades and fell into hand-to-hand combat until they were killed with knives and pistols. Reinforcements we had expected on the following day never arrived, and we barely held off another counterattack because of the high ground we maintained.
Two days later (it might have been the nineteenth or the twentieth of June, but I had no way of keeping track of days within the month, only the rising and setting of the sun), two new companies made it to our side — part, another new lieutenant among them said, of an entire division of men thrown into the fight by General von Wurm, in the hopes of opening a gap in the Italian lines and pushing through once and for all.
The next day, we stood to with bayonets fixed, and Holub said to me in the trench, as though a veteran of battle, “Stay right beside me,” and we went over the top into a wall of Italian machine-gun and rifle fire, the enfilade so close that we were pinned down instantly, and I felt the heat of the rounds, wondered how it was I hadn’t been hit and killed, turned to Holub for direction, and saw his body lying next to me, eyes wide open as he stared at the sky, his chest and belly torn apart. Officers in the rear ordered men to advance, and those men were mowed down. When the attack was abandoned, we crawled back into our position and sat numb and indifferent, like prisoners who had just received a stay of execution, until new orders came on the morning of the following day: a fullscale withdrawal back to the east bank of the Piave.
Because we were in one of the forward positions of the advance, our company made up the flank in retreat. Horses, trucks, artillery caissons, and men poured over the Piave under even greater danger from aircraft and machine guns now, because our supporting guns had gone silent from ever more accurate Italian fire and the continuous, lethal presence of British planes. The Italians were hungry for their revenge, now that it was clear that we had nothing, nothing left at all. They weren’t going to let an enemy who had humiliated them on their own soil simply walk across the river to lick his wounds. When I took up my defensive position on Papadopoli Island with what was left of our platoon and prepared to retreat the unlikely half mile across the eastern branch of the river to safety, I heard the whistle for an attack come from the Italian side, and so I could do nothing else but take up my weapon to stand and defend the troops retreating.
At eighty yards, the machine guns to the left of me opened up on soldiers moving quickly in a forward advance. The gunners let go in tight, short bursts, aiming for where the men ran bunched up. I drew down on the ones quick enough to break for cover and dropped them with single shots to the waist. Another fellow rifleman to my right — a boy no older than sixteen — fired with a control and accuracy so well trained and deadly that I believed for a moment that it was Zlee at my side and that we’d get out of this alive. But the waves of men coming over those embankments seemed to grow higher and higher. Our defensive artillery, and any commander who might order men to come up and fight, had turned to the logistics of flight and left us to fend for ourselves in this position, which was becoming more sacrificial than defensive, and it was only a matter of time before we ran out of ammunition and were overtaken by the storm.
Upriver, no more than a hundred yards, I saw an enemy unit make it to our barbed wire and begin cutting, and I realized that the division in charge of these positions had chosen ground that left a gap of cover between the machine guns’ range and our trenches. I heard a few explosions and their guns stopped. I knew that soon the fight would come down to grenades and knives. I bolted a new round, and as the gunners to my left stopped to reload, they were shot dead in quick succession. I turned and could see a sweep of enemy soldiers attacking from ground that a company of Honvéd had been ordered to hold for the retreat, but they, too, had cut and run.
I pushed the dead men and their gun tripod over and got down in a prone position behind them. My nameless comrade of the trench kept firing at the unit advancing in front of us until more than he could kill with one rifle came at him and he fell back from a bullet in the face, and I was alone, to fight, retreat, or die like those whose bodies lay off to the side as though they were asleep in spite of the din surrounding us.
When I stood to return fire, I saw a new wave of infantry, hushed and spurred, advancing upon the island. Two men with a light machine gun dropped into a shell hole out in front of me, and I waited for the soldier feeding the belt to lift his head to see where I had taken position, and when he did, I shot him and ducked for cover again. Some enemy rifle fire ensued, but I had silenced the machine gunners, or so I thought, when a burst opened up above me, stopped, and then hammered — as though enraged at the delay I had caused them — into the now ripped-up carcasses of the dead men covering me.
I had one more round in my clip, and Zlee’s ghost had fallen too far from me to crawl to him for what cartridges might remain in his field pouch, and I knew that the next time I stood would be my last. I thought of my father and wondered what it would be like to live a life as long as his, if I would have become him in the end, weaker but wiser from all that’s lost as well as hard-won, and if he might have preferred to have died a young man full of ambition. And I thought of Zlee and what he would do now, surrender or fight to the end, and I wished that we could have sat and talked about the mountains and hills of Pastvina, or at least said good-bye to each other like brothers. I had lost all faith in the belief that I would see those I loved again, but I didn’t want to die and disappear like every other soldier who fought and died and decayed in the flood and layers of indifferent rivers and mud. And I was overcome with fear.