A Soldier of the Great War (69 page)

"In the mountains the trenchworks are shallow and inadequate, which is why we're here—to be ready to break through if the Austrian line buckles, and to hold the line if our defenses are overrun, giving the strategic reserves behind us time to mobilize. At the western edge of the wood, we're in the most dangerous position. We should have our ordnance now. We should have had it when we came in."

"Has it ever happened?" Alessandro asked. "Have they reached this encampment?"

The Milanese looked at Alessandro with a pitying glance. "It used to happen twice a week."

Then the other men began to stream back into the tent. They shook off the snow and went for their blankets, where they lay shivering in the dim light of the afternoon. As the soldiers slept, brigades of cloud glanced across the hillsides and threaded through the pine wood, mixing with the smoke of the dying fires in the field kitchens. No sentries had been posted in their section, because, although they were close to the enemy, they were hard by thousands of other troops. The snow brushed against the tents and slid off them, and the clouds became so thick that it seemed like night.

 

A
WAKENING AT
five in the afternoon, with icy fog rushing by as if it were water from a broken dam, Alessandro felt feverish and
sick. Though he hadn't suffered a chill, had had sufficient rest, and was neither wet nor exhausted, he felt, nonetheless, like a typhoid patient. Everything was sore to the point of paralysis, he had no energy, and he was burning hot.

The cure for this was to get up and walk. A cup of tea, some deep breaths, conversation, and perhaps a task to perform, would do it. No one was in the tent. He struggled to put on his boots, fold his blankets, and stagger out the door. As soon as he was in the open air he felt slightly less feverish, but he remained giddy and weak.

In the center of the brigade clearing a huge bonfire burned; in sub-clearings, the battalion kitchens rattled and shook as they built up steam; and as far as the eye could see into the dark wood, the fires were replicated, until those very distant hardly broke through the snowy maze of trees, giving the impression of both hell and a summer night in fields swarming with fireflies. Half the soldiers wore their blankets, which Alessandro knew to be a mistake, because the blankets would get wet and dirty.

The aromatic smoke was difficult to distinguish from the fog except that the fog, which was really low cloud, left moisture that sparkled in the firelight and the smoke left a scent that promised to follow each soldier for the rest of his days. A string of pack mules nearby stamped and brayed. Troops from other brigades wound through the encampment, moving to and from their own tents, the trenches, the headquarters, and the road.

The huge bonfire was surrounded by a Sufic ring of men who slowly turned in circles to warm themselves. Places in this line were hard to find and jealously guarded. Magically held gaps stayed open for the passage of mysteriously chosen acolytes and subalterns who fed the fire with huge pine logs so heavy they had to be carried like the Cross.

Alessandro despaired of finding the Milanese among fifteen hundred men in half darkness and fog, each man in uniform,
many hooded in blankets as if in domino, and he went back to the tent to get his cup and bowl.

As he placed his hand on the butt of his rifle to steady it during the strange little curtsy required at tent doors, he heard the deep rumble that he had not heard for almost a year, the familiar and dreadful sound that soon grew shrieking tentacles capped with blasts that lit the dark. Scores of guns were firing simultaneously. He knew the trajectories were streaming in his direction, he felt the blasts in his chest—hollow metallic bursts like the cross between thunder, cymbals, and bombs—and he saw the light darting into the tent as if the purpose of the barrage were to make shadows on army canvas.

Young officers ran swiftly through the wood, darting this way and that way in the twisting corridors. Soon, thin lines of soldiers, some running with straps and pack flaps whipping the air, and boots not completely laced, thudded in all directions on the paths across the snow-covered forest floor.

The officers of Alessandro's brigade were absent for indoctrination at headquarters, and the noncommissioned officers were acutely aware that their men were badly armed. In no way could the soldiers of a freshly constituted brigade be marshaled into fighting units when no one knew his platoon sergeant and no parade ground existed for sorting everything out. As a result, everyone was running every which way, and not a soul knew what to do.

Returning to the tent, the Milanese said, "This is a poor time to have a battle," and rolled himself into his blankets.

"Why?" Alessandro asked. He could no longer see the Milanese, but only hear his slightly muffled voice.

"My mother winds the clock tomorrow, and I don't like to fight if the clock isn't all wound up."

"Don't worry," Alessandro said reflexively. Big flakes of snow began to fall like cinder from a volcano.

"And the guns. I never heard so many guns before."

"On some sections of the Isonzo," Alessandro commented, still on his knees, "they massed thousands of guns."

"Look," the Milanese said, "the Austrians come running through, and they always reach the trees. By the time they get here they're wild-men, and now I have only twenty rounds of ammunition. Everyone has only twenty rounds. You can go through three dozen before the first charge. What are we supposed to do? And I don't like fighting in fog. With the stars there's something more tolerable about it, and in the cold air up here the stars go crazy. They're so bright they jump around like fleas, they burn like magnesium. If you get killed on a night like that you go straight up."

"How many make it to the trees?"

"As many as don't die in the field or on the ridge. They resent the fact that we have this place, sheltered from their artillery. It's so foolish it's crazy. The attack will start in less than an hour. Sleep, and when the guns stop, you'll wake up fresh."

"How can you sleep?"

"I think of a girl I knew in the university. I never had a chance with her, even though I was the one for whom she was made and she was made for me. She married someone else. When I think of her face I can fall asleep, because she's so beautiful and I love her so much that the sadness of losing her pushes me down and away from life."

"What about your stationery?"

"A poor substitute."

Alessandro rolled himself into his blankets and tried to sleep. He wasn't tired, and although the shells flew over them, explosions seemed to bounce the forest floor. Eventually, though, he did sleep, and in a dream he told himself two things. In between the blasts of artillery he said to himself that he was sleeping fitfully and was not well. And he scolded himself over and over, a thousand times, for not being awake, because if he were not awake he might not have enough time when the order came to fix bayonets. He slept this
exhausting sleep until the barrage stopped. Then he and the Milanese jumped up as if the silence were an artillery shell exploding in their ears.

"Now we go up to the firing line and waste all our cartridges," the Milanese said.

They groped around the tent, looking for ammunition, but found none. Then they went into the dark among the trees, where they saw that the clouds had been pulled apart in the wind and tossed up to higher altitudes. The stars were revealed steadily in the gaps, making patches of the sky look like ocean liners that suddenly appear on a dark sea.

"It's colder," said Alessandro, "and it's almost dry."

On the ridge, where the trees had been topped by passing shells, a long line of troops lay on the ground, their rifles in front of them. A vast meadow descended to the northeast, dropping off below the trenches. They waited for the ground to change color as the Austrians advanced en masse. The sergeants had caged only a few crates of ammunition from the brigade to the east, and extra rounds were passed out as stintingly as if they had been roast beef or money. One machine-gun squadron had gotten hold of a machine gun, but they had just two boxes of belts.

Someone asked why the trenches didn't extend across the meadow. A stocky sergeant with a pitted face told him that the meadow grew on rock, and that when the snow melted, or in summer in the rain, it became a sluice.

"Where's our artillery?"

"Why waste shells?" was the sarcastic answer from someone down the line.

Further sarcasms were cut short by the appearance of a dark mass at the base of the hill. Not only was it too slow and too uniform to have been the shadow of a cloud, but the moon had not appeared and the stars cut shadows too weak for men to see.

Conversation ceased. The companies in the trenches to the left and right started an enfilade, but an enemy mortar barrage, like a
huge wave smashing against a quiet beach, silenced them immediately—their firing ports were aligned in the wrong direction and they could only shoot if they rose above cover. At the same time, the main body of Austrians emerged from forward trenches onto open ground.

A moment after this, the dark shadow at the bottom of the hill snapped into different form as more than five thousand men who had been crawling suddenly began to run.

On the unfortified Italian line rounds were rammed into chambers and bolts locked. The sound was like that of coins rattling in a mechanical sorter. Mixed and informal prayers arose and then were forgotten as the firing began. Sergeants scolded premature ignitions but were soon drowned out by the growing cascade, and at the first flashes from the approaching enemy the whole line opened up until the guns made so much smoke and noise that no one could see or hear. They fired at the enemy where they remembered him to have been, as the pits of their stomachs fell because they knew that he was really much closer.

A gust of wind lifted the smoke. Now the compact mass of attackers was thinning, and began to move in many directions at once. Orders were shouted on the Italian line, and groups of men suddenly jumped up and ran madly to other positions. Alessandros brigade, with neither formations, nor officers, nor ammunition, was in panic. As the Austrians divided to encircle the hill and come into the tent forest, some of the brigade stayed at the ridge, and others returned to the trees.

Alessandro and the Milanese remained until they had no more ammunition. They had waited until they could sight individual soldiers and fell them with well placed shots, but most of the men in their sector, being inexperienced, had wasted their ammunition in early firing and been unable to hit anything with the few rounds they had held back. The enemy soldiers were very near and coming forward at a run.

As the brigade heard the Austrians breathing and watched them
emerge from the smoke they tried to move to either side, but their own lines had curled into flanks and they had to fall back. This they did without hesitation, racing into the trees as if they were game-birds racing out.

Alessandro and the Milanese stayed together even at a run, and they found themselves in the brigade clearing with a thousand terrified soldiers. A few officers who had made it through the mortar barrage on their return from headquarters were screaming assembly orders, but it was hopeless. Then they gave up on making formations. "Fight among the trees! Fight among the trees!" they commanded as the Austrians entered the thicket and started to fire.

"We have no ammunition!" they were answered.

"Fix bayonets! Stay in the trees!" the officers shouted, knowing that to be chased into the open would be the end.

Alessandro and the Milanese fixed bayonets and stood in the pines. Bullets were knocking against the tree trunks like woodpeckers, and severed branches fell as if a hundred foresters were in the air above them pruning the greenery. A third soldier joined them. "What are we supposed to do?" he asked, and when he received no answer, he left.

No time had remained for an answer. Thinking that the Italians were so disciplined as to forgo firing in thick cover, the Austrians ceased fire and charged with bayonets and trench clubs. Even the most inexperienced among the Italians, the little clerks and the young boys who had never been away from home, knew that they now had an even chance.

The Austrians were bigger almost to the man, and wore barbaric cloaks and furs that made the neatly tailored Italians shudder. Alessandro thought that his own uniform, in comparison to the pointed hoods, horned helmets, and sheepskin vests of the enemy, made him seem very weak. As the Austrians ran through the trees, cutting the obstructive tent cords with bayonets and short-swords, and as a line of enemy advanced toward him, cocking their arms if
they carried clubs and raising their rifles if they were going to use bayonets, Alessandro realized that the entire Italian army was dressed like waiters. He wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, and, when he found he could do neither, he was angry.

Three men approached. Never in his life would he forget them. The one on the left had no neck, a snapping-turtles jaw, a mouton cap, and, in his right hand, a long mace with steel spikes mounted on four gleaming brass plates at the head. In his left hand was a small sword. The man in the middle, in fur vest and spiked helmet, was preparing to lunge with a bayonet, and the one on the right had a red beard and was carrying all kinds of leather holsters and sheaths that were strapped onto his coat. He raised his rifle as if to shoot.

The Milanese was nowhere to be seen, and Alessandro had no place to fall back. Although these three were the immediate threat, their companions had fully infiltrated the wood, and everyone was surrounded. Certain that he was going to die, Alessandro watched the red-bearded man slowly draw a bead on his chest.

"You're out of uniform," Alessandro said, thinking that this pointless declaration would be his last, but he was surprised to see the three of them suddenly take their eyes from him. He heard a loud crack and saw the red beard tip back as the rifleman was thrown dead off his feet. The round intended for Alessandro ignited as the dead man's finger closed on the trigger, but the short Mauser was already pointed into the trees.