Free The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak

Pes?”
    Zlee, still staring doggedly at some point on the wall, said, “Sir, better than you might expect.”
    A few days later, just before the entire battalion was supposed to move out, we were released from our regiment, given lance corporal stars to attach to our uniform collars, and boarded a train with a company of other soldiers going in the same direction, but not the same place.
    That night, we arrived at a camp on the Duna outside of Pozsony. A sergeant barked orders at us there in the dark, where we stood at attention for what seemed like hours, until two officers showed up, and the sergeant snapped to attention himself and then receded. One, another Austrian captain, did all the talking, while the other, whose uniform was German but whose overcoat looked more like some Bavarian hunter’s, stood by, listening and surveying us there in the harsh light.
    Nineteen sixteen was the year the Austrians started sending sharpshooters to learn sniping skills for the front. Most of these schools recruited men from the Tirolean region of the Southern Alps, on the border with Italy, and were run by German officers. Scharfschützen, they called them. The Italians called them cecchini and (we were to learn in time) feared them more than anything else in those mountains. Under that veil of mock secrecy, it emerged that we were being sent to a place in Austria called Klagenfurt to be trained as Scharfschützen for the empire’s defense of its culture and threatened borders on the southern front. We had been chosen, the captain told us, not only for our marksmanship but for our character and ability to endure hardship in conditions under which most men would buckle, although I’m sure he knew or
cared nothing about my character. The emperor himself understood who we were and how important our mission was, he said to us, and from there on out we were ordered never to speak unless spoken to by a superior officer, and any soldier showing the least amount of weakness or lack of discipline and restraint would be sent straight back to his regiment and a trench on the eastern front.
    There we were, forty of us, men from the ranks—although there were only four other Slavs, two Bosnians, and two Czechs—brought together because we had a common skill that was about to be pressed into service. I didn’t understand what it meant then to have what the captain referred to as a gift. There were plenty of Frontkämpfer, he said, the frontline infantry, who wore the marksman’s badge and would line up in the trenches next to machine gunners when the enemy attacked. We weren’t riflemen, though. We weren’t Frontkämpfer. We were hunters who already knew how to stalk game in the mountains and forests we had lived in before the war, and who were now being taught to hunt men, observing their numbers, their movements, their skills or the lack of them, their habits, and ultimately their faces—front or back—through the crosshairs of a rifle scope, all so that we might kill them, one at a time, with a silence that terrified them more than anything because it held nothing of the glory they imagined they’d find in battle.
    In Klagenfurt, we trained and practiced—not just drilled but practiced—as though virtuosi who would one day be given their concert hall solos in some great symphonic concerto, conducted by our maestro, Sergeant Major Bücher, who had been fighting on the western front since August 1914, until he lost a leg to a long-range French shell that had caught him leaving the line at Verdun. He
limped well enough with the prosthetic limb a puppet maker in Leipzig had carved for him, but the Germans were one sharpshooter down at the front as a result. So he offered his services as an instructor and would always say, as we stood at attention at dawn on snow-packed and frozen ground while he paced before us, that the sharpshooter should consider himself above rank and