Free The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak Page B

own horses. That’s where I saw my first Schoenauer, a beautiful and powerful rifle with the precision of a surgical instrument. I saw the Norwegian model of the Krag, German Mausers and Gewehr 98s sent down from the western front, and a few other peculiar cannons that looked as though they should have been left in the nineteenth century. But the weapon didn’t make the shot, and in the end more than a few of those gentlemen were sent home with their rifles, where they’d live to hunt game-park deer, not Italian soldiers.
    Twenty-five of us remained by the third week, and that’s when we took to the range again, this time firing a long-barrel Mannlicher 95 with a double-set trigger and fitted with an optical sight, the physical effect of which was still something new for Zlee and me, despite the fact that we had been carrying them around and caring for them for weeks. We were trained to make head shots and aimed for the teeth, which seems ludicrous until, on a cold morning, across the distance of a valley through refracted light, you can suddenly see a man’s breath, see that he’s speaking to a comrade, or perhaps only to himself,
having a smoke, singing a song he loves, or maybe giving voice to some prayer, words that will be his last. It was hand-to-hand combat, except that the enemy never saw your hand, and lifted his to no effect.
    As a team with rifle, rounds, field glasses, and maps, Zlee and I were a rarity, spotter and shooter equally good at both. Bücher called us die Zwillinge, “the twins.” And then, almost as quickly as it began, just shy of a month of training in that mountain forest by the lake and on ground soft and thawing in the sun, we were pronounced ready, given gold-colored sharpshooter cords for our uniforms, told to keep silent and alert, and sent off to the front, unaware of what kind of war awaited us there.
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    LIKE MOST OF THE TROOPS ON THAT TRAIN, MEN WHO STRODE along the ravines and through forests from Ljubljana west to the river town of Most na Soc•i, Zlee and I had yet to see battle, and we were a spirited, if tentative, bunch, some men singing, others shouting boastful taunts to unseen and unknown Italians, until, idle and waiting at the station platforms of small and emptied Slovenian towns, we saw our first trains of the wounded push past.
    Closer to the lines, we came upon the field hospitals and casualty-clearing stations, where the lives of those men in all their misery were born.
    Because this was where trains were constantly switching, we stopped and were held there, which must have been some mistake if anyone had the morale of new soldiers in mind. Some joked, others praised the valor of the wounded, but most of us just looked away or made the sign of the cross to hide our unease, unease at the sight of figures prone on stretchers or laid out on the frozen
ground, some screaming and crying for their mothers like hurt children, others emitting a rhythm of slow moans, as though their breath had to pass through the reed of a bassoon. Some never uttered a sound. Soldiers old enough to have facial hair at that time wore their best imitations of Franz Jozef’s handlebar mustache. On the gray and emaciated lips of the dying, though, those mustaches appeared unkempt and spindling imitations of the real thing.
    I don’t know how many hours we waited, or for what or whom we were waiting. Trains that had arrived behind us had inched out of there long ago. It seemed an eternity passing and chipping away at our collective desire at that moment to hurl our young wills into what battle awaited us, believing somehow that we would be saved and emerge unscathed, while others, though lost, should live on in our memories as heroes, so that the borders our train approached might remain drawn as though time itself had drawn them.
    From the siding, we could hear long-range artillery dropping randomly in the distance, indistinguishable from the thunder