The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak

Author:Andrew Krivak
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781934137413
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2011-03-28T07:00:00+00:00

I REMEMBER STILL, AS WE APPROACHED FORT CHERLE, THE new snow falling on the already deep pack we skied, and the strange lack of harassing fire from either the Italian or Austrian positions as we pushed up the access road that led to the back of the fort, and in the silence of the forest, I thought of Bücher. He had been right about the time it would take us to get there. Had he been right, too, about the fighting and the war?

We reported to Captain Edmund Prosch, a bored and phlegmatic officer assigned to this stalemated outpost. Or maybe he was happy there, away from battle on the open plains below, where our army now pursued with a thirst to destroy its enemy (it was said), news of which he had certainly received, for there was a tone of anticipated victory at Cherle, and everywhere, for that matter, along the northern front. After he looked us over and told us never to report to a commanding officer without having washed and shaved first, he bent down to his papers.

We waited, undismissed, until he looked up and said, as though this was the first day we had spent in the army—and the conversation with our superior officer had in fact been seamless—“You men will do as I say, and go where I tell you to go,” and then informed us that there would be Mass at midnight in the fort’s refectory. “Mandatory. You’re not Protestants, are you?” he asked as he turned back to the papers he kept riffling through, occasionally adding his signature.

I said that we weren’t, and he said, “Good. Let them desert to the English all they want, because I would just as soon shoot them coming at me as running away.”

And so we moved along the tunnels of that fort to a dank and makeshift chapel, listened in our weariness and the darkness lit by candlelight to the high Latin of the Christmas liturgy, with which we were wholly unfamiliar, and fell off to sleep afterward on folded blankets and steel racks bolted into crumbling bricks, where the cold emanated from the walls.

Fort Cherle stood at the edge of Austrian territory in the high mountains northeast of Lake Garda and straddled the northern Alpine front. From its barricades and walls, its guns traded defensive fire with Italian posts at Campomolon, although it seemed like hubris to believe that these positions had reach enough to claim or even prove that they defined lines and borders in those mountains. All of its firepower was trained forward and to the south, and we were told by a gunnery captain that its roof could withstand sustained direct hits of artillery and that its walls (belowground and encircled by a kind of dry moat) were meant to absorb the impact of shells. Outside, though, a soldier on lookout was in greater danger of being wounded or killed by the limestone shards that a well-placed shell could produce than he was by an army climbing out of the surrounding valley and storming its ramparts.

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