When the doctor arrived, he spoke to himself out loud, believing, I guessed, that he was alone among a sea of triumphal victors and their beaten foes, neither one of whom spoke his language.
“These men look as though they’ve been living on grass and horse flesh,” he said, sounding more irritated than concerned. “Not a Boche among them. What the hell kind of army is this?”
I wanted to tell him that he was right, we had been, and there was the occasional cup of tea brewed with ditch water, when we had a chance to make a fire to boil it.
All the while, he worked on my hand with distracted swiftness and telegraphed his moves by narrating them, as though consulting some other doctor in the room, though he was the only one, as far as I could tell. “Infection? Damn near. Clean shot from fairly close up. Fifth gone. Ring finger? No use. Take them both. Nurse! I’ll need a tray and sutures, and change that bloody apron! No English. Christ! Okay, Fritz. Lie down. You’ll never play the piano again.”
After the amputation, they kept me in a bed at that poor excuse for a hospital, changed my bandages daily, and fed me. When I could stand and the risk of infection had passed, they gave me new clothes (some dead Austrian’s old uniform) and shipped me out with the rest of the prisoners.
All of the trains I rode from there were old boxcars bolted shut, and I never saw daylight until we reached what a chipped and peeling sign at the station said was Livorno. And there we were boarded into the hold of an old coal-steamer ferry, which chugged across a lurching sea and landed on the island of Sardinia. The harbor town was deserted as we disembarked. Or perhaps its locals remained out of sight while this boatload of despised Austrians boarded the trains those locals rode every day from one town to another, and we disappeared in order and silence to the sentences that awaited us.
After a long journey that I reckoned was taking us south, the train stopped at a siding that could have been any stretch of track that dead-ended in a desert, or a quarry, or at the base of a mountain — anywhere that was nowhere — and we were separated by rank, marched through the gates of a compound that had been built long ago, given showers, deloused, handed clothes to wear that felt like burlap, led four men at a time into dark, bare cells with small uncovered slits cut in the stone above head height (and through which more mosquitoes came than light), and doled out a ration of a crust of bread and a tin of water. Still, it was no worse than where I’d slept at Fort Cherle and like a villa compared to the muddy pits in which we had made our stand on the Piave. I slept on the floor, not wanting to fight for a rack that served as a bed, and in the morning one of the men in our cell was dead and we were three, although we didn’t announce to the guards that he was dead until after we had gotten our breakfast of more bread and watered-down goat’s milk and shared his among us.
Not one of us moved on that first full day of imprisonment. The other two men had no wounds but were listless and feverish, and we all three sat or lay as though taking a short break after a long morning of hard labor and intending to get back to our work soon, but not one of us got up, not even to empty our bowels, and the place began to reek of shit. By evening, one of the prisoners was moaning quietly and the other seemed able to take shallow breaths, if he took breath at all. My hand throbbed with pain, though I welcomed it, for then I knew there was enough life in the limb for me to keep it, and my own exhaustion was simply that: exhaustion. Already I was feeling (as one of the others rolled off his rack in the dark and remained on the floor) something of the strength I once knew return to me. So I moved on to the bed and slept as well as I had slept since the night before Zlee was killed.
In the morning, both of my cell mates were dead and there was no breakfast. I was dragged out of the room past men wearing masks and dipping brooms in what smelled like buckets of lye water, and I was taken to another part of the prison and put in a cell similar to the other in everything but the window, which was of regular size but with iron bars across, and left there by myself.
MY HAND HEALED SLOWLY BUT WELL. WHEN THE ITALIAN soldier on the Piave shot me, the top half of my little finger was ripped off by the bullet, and on the march to the prisoners’ sorting station, my ring finger had begun to get infected. I would surely have lost my arm, or died from sepsis, if the English doctor in Padua hadn’t taken both fingers off at the palm, and I remember saying when I unwrapped my own bandages and looked down and saw my hand form the shape of a small pistol, “I won’t die by the sword after all.”
Daily I felt my strength increase, and I began to move more and go outside when the guards allowed it, and take in where it was they had sent me. The prison was a sandstone compound in a valley near the town of Cagliari, to the south of the island. It baked in the heat of the Mediterranean by day and sat in the path of a cold wind funneling down it by night, and it might have been one among hundreds of prisons, for all I knew, although this one surely wasn’t a temporary structure that was built to house an enemy vanquished in a war, but, rather, a prison of old merely opened to accommodate new inmates. When we were let out into the yard, all I could see were rugged mountains in the distance — they looked like they had only the night before risen fully from the earth — but I could smell from whichever direction the wind was coming, the faintest breath of sea. Because it was an old smell to me, and its wet, briny musk scrubbed the stench of death from my nostrils and mind (even in that prison), I began to long to smell it, the sea, and wondered how one lived so as to be near it always.
But life was still, day after day, the life of a prisoner. There is nothing more to say. Around me, men lived behind walls and died behind walls. The only difference between life here and on the battlefield was there we believed that the outcome of the war would be different, and so fought to that end. Here, we were reminded of our defeat, for although they died among comrades, death came quietly to those who couldn’t hold out any longer, and into that silence, too, went all hope that we might have fought for some purpose.
Austrian or Slav, the Italians treated us with contempt, and without the English officers back on the Piave to stop them, they would have shot every last one of us, I am convinced. But the Sardinians who met our steamer (in what I later learned was the town of Olbia), herded us onto the train, rode with us on the long, slow trek by rail, marched us to our internment, and ordered our lives, were men of the hills and the mountains, who understood us and trusted us, strangely, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, and so I came to love my jailers. They wanted us to live and thrive (they were visibly upset when one of us died, and so many of the men with whom I was sent there died), and gradually we ate what they ate, and those of us who stayed healthy were given coats for our outdoor work details as the hot summer months gave way to a chilly autumn, and if there was anything they forced us to do, it was to go outside.
“Ki proiri, arreparari… Ma proiri?” they’d say in their staccato tongue (a dialect strange even to the Italianspeaking Austrian in my cell block, who came to realize what they were saying to us one day, and that they meant well). “A roof is for the rain. Do you see any rain?” And to be sure, that summer it never rained, and though we were the beaten prisoners of a lost war, the sun and sky up above were freedom enough.