“Bullets Were Our Smallest Problem” – What Actually Wiped Us Out in the Mountains D
The dust of the step is still in our teeth when the ground begins to rise and the road turns up into the hills. For weeks we cross that flat yellow country. That heat that never let go of us. And now the plane is behind us and the mountains stand across the whole sky.
A gray wall higher than a man thinks mountains can be. We march up a narrow road along a river. One man behind the other and nobody talks. Everyone looks up at the peaks and everyone knows that somewhere up there is something worse than the step was. My name is Wilhelm Krauss Unraitzia, First Mountain Division, Gibbs Jerger Regiment 99.
It is the summer of 1942, a hot and dusty summer. And they have told us to go up the valley, over the high passes, and down the far side to the sea and to the oil fields. The officers talk about the ones that are supposed to lie just behind the next ridge. They do not lie behind the next ridge.
But we do not know that yet on this first day down here at the foot of the mountains where the air is still warm and smells of dry grass and dust. I lead a squad. 10 men are mine to answer for. And before this is over, I will bury most of them or leave them where they fall because there is no burying them.
Before the first climb, there were days of marching across the plane, and the wearing down started there. We marched partly at night to get out of the heat of the day, and slept a few hours at dawn wherever we could in a ditch on the bare ground. The boots filled with dust and small stones, and the man who did not look after his feet got blisters that later on the rock turned into something worse.
We passed through empty villages, houses with the doors standing open and the pens with no animals in them and fields burning in the distance. The people had gone. The war had come through there before us and had not left much behind. The road follows the river up into a valley, and for a while it is almost easy country, green with orchards and small stone villages, though the villages are empty and the people gone. Then the valley narrows.
The road becomes a track. The track a path. First the vehicles fall behind one after another because no engine takes this grade. And in the end there are only us and the pack mules which carry everything we do not carry on our own bodies. The ammunition, the rations, the broken down guns.
My pack weighs more than a dead man. Krampons and rope. The eyes ration. I may not touch without an order. The belt, the rifle, two grenades, the spade. Every step uphill drives the straps deeper into the shoulders until the flesh under them goes numb. The first hours go through forest, pine and birch, dark and close, and it is cooler in the shade, but the air hangs damp between the trunks, and the sweat runs down my back and stings my eyes.
The flies are a plague. They settle on the face, on the cracked lips. They crawl under the collar and a man has no free hand to wave them off because one hand is on a strap and the other on the rock. Even here at the bottom of the slope where everything is still green, a man learns that in the mountains you do not fight the enemy first.
First you fight your own weight and the grade. The enemy comes later. The path climbs in switchbacks higher and higher. And when the trees open, we see the valley far below, the river a thin line, the step beyond it already a great distance off. The column strings out, the strong in front, the weak behind, and the NCOs’s shout to close up always close up.
But on this grade, nobody closes up. As a squad leader, I meant to keep my tent together, and I cannot because a man who has nothing left has nothing left, and shouting does not give it back to him. We walk and walk, and the day does not grow shorter, and the ridge that looked close in the morning gets further off the nearer we come.
Up here, the distances are wrong, always further than they look. The first man of mine to die was Rindle, on the second day, on an open stretch of track below a rock bluff. The E1 had a maxim up there, well hidden, and he let the head of the column come right out into the open before he opened up.
Rindle was walking point because I had put him there. That is the thing about leading a squad. You put a man somewhere and then he is dead and you put him there. The gun cut across the track and Randall went down and did not move and we lay flat behind whatever rock there was while the rounds walked up and down the stone.
It took an hour and two more men hurt before the mortar teams got the range and put a few rounds onto the bluff and the gun stopped. We took the bluff in the end. And it was not a victory. What happened was that we lived and the men up there died and when it went quiet we climbed up and found them among the rocks, young men no older than us in their padded jackets.
One was still alive, holding his belly, and his eyes went from face to face, and none of us did anything. Picler gave him water from his flask. Then we went on. There were no stretcherbears for him. There were barely any for us. I wrote Rindle’s name in the little book I kept, the first name, and there was a lot of room left under it.
By the third day, the forest thinned out. The big trees stopped, then the small ones, then there was only low, hard scrub between the stones, and then not even that, only rock, gray, bare rock, as far as a man could see, and above it the ridges sharp and naked. The air was different up there, thinner.
It did not fill the lungs, and after every turn of the path, a man had to stop and drag air in, and could not get enough. My head began to pound, a dull, steady ache behind the eyes that did not stop while we climbed. Pickler, who was from the Tur and knew the mountains, said we were at 3,000 m, and it would only get worse.
A man talks less up there because talking costs air, and air is the thing there is least of. Zimmerman threw up that morning walking without stopping, and nobody laughed. Down in the step, we would have laughed. Not here. Hour sat down to rest and I had to get him up, shout at him, get him on his feet because sitting down was the first step to not getting up again.
And a squad leader learns that fast or he loses men to the cold who were never even shot at. We climbed in silence, one behind the other, and I counted my men over and over out of habit. And each day there was one fewer to count. On the lower rock before the ice, the falling stones were the worst danger.
Sometimes you heard it, the clatter and the rolling high above. And there was no time. None at all. A stone the size of a head comes down from up there. And if it hits you, that is the end. That is how we lost Huber on the climb up. It caught him on the shoulder and took him off the path.
and he slid and rolled and there was no stopping him. And the sound of him got smaller and smaller until it was gone. We could not go down after him. There was no way down. We went on. There was never any going down after them. Then the rock gave way to ice. We came out onto the glacier that runs down off the great mountain, a wide field of old ice under the snow, and we roped up because a glacier is not solid.
It is split with cracks, creasses, some of them narrow and some of them deep enough that a man who goes in does not come out. The snow bridges them over so you cannot see them. You feel the ground go soft under a foot and you throw yourself back and hope the rope holds.
Lang went into one on the second day on the ice. The bridge gave under him and he was gone straight down and the rope snapped tight on Edgar and nearly took him in too. We hauled Lang up. He was alive, both legs broken, and after that he was a load. And a load on the ice is a slow death for everyone who carries him.
High on the ice there was a hut, a building of stone and metal that the mountaineers had put up before the war, on a shoulder of the great mountain, a little over 4,000 m up. We took it and made it our base. It was the only shelter for a day’s climb in any direction out of the wind with walls, and that alone made it worth more than we could say.
But it was one building on an open field of ice, and the Ewan knew exactly where it stood. And so it was also the one thing on all that ice the enemy could always find. We held it, and it kept the wind off. And it was also the place his guns and his patrols came for. And both of those things were true at once.
Even in the hut the cold got in. 20 below zero at night, Peer reckoned, sometimes more, and the wind never stopped. It came off the summit and found every gap in a man’s clothing, the sleeves, the collar under the mountain cap. We slept packed together on the floor, and still nobody was warm.
And in the morning the door was frozen shut, and the water in the cantens was ice. The rations froze hard. You broke a piece off the bread and thawed it in your mouth a long time before you could chew it without cracking a tooth. The fingers went first. They always go first, and a man does not feel it come.
The mornings up there were the hardest thing to start. A man woke, if he had slept at all, with his clothes frozen stiff and his body locked up with the cold, and the first movements hurt because everything had gone rigid in the night. The first thing was to look at the hands and the feet, count the fingers, see what color they were.
Then came the fight with the frozen boots, with the rifle whose bolt had iced up, with fingers that would not obey. Some men did not wake. You spoke to them. You shook them and they stayed still. And then you knew the cold had taken them in the night without a sound. By the second week in the hut, men were losing toes.
Zimmermans went white and hard, and the medic who was still with us looked at them and shook his head. Frostbite takes the toes, then the feet, and there was nothing to do about it up there but cut away what had gone black before it spread with scissors without morphine because the morphine was gone. Zimmerman bit down on a strap and did not make a sound because there was already almost no feeling left in the foot.
A gi without feet is nothing, a sack the others have to carry, and everyone knew it, and Zimmerman knew it best of all, looking at what the medic had cut away. The feet were a torment of their own. The mountain boots got wet from the snow in the day, and at night if you did not take them into the sleeping bag with you, they froze stiff, and in the morning you forced your foot into a boot of ice.
The man who got a while by the fire pulled off his wet socks and tried to dry them against his chest under his clothes with his own warmth. The man who neglected his feet lost them. I saw the medic cut black toes off men with a pair of scissors. no morphine and the men set their teeth and made no sound because there was almost nothing left to feel.
The sun burned even in the cold. The snow threw the light back and it burned the eyes until a man saw only through a slit and the one who had no goggles went blind all the way blind and then somebody had to lead him on the rope. Snow blindness. It came to our who spent three days seeing nothing, his eyes red and swollen, weeping a fluid that was not tears but the injury of the light itself. He got his sight back.
Most of them did. If they could keep the eyes covered and in shadow, but three days blind on that ice, a burden to the man leading him, is 3 days a man is a load, and nobody wanted to be alone. The Ewin came at the hut at dawn more than once across the open ice. That was the strange thing about fighting up there.
There was no cover on a glacia, none. And they came at us over open snow in their white suits, and we cut into them with the MG from the walls of the hut. The MG34 opened up a hard, fast hammering, 800 to 900 rounds a minute. And on that open field, it did terrible work, and the snow in front of the hut was not white afterwards, but they kept coming.
Night patrols and dawn rushes, and each time we held, they came back the next time with more, because they had more, and we did not. I have killed. I say it because it is the truth, and because I will not pretend I was only a man that things were done to. From the wall of the hut, I fired into men coming across the ice, and some of them fell and did not get up.
And I gave the orders that put the gun where it did that work, and I chose which of my men lay behind it. That is what an unreer does. He does not only carry the load, he decides. And there is no way to set that down again afterwards, and I have not set it down. The mules did most of the carrying, and they suffered worse than we did.
They went where they were driven, up ice and along ledges no animal should have been on, and when one lost its footing, it went over with its whole load, and there was no getting it back. The drivers stayed with them longer than sense allowed, because a lost mule meant lost ammunition or lost rations, and a man would risk himself for a load he could not afford to lose.
I saw a driver go over the edge after a slipping animal. Both of them gone in a second and the load with them and there was nothing at the bottom to go down for. The supply stopped coming. The mules broke through in the passes went off the edge or the drivers could not get up because the E1 swept the tracks with fire.
Once they tried to drop it to us from the air, a transport, a Jew 52, that came in low over the glacier and pushed out canisters on small shoots, and half of them drifted off on the wind onto ice we could not reach. And one of them we watched go straight down a creasse, food and fuel and ammunition gone into the mountain where no man would ever get it.
We had the Isizerna ration which you touch only on an order and in the end you touch it anyway order or none because the hunger gets so bad that a man starts to see things that are not there. Everything up there came down to fuel in the end. With fuel you could melt snow for water and warm a little food and without it you could do neither and there was almost never enough.
We burned what we could find low down and carried up. And when that was gone, we did without. A man can go a long time without much food if he can get something warm into him. But cold food in a cold body day after day wears a man down faster than hunger alone. On the days the cooker had nothing to burn, we ate the frozen ration cold and sat there getting colder.
And those were the days men gave up. Hunger high on the ice is not the hunger of the valley. The body burns itself to keep warm. And when there is nothing left to burn, it burns the muscle that carries a man up the mountain. And then he does not climb anymore. What we ate when we ate was hard frozen bread, a little sausage thawed in the mouth.
Sometimes a paste of the last scraps boiled in melted snow. The meat was from mules that died or had to be shot because they could go no higher. It was not good, and it was not enough, but it was warm, and the warmth mattered almost more than the food. The days with nothing warm were the worst.
A man loses count of the days. It was August. That much was sure, the 21st, perhaps, when the word came that a party had gone up the great mountain all the way to the top, and set the flag on the summit. It went round the positions and some men were actually glad. And I did not understand what there was to be glad about.
We were freezing. We were starving. We were dying one at a time. And somewhere up there, a piece of cloth was flapping in the wind that warmed no one and filled no belly and brought back not one of the dead. Later I heard that high up at the headquarters someone had been furious because the climb had not even been ordered.
Men had died for a thing nobody had told them to do. The body gives out on the mountain in a set order and a man learns it whether he wants to or not. First the fingers and the toes, then the nose and the ears, then the head. High up a man goes slow and stupid, thick in the mind because the brain does not get enough air. Men made bad choices from it.
They sat down to rest. Only a moment, they said, and did not get up. And I had to hit them, shout at them, kick them onto their feet, because sitting was the first step to dying. And it was my job to know that, and theirs, to hate me for it. Naggle’s mind went one night in the hut. He did not rave.
He got up quietly in the dark, and began to unlace his boots and take off his jacket in 20 below, quiet and calm. And when Pickler stopped him, he said he was going home, that it was warm, and his bed was made. The cold and the height do that to the head at the end. We held him down and got his clothes back on him, and by morning he was clear again, and did not remember it, and nobody spoke of it.
But two nights later, he walked out the door while the sentry’s back was turned out onto the ice, and we found him in the morning, a 100 meters off, sitting in the snow, frozen, with a look on his face that was almost content. The dead mostly cannot be buried on the mountain. The ground is rock or ice. You cannot dig.
So you lay a man aside, put stones on him if there is strength for it, and if there is not, you leave him. They freeze. In winter, I was told the face freezes just as it was at the moment of death. And the next summer, when the ice gives a little, they look freshly dead. There are men on that mountain who found their own comrades from the year before, the same face, the same position, and had to walk past them to fight for the same ground.
Standing sentry at night was its own kind of dying. Two hours out on the ice in the wind, in the dark, straining to hear a patrol that made no sound, the cold working into you the whole time, and your relief at the end of it had to be shaken awake, and sometimes could not be woken at all.
You could not stamp your feet or swing your arms much, because the noise carried, so you stood and froze, and watched the dark, and waited for it to be over. More than one sentry was found dead at his post in the morning. The weather changed in minutes. One moment the hard blue sky and then a white wall came down, a blizzard that took the hand from in front of your eyes.
You could not see the man ahead of you on the rope. You heard nothing over the wind, not the orders, not the shouts, not a man’s own thoughts. A man lost in a storm like that walks in a circle and dies in a circle. We tied the whole group to one rope and went on blind, one behind the other, trusting that the man in front knew the way that none of us could see anymore. Sometimes he did.
They sent my squad out on the ice at night more than once to feel for the E1’s positions before an attack. There is nothing worse than a patrol on a glacier in the dark. You go roped slow, testing every step for the creasses you cannot see. and you know that somewhere out on that white ground, the enemy is doing the same thing and that you will not see each other until you’re almost on top of one another.
One night, we walked into one of their patrols in the dark. And what happened then happened at arms length with grenades and the spade and the knife because a rifle is no use when you cannot tell your own men from theirs. We lost two. They lost more. We did not stay to count. There was a stretch of the glacia the E1 had raged from above and we had to cross it and we crossed it at night because by day the fire came down on it.
But at night on the ice the danger is under your feet because you cannot see the creasses. Two men went into one that night without a sound. A wrong step in the dark and nobody knew until we counted at dawn and two were missing. We did not look for them. There was no looking for them.
On the mountain, a man falls and no one hears it. I remember the hands of the dead. It is a strange thing to remember. But it is the hands. In the frost, they curl and close and the skin goes yellow then gray. We took the gloves off the dead, the pullovers, the socks, everything that still had use in it because the living needed it and the dead needed nothing. It sounds cruel.
It is cruel. But on the mountain there is no word for cruel. There is only a word for necessary. And up there the two mean the same thing. I took a dead man’s gloves myself more than once, and pulled them on while they were still stiff. Edgar died on a morning clearer than most.
He had been coughing for days, a wet cough. And that morning he coughed differently and a pink foam came over his lips. The lungs, the medic said, the water has got into his lungs. It is the height. He drowned slowly on his own breath with dry feet on a mountain where there is no water but ice. It took the whole morning.
Pickler and I held his hands. There was nothing more we could do. There was no more. I asked myself in those days, what for? Not allowed. never allowed. But inside where the ketton does not reach, I asked it all the time. What for this mountain? What for this hut on the ice? These passes that led nowhere because we did not get through.
We had known that a long time. The push to the sea never came. The oil fields in the south stayed out of reach and stayed there. We were stuck high on the ice, dying for lines on a map that a general looked at, who never froze and never starved, and never held a man’s hand while the pink water filled his lungs.
The officers who gave the orders almost never came up to where we were. They sent them by radio or by runner, a paper with a line and a time. Take that height before dawn. Hold that position at all costs. At all costs meant to the last man. And the last man was not the one who signed the paper.
Once a young lieutenant came up to see the line, and he went white at the state of us, and he went down the next day, and did not come back. I do not blame him. Only that after he had seen it, he went on sending the same papers with the same lines and the same times, and what he had seen changed nothing.
The E1 had guns somewhere behind the passes, and now and then he shelled our positions. You did not hear the round coming until the last moment, and by then it was too late. A man learned to read the sound, to know from the whistle whether it would fall near or far, and he got into his hole and waited with his face against the snow, counting.
The bursts on rock were worse than on soft ground because the rock broke and flew in sharp pieces that cut as well as the shell fragments did. After a shelling, the men were counted and there was almost always one missing. The medic ran out of everything. The man stayed, but the bandages and the morphine gave out and in the end he had nothing but his hands and his voice.
A man with a leg shattered screamed for two days and there was nothing nothing to be done. And in the end, you prayed for him to be quiet, and you were ashamed of it. And you prayed anyway. And when he was quiet, it was a relief. And that relief is the worst thing this war has done to me.
To be glad a comrade is finally dead, only so the screaming will stop. There was more than the enemy and the cold trying to kill us. The lice were there from the start. and up on the ice where a man cannot wash. They lived in the seams of his clothes and drove him half mad with the itch, and they carried the typhus.
And men went down with fever and burning skin, and talked nonsense, and some did not get up. And the dissentry ran through the positions, and pulled out of a man what he did not have to give, and left him a skeleton in a few days. And on that ice, where every step aside was over a crack or a drop, men died of that alone, of the body emptying itself with nothing to put back.
They shot a man from the next section for leaving his post. He had gone off it one night down out of the wind into a crack in the rock and slept. And while he slept, an E1 patrol got in close and killed the two centuries either side of him before they were driven off. They called it what the field police, the Kettund always call it.
And there was a court that did not last half an hour up there on the ice. And then they stood him against the wall of the hut because there was no other wall. And a squad of his own comrades had to aim. I was not on it. Pickler was and Pickler did not speak for three days. They shot a man who had done what every one of us wanted to do. Get out of the wind and sleep.
and they called it order. And that is the war, too. When we had the mortar and still had rounds for it, things were a little less hopeless. The crew of the granite were worked out the angle, and the rounds went up and came down on the far side of the ridge, where we could not see onto the Ewan’s positions.
But getting the mortar rounds up there cost. The mules that fell carried them, and the men who broke their backs carried them, and for every round we fired, there was blood on the track that had carried it up. When the rounds ran out, the mortar was only a heavy iron tube that had to be carried on for nothing.
The order came to take a rock spur that stood above the glacier from which the E1 swept the whole ice field. We went up in the night over a slope of ice that was hard and smooth, the krampons scratching and slipping. Nothing below us but the open glacier. At first light we were nearly up. And then they saw us and it began.
Grenades from above and the water cooled gun they call the Maxim, which does not fire as fast as our MG but never stops. A dull steady hammering. We took the spur. It cost seven men, seven of the 19 we still were. And when we stood on it among their dead and ours, I looked out at the mountains, an endless line of white peaks to the edge of sight, and I understood that the spur that seven men had died for was nothing, a point.
We had it, and it changed nothing, and in a week we would give it up again. There was a gorge below the ice that we called the trap because you had to go into it and there was almost no getting out. It was narrow and deep and the walls went up on both sides 100 m 200 and the E1 sat up on the rim and only had to wait.
We went in because the order said so because some staff had drawn a line on a map that ran through that gorge and the man who drew the line had never seen the gorge. They let us get halfway in and then it started from above from both sides and there was no forward and no back, only the bottom of the gorge and the fire coming down.
We lost four before we could crawl back out, dragging the wounded by their straps. and one of the wounded died on the way and we did not notice at first. Water was a constant problem. Surrounded by ice and snow, we were dying of thirst because you cannot drink ice. You have to melt it and melting costs fuel and there was almost no fuel.
Some men ate snow anyway and it chilled them from the inside and they shook for hours afterwards. And more men have died of eating snow on a mountain than of the bullet. Others packed snow into a canteen and carried it against the body under the clothes. And after half a day they had a few swallows of ice water that tasted of wool and sweat.
The mouth was always dry, the tongue swollen, the lips split until they bled. The post barely came. Now and then a sack of letters from home came up with the mules half soaked through, and what there was got handed out. And for the men who got something, it was the best day in weeks. And for the men who got nothing, it was one of the worst.
I got two letters in all that time. I read them so often that I knew them by heart. And then I stopped reading them because each time I read them, the distance to all of that got bigger. The house, the table, the bed, all of it belonged to a life that felt further off every time.
One I had lived before and had left somewhere on the way up. Pickler lasted longest of the men I had trusted. He was from the Tir, a guide before the war, the one who knew the ice, the one who had got us up the glacier and off it more than once. He complained least of anyone. And near the end, even Pinkler went quiet, not in the body, inside. His eyes went flat.
He barely spoke. And when he spoke, it was flat and toneless. And I knew the cold and the height were taking him too slowly, the way they took everyone, and there was nothing I could do about it. And I was his squad leader, and there was nothing I could do. There were weeks when we neither went forward nor back, when we only held, dug into a hole in the snow, or a crack in the rock waiting.
It is hard to say what that does to a man. It is not the fighting that breaks you. It is the waiting between one fight and the next. the hours and the days with nothing to do but be cold, stare at the white wall in front of you, and think about when the next round would come down. Even to relieve yourself, you had to go out to the edge in the wind, in sight of anyone watching from above, and more than one man went down with his trousers around his knees.
There came a day when we had gone more than a week with nothing warm, and the mule column we were waiting for did not come, and in the afternoon we found it a little lower down in the snow. The Ewan had caught it in a hollow, and the animals laid dead among the spilled loads, and the drivers beside them, stiff with cold in the position they had fallen.
We took what we could carry, bread, tins, a can of fuel, and we took it off the backs of the dead animals and out of the pockets of the dead men, and nobody said a word. That evening, we ate something warm for the first time in days, and it tasted of nothing. Once we got replacements, in the middle of all of it, young men from home, just trained, clean faces and new kit, and they looked at us with something between pity and horror.
They understood nothing. They talked about advancing and breaking through and what they had heard at home, and we listened and said nothing. 3 days later, half of them were dead or frostbitten because they did not know the order in which the mountain takes a man because they sat down to rest.
Because they ate snow against the thirst. All the mistakes we had made, too. Only we had had luck and they had not. After weeks up there, we hardly looked human anymore. Nobody had washed or shaved. The clothes were stiff with frozen sweat and filth. The beard grown out and white with frost in the morning.
We stank of smoke, of sweat, of rotten clothing, of the dead we carried, and the dead we left. The face had gone black from the sun off the snow, and from the cold that burns the skin the same. When we came down, the men in the rear kept their distance from us. And not only because of the face, it was the smell as well.
The first snow of the autumn came early, and with it the certainty that it was over, though nobody said so. You do not break a front in the high caucuses in winter. You barely live through the winter with luck, and we had no luck left. The passes closed under the snow. The ways down became death traps.
We were stuck between the Ewan and the ice. And the order that came in the end was to hold, always hold, to hold a line in a place no man can hold because the place itself killed more of us than the man across from us did. The badly wounded had to be got down, and getting a wounded man down that ground was almost impossible.
It took four men to a stretcher. Four men who could barely stand themselves. And on the narrow stretches the stretcher would not go. So the wounded man was tied and dragged and every pull over the rock and the ice was agony for him. We took Fuches down that way for half a day with a wound in the belly and he screamed at every step.
And by midday he stopped screaming and we went on down with a dead man tied to the rope because leaving him did not seem right until he weighed too much and we left him anyway. We buried what could be buried, left what had to be left, and came down when the order finally came, and it came late for most.
The descent is no easier than the climb. They think that in the valley, but it is not so. Going down the knees give out, the thighs shake, the krampons find no hold in the soft new snow, and coming down is as dangerous as going up. Men die on the descent as well, and no one warns you of that in the valley.
Three more men we lost coming down to falls to the cold. To the plain exhaustion that just drops a man where he stands. The frostbitten who could not walk we carried and some of them we could not carry far enough. I kept counting them. It was the one thing a squad leader could still do when he could do nothing else.
Morning and night I counted and put a name to each one. And every few days a name had no man to go with it anymore. You do not get used to it. Men say you get used to it, but you do not. You only get quieter about it. I was quiet by the end. There was not much left to say. Of the 10 men who were mine at the foot of the mountain, two came down with me.
I have the little book still with the names in it. Rindle on the track below the bluff. Lang whose legs the creasse broke. Zimmerman whose feet the medic cut. Naggle who walked out onto the ice to go home. Edgar with the pink foam on his lips and the others whose names I will not read out here all of them because there is not the time and because the voice fails when too many names come one after another.
I answered for those men and I could not keep them and that is a thing I carry that no one can take from me. Down in the valley it was still warm a last of the summer and we did not belong there anymore. The men below, the rear services, the supply people, looked at us, and perhaps they had reason to look at us so thin to the bone, the face black from the sun off the snow and from the cold that burns the skin as well.
The lips split, the eyes sunk deep, and in those eyes something they did not have and never would, something a man leaves up on the mountain and does not bring back down. Afterwards, there were stories told of the flag on the great mountain, the highest peak of the Caucusesus, 5,642 m, and of the heroism of the Gibberg’s Jagger. I saw no heroism.
I saw men who froze and starved and were sick with fear and went on climbing anyway because there was no way back. And that is not heroism. That is only what a man does when there is nothing else left to do. The truth of this war is not the flag in the wind. It is Edgar’s hand in mine while he drowned.
It is the black snow in front of the hut. It is the relief when the screaming finally stopped. The mountain did not beat us and we did not beat the mountain. A mountain does not win or lose. It was there. And up there the men who died died of the cold, of the height, of the ice, of the rock, of the bullets, and nothing came of it.
We went up as soldiers and came down as what is left of a soldier when everything is taken from him. The warmth, the bread, the sleep, the comrades, the belief that any of it meant something. What was left was the will to take the next step, the next breath, the next hour. And there was never more to it than that.
The whole war, never more than that. My name is Wilham Krauss Unraitzia, and I came down off the Caucusesus, and that is all I have to show. No glory, no medal that means anything. No story that tells well beside a warm stove. Only the names of the dead in a little book, and a cold that has never fully gone out of me, and the certain knowledge that up there was no goal worth what those men cost. None.
And that the mountains are still standing over the bones of the ones who never came down, and will stand there long after the last of us has forgotten why we ever climbed.
