Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/787068
80 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S or four, but 11 named battles, each one bloodier than the previous one, culminating in the 12th, the debacle of Caporetto, where the Italians, surprised by a German army that included a young lieutenant named Erwin Rommel, retreated in panic to the south, having lost in the course of two days 40,000 killed, 280,000 captured, and 350,000 lost through desertion, giving the Italian army the reputation for cowardice it suffered under for the rest of the century. Hemingway wrote about this retreat in the unforgettable final pages of A Farewell to Arms—about the Italian soldiers, peasants from the south most of them, freezing in the mountain cold, with no stake in the war's outcome, throwing away their rifles and yelling "Andiamo a casa!" when their officers demanded to know where they were going. "We're going home." Hemingway's hero, ambulance driver Frederic Henry, dives into the Isonzo to avoid being shot as a deserter. "You do not know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly. It seems a long time and it may be very short. I was lucky to have heavy timber to hold onto and I lay in the icy water with my chin on the wood." C aporetto happened 100 years ago. History having moved on, it's a Slovenian valley now, not an Italian one—Caporetto is now called "Kobarid," and the Isonzo is the "Soca," as lovely and peaceful a limestone stream as I've ever fished. Marble trout are its big attraction, with their heavily mottled flanks, but there are big rainbows and browns in all the pools, rising to wispy mayflies in water so pellucid that, staring into it from one of the many footbridges, it seems the trout are hovering in thin air. Even Benito Mussolini noticed the clearness. This was in l914 when he served as a private in the army here, and, as an Italian patriot, thrilled to the river's symbolism. "I have never seen purer water," he wrote. "I bent down over the cold current and drank a mouthful with devotion. Sacred river!" It's entirely possible to fish the Soca and its tributaries without ever once thinking about anything so gloomy as war. You'll see wet-suited kayakers resting on the bank before tackling the next set of rapids; you'll see fly-fishers Czech-nymphing the deeper runs. (Germans or Italians most of them; to my great disappointment, I didn't encounter any Czechs.) The valley, set at the base of the spectacularly jagged Julian Alps, reminds people of New Zealand, though to my eye, with its pastoral farms and neat chalets, it's Switzerland crossed with Vermont. The farmers arrange their firewood in huge piles that are masterpieces of the wood-stacking art; beekeeping boxes are everywhere, painted in yellows and purples that make it seem like they're smiling; in this Catholic, flower-loving country, the roadside shrines will always have fresh bouquets. So you have to search a bit if you want to seek out the war. The Kobarid Museum has one of the best World War I collections anywhere, focusing on the 12 Isonzo/Soca battles. If you're in great shape, you can arrange to hire local mountaineering guides to lead you up to the old front lines, which were often on the summit ridges of 6,000-foot Alpine peaks. The soldiers—the weakest of them bearing up under conditions that would kill the strongest of us now—were supplied by elaborate tramways carrying everything from bread to howitzers to live cattle. The locals know what happened here a century ago, but I am haunted by rivers," Norman Maclean once wrote—but what happens when you fish rivers that are haunted themselves? Haunted by the past is what I'm talking about here. Haunted by the tragedies that happened along their banks. I'm thinking, for example, of the North Fork of Montana's Big Hole River, where in the quiet predawn morning of August 9, l877, a contingent from the U.S. Seventh Infantry attacked the sleeping camp of Chief Joseph and his refugee band of Nez Perce, setting fire to their tipis, killing, not just warriors, but more than 60 women and children. Now it's as tranquil and beautiful a trout stream as you can imagine, the place where the infantry waded across the river to attack. On an August morning you'll see midges on the surface and small cutthroats rising to pick them off, but if you go on to spend some time at the National Battlefield's visitor center on the east bank and sit in the auditorium for the explanatory film, you'll notice boxes of tissues arranged on shelves along the perimeter. "Because so many people cry," the ranger told me when I asked about this. "They learn the story of what happened here and they cry." And I'm thinking of a river closer to home, the Williams in Vermont where it enters the Connecticut. I'll fish there on a summer evening for smallmouth, and it looks as far from haunted as a river can look—a bluebird kind of river; a river of sunlight, swallows, and soft, pliant weeds. Drive along it on a gray winter afternoon and you'll sense it brooding under the weight of something darker than its choppy ice flows, even if you don't know its exact story. On the last day of February 1704, a raiding party of French and Indians ("state-sponsored terrorists" we would call them now) came down from Canada to attack the unsuspecting village of Deerfield, killing the inhabitants or dragging hostages back with them to Quebec through the snow. One of these hostages was John Williams, the town's minister, a man loved and respected by all. He begged his captors that he be allowed to preach a sermon at one of their halting places, it being a Sunday. He took as his text "Hear all people and behold my sorry; my virgins and my young men are gone into captivity." Only half of the hostages ever returned home. One after the other, as they weakened, they were dragged into the forest and dispatched with hatchets, including Williams' beloved wife. The river he preached along is called the Williams now—and, when you see it choked by black February ice, it does indeed look like the kind of place history would choose to do its worse. That's what I mean by haunted rivers. It wouldn't be hard to make a longer list, starting with the Little Bighorn in Montana and going on through dozens of sleepy bass creeks in Virginia and the old Confederacy, along whose banks, 150 years ago, more young men died than bears thinking about. But while many American rivers are haunted by their violent pasts, they're all happy, laughing little brooklets compared to the trout stream I fished this year—the Soca in Slovenia. A hundred years ago, when its valley still belonged to Italy, the river was known as the "Isonzo," and it became one of the most ferociously fought-over corridors in World War I, the Italians trying to move up it to take Ljubljana and Vienna, the Austrians and Germans trying to move down it to break out from the Alps onto the plains above Venice. There wasn't just one "Battle of the Isonzo," not just two, three,