Sly hints are about in America as to the pusillanimity of the Italians.
Some persons are ready enough to absorb these hints. Nothing could
be more monstrously false. It is not a matter about which I need
to argue--I _know_. No one with the full use of eyes and ears and
possessed of moderate intelligence could spend twenty-five days with
Cadorna's fighting men without being thrilled. They are battling where
men never battled before--upon the tops of high mountains, elevations
that only eagles knew before Germany put the torch to civilization.
They are swinging bridges across incredible chasms. They are chiselling
roadways where monkeys could scarcely cling. They are blowing off the
tops of gigantic mountains in order to progress a few meters. They are
accepting the most frightful hardships with that charming acceptance of
the inevitable which, it seems to me, is so characteristically Italian.
They freeze. They starve. But always they go ahead--and Vienna knows
with a drag at the heart that the standards of Italy will shortly snap
from the housetops of Trieste.
I say that men never fought before in country so frightfully convulsed
by nature. Wily Austria, peering into the future, knew that the hour
would come when Italian forbearance would strike twelve and demand the
liberation of oppressed Italians in the Trentino, and so Austria in the
Peace of Villafranca brought about an iniquitous boundary which left
her with her feet planted in Italian territory, with her fortresses
upon Italian mountain crests. And that desperate handicap was what
Italy faced when she went to war to liberate her people. All the odds
were against her. But she is winning--winning a few hundred meters at
a time. She conquers first one peak, then a whole range, then another
peak, then another range, and all the time fights classical warfare,
the classical warfare that has been abandoned in France and Belgium.
Hear this story--one of fifty such: