down the valley to Monfalcone and the sea, and so it would have been
had the weather continued misty and rainy. But the sun came out
brightly just as we reached the beginning of an exposed stretch of the
road; an Austrian observer, peering through a telescope set up in a
monastery on top of a mountain ten miles away, caught sight of the
hurrying gray insect which was our car; he rang up on the telephone a
certain battery and spoke a few words to the battery commander; and an
instant later on the road along which we were travelling Austrian
shells began to fall. Shells being expensive, that little episode cost
the Emperor-King several hundred kronen, we figured. As for us, it
merely interrupted a most interesting morning's ride.
Leaving the car in the shelter of a hill, we toiled up a steep and
stony slope to a point from which I was able to get an admirable idea
of the general lay of Italy's Eastern Front. Coming toward me was the
Isonzo--a bright blue stream the width of the Thames at New
London--which, happy at escaping from its gloomy mountain defile, went
rioting over the plain in a great westward curve. Turning, I could
catch a glimpse, through a notch in the hills, of the white towers and
pink roofs of Monfalcone against the Adriatic's changeless blue. To
the east of Monfalcone rose the red heights of the Carso, the barren
limestone plateau which stretches from the Isonzo south into Istria.
And beyond the Carso I could trace the whole curve of the mountains
from in front of Trieste up past Gorizia and away to the Carnia. The
Italian front, I might add, divides itself into four sectors: the
Isonzo, the Carnia and Cadore, the Trentino, and the Alpine.
Directly below us, not more than a kilometre away, was a village which
the Austrians were shelling. Through our glasses we could see the
effects of the bombardment as plainly as though we had been watching a
football game from the upper tier of seats in the Yale Bowl. They were
using a considerable number of guns of various calibers and the crash
of the bursting shells was almost incessant. A shell struck a rather
pretentious building, which was evidently the town hall; there was a
burst of flame, and a torrent of bricks and beams and tiles shot
skyward amid a geyser of green-brown smoke. Another projectile chose
as its target the tall white campanile, which suddenly slumped into
the street, a heap of brick and plaster. Now and again we caught
glimpses of tiny figures--Italian soldiers, most likely--scuttling for
shelter. Occasionally the Austrians would vary their rain of heavy
projectiles with a sort of shell that went _bang_ and released a
fleecy cloud of smoke overhead and then dropped a parcel of high
explosive that burst on the ground. It was curious to think that the
guns from which these shells came were cunningly hidden away in nooks
and glens on the other side of that distant range of hills, that the
men serving the guns had little if any idea what they were firing at,
and that the bombardment was being directed and controlled by an
officer seated comfortably at the small end of a telescope up there on
a mountain top among the clouds. Yet such is modern war. It used to be
one of the artillerist's tenets that his guns should be placed in a
position with a "commanding" range of view. But nowadays guns
"command" nothing. Instead they are tucked away in gullies and leafy
glens and excavated gun-pits, and their muzzles, instead of frowning
down on the enemy from an eminence, stare blindly skyward from behind
a wall of hills or mountains. The Italians evidently grew tired of
letting the Austrians have their way with the town, for presently some
batteries of heavy guns behind us came into action and their shells
screamed over our heads. Soon a brisk exchange of compliments between
the Italian and Austrian guns was going on over the shattered roofs of
the town. We did not remain overlong on our hillside and we were
warned by the artillery officer who was guiding us to keep close to
the ground and well apart, for, were the Austrians to see us in a
group, using maps and field-glasses, they probably would take us for
artillery observers and would send over a violent protest cased in
steel.
On none of the European battle-fronts is there a more beautiful and
impressive journey than that from Udine up to the Italian positions in
the Carnia. The Carnia sector connects the Isonzo and Trentino fronts
and forms a vital link in the Italian chain of defense, for, were the
Austrians to break through, they would take in flank and rear the
great Italian armies operating on the two adjacent fronts. West of the
Carnia, in Cadore, the Italians are campaigning in one of the world's
most famous playgrounds, for, in the days before the Great War,
pleasure-seekers from every corner of Europe and America swarmed by
the tens of thousands in the country round about Cortina and in the
enchanted valleys of the Dolomites. But now great gray guns are
emplaced in the shady glens where the honeymooners used to stroll; on
the terraces of the tourist hostelries, where, on summer afternoons,
men in white flannels and women in dainty frocks chattered over their
tea, now lounge Italian officers in field uniforms of gray; the blare
of dance music and the popping of champagne corks has been replaced
by the blare of bugles and the popping of rifles.
If you have ever gone, in a single day, from the sunlit orange groves
of Pasadena up to the snow-crowned peaks of the Coast Range, you will
have as good an idea as I can give you of the journey from the Isonzo
up to the Carnia. Down on the Carso the war is being waged under a sky
of molten brass and in summer the winds which sweep that arid plateau
are like blasts from an open furnace-door. The soldiers fighting in
the Carnia, on the other hand, not infrequently wear coats of white
fur to protect them from the cold and to render them invisible against
the expanses of snow. When I was on the Italian front they told me an
incident of this mountain warfare. There was desperate fighting for
the possession of a few yards of mountain trenches and a
half-battalion of Austrian Jaegers--nearly five hundred men--were
enfiladed by machine-gun fire and wiped out. That night there was a
heavy snowfall and the Austrian corpses sprawled upon the
mountainside were soon buried deep beneath the fleecy flakes. The long
winter wore along, the war pursued its dreary course, to five hundred
Austrian homes the Austrian War Office sent a brief message that the
husband or son or brother had been "reported missing." Then the spring
came, the snow melted from the mountainsides, and the horrified
Italians looked on the five hundred Austrians, frozen stiff, as meat
is frozen in a refrigerator, in the same attitudes in which they had
died months before.
With countless hair-pin, hair-raising turns, our road wound upward,
bordered on one hand by the brinks of precipices, on the other by bare
walls of rock. It was a smooth road, splendidly built, but steep and
terrifyingly narrow--so narrow in places that it was nothing more than
a shelf blasted from the sheer face of the cliff. Twice, meeting
motor-lorries downward bound, we had to back along that narrow shelf,
with our outer wheels on the brink of emptiness, until we came to a
spot where there was room to pass. It was a ticklish business.
At one point a mountain torrent leaped from the cliff into the depths
below. But the water-power was not permitted to go to waste; it had
been skilfully harnessed and was being used to run a completely
equipped machine-shop where were brought for repair everything from
motor-trucks to machine-guns. That was one of the things that
impressed me most--the mechanical ability of the Italians. The
railways, cable-ways, machine-shops, bridges, roads, reservoirs,
concrete works that they have built, more often than not in the face
of what would appear to be unsurmountable difficulties, prove them to
be a nation of engineers.
Up to the heights toward which we were climbing so comfortably and
quickly in a motor-car there was before the war, so I was told,
nothing but a mule-path. Now there is this fine military road, so
ingeniously graded and zigzagged that two-ton motor-trucks can now go
with ease where before a donkey had difficulty in finding a footing.
When these small and handy motor-trucks come to a point where it is no
longer possible for them to find traction, their loads are transferred
to the remarkable wire-rope railways, or _telefericas_, as they are
called, which have made possible this campaign in cloudland. Similar
systems are in use, all over the world, for conveying goods up the
sides of mountains and across chasms. A wire rope running over a drum
at each side of the chasm which has to be crossed forms a double line
of overhead railway. Suspended on grooved wheels from this overhead
wire are "cars" consisting of shallow iron trays about the length and
width of coffins, one car going up as the other comes down. The floors
of the cars are perforated so as to permit the draining off of water
or blood--for men wounded in the mountain fighting are frequently
brought down to the hospitals in them--and the sides are of
latticework, and, I might add, quite unnecessarily low. Nor is the
prospective passenger reassured by being told that there have been
several cases where soldiers, suddenly overcome by vertigo, have
thrown themselves out while in mid-air. If the cars are properly
loaded, and if there is not a high wind blowing, the _teleferica_ is
about as safe as most other modes of conveyance, but should the cars
have been carelessly loaded, or should a strong wind be blowing, there
is considerable danger of their coming into collision as they pass. In
such an event there would be a very fair chance of the passenger
spattering up the rocks a thousand feet or so below. There is still
another, though a rather remote possibility: that of being shelled
while in mid-air, for certain of the _telefericas_ run within view of
the Austrian positions. And sometimes the power which winds the drum
gives out and the car and its passengers are temporarily marooned in
space. Aviation, motor-racing, mountain-climbing, big-game hunting,
all seem commonplace and tame compared with the sensation of swinging
helplessly in a shallow bathtub over half a mile of emptiness while an
Austrian battery endeavors to pot you with shrapnel, very much as a
small boy throws stones at a scared cat clinging to a limb.
Yet over these slender wires has been transported an army, with its
vast quantities of food, stores, and ammunition, and by the same
method of transportation have been sent back the wounded. Without this
ingenious device it is doubtful if the campaign in the High Alps could
ever have been fought. But the cables, strong though they are, are yet
too weak to bear the weight of the heavy guns, some of them weighing
forty and fifty tons, which the Italians have put into action on the
highest peaks. So, by the aid of ropes and levers and pulleys and
hundreds of brawny backs and straining arms, these monster pieces have
been hauled up slopes as steep as that of the Great Pyramid, have been
hoisted up walls of rock as sheer and high as those of the Flatiron
Building. You question this? Well, there they are, great eight and
nine inch monsters, high above the highest of the wire roads, one of
them that I know of at a height of ten thousand feet above the sea.
There is no doubting it, incredible as it may seem, for they speak for
themselves--as the Austrians have found to their cost.
The most advanced positions in the Carnia, as in the Trentino, are
amid the eternal snows. Here the guns are emplaced in ice caverns
which can be reached only through tunnels cut through the drifts; here
the men spend their days wrapped in shaggy furs, their faces smeared
with grease as a protection from the stinging blasts, and their nights
in holes burrowed in the snow, like the igloos of Esquimaux. On no
front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the
frozen Mazurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud of Flanders, does
the fighting man lead so arduous an existence as up here on the roof
of the world. I remember standing with an Italian officer in an
observatory in the lower mountains. The powerful telescope was
trained on the snow-covered summit of one of the higher peaks.
"Do you see that little black speck on the snow at the very top?" the
officer asked me.
I told him that I did.
"That is one of our positions," he continued. "It is held by a
lieutenant and thirty Alpini. I have just received word that, as the
result of yesterday's snow-storm, our communications with them have
been cut off. We will not be able to relieve them, or get supplies to
them, much before next April."
And it was then only the middle of December!
In the Carnia and on the Upper Isonzo one finds the anomaly of
first-line trenches which are perfectly safe from attack. I visited
such a position. Through a loophole I got a little framed picture of
the Austrian trenches not five hundred yards away, and above them, cut
in the mountainside, the square black openings within which lurked the
Austrian guns. Yet we were as safe from anything save artillery fire
as though we were in Mars, for between the Italian trenches and the
Austrian intervened a chasm half a thousand feet deep and with walls
as steep and smooth as the side of a house. The narrow strip of valley
at the bottom of the chasm was a sort of no man's land, where forays,
skirmishes, and all manner of desperate adventures took place nightly
between patrols of Jaegers and Alpini.
As with my field-glasses I was sweeping the turmoil of trench-scarred
mountains which lay spread, below me, like a map in bas-relief, an
Austrian battery quite suddenly set up a deafening clamor, and on a
hillside, miles away, I could see its shells bursting in clouds of
smoke shot through with flame. They looked like gigantic white peonies
breaking suddenly into bloom. The racket of the guns awoke the most
extraordinary echoes in the mountains. It was difficult to believe
that it was not thunder. Range after range caught up the echoes of
that bombardment and passed them on until it seemed as though they
must have reached Vienna. For half an hour, perhaps, the cannonade
continued, and then, from an Italian position somewhere above and
behind us, came a mighty bellow which drowned out all other sounds. It
was the angry voice of Italy bidding the Austrians be still.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] I was told by a British general that thousands of tiny steel
prongs had been discovered in baled hay brought from America. They
were evidently put there by German sympathizers in the United States
with the object of killing the Allies' horses.
CHAPTER IV
THE ROAD TO TRIESTE
In order to appraise the Italian operations on the Carso at their true
value, it is necessary to go back to May, 1916, when the Archduke
Frederick launched his great offensive from the Trentino. Now it must
be kept constantly in mind, as I have tried to emphasize in preceding
chapters, that when the war opened, the Italians had always to go up
while the Austrians needed only to come down. The latter, intrenched
high on that tremendous natural rampart formed by the Rhaetian and
Tyrolean Alps, the Dolomites, the Carnic, Julian, and Dinaric ranges,
had an immense superiority over their enemy on the plains below. The
Austrian offensive in the Trentino was dictated by four reasons:
first, to divert the Italians from their main objective, Trieste;
second, to lessen the pressure which General Cadorna was exerting
against the Austrian lines on the Isonzo; third, to smash through to
Vicenza and Verona, thus cutting off and compelling the capitulation
of the Italian armies operating in Venetia; and fourth, to so
thoroughly discourage the Italians that they would consent to a
separate peace.
The story of how this ambitious plan was foiled is soon told. By the
first week in May the Austrians had massed upon the Trentino front a
force of very nearly 400,000 men with 2,000 guns. Included in this
tremendous accumulation of artillery were 26 batteries of 12-inch guns
and several of the German giants, the famous 42-centimetre pieces,
which brought down the pride of Antwerp and Namur. By the middle of
May everything was ready for the onset to begin, and this avalanche of
soldiery came rolling down the Asiago plateau, between the Adige and
the Brenta. Below them, basking in the sunshine, stretched the
alluring plains of Venetia, with their wealth, their women, and their
wine. Pounded by an immensely superior artillery, overwhelmed by wave
upon wave of infantry, the Italians sullenly fell back, leaving the
greater part of the Sette Communi plateau and the upper portion of the
Brenta valley in the hands of the Austrians. At the beginning of June
a cloud of despondency and gloom hung over Italy, and men went about
with sober faces, for it seemed all but certain that the enemy would
succeed in breaking through to Vicenza, and by cutting the main
east-and-west line of railway, would force the armies operating on the
Isonzo and in the Carnia to surrender. But the soldiers of the Army of
the Trentino, though outnumbered in men and guns, determined that the
Austrians should pay a staggering price for every yard of ground they
gained. They fought as must have fought their ancestors of the Roman
legions. And, thanks to their tenacity and pluck, they held their
opponents on the five-yard line. Then, just in the nick of time, the
whistle blew. The game was over. The Austrians had to hurry home.
They had staked everything on a sudden and overwhelming onslaught by
which they hoped to smash the Italian defense and demoralize the
Italian armies in time to permit at least half their eighteen
divisions and nearly all of their heavy guns being withdrawn in a few
weeks and rushed across Austria to the Galician front, where they were
desperately needed to stay the Russian advance.
By the beginning of the last week in June the Austrian General Staff,
recognizing that its plan for the overwhelming of northern Italy had
failed disastrously, issued orders for a general retreat. The
Austrians had planned to fall back on the positions which had been
prepared in advance in the mountains and to establish themselves, with
greatly reduced numbers, on this practically impregnable line, while
the transfer of the divisions intended for the Carpathians was
effected. But General Cadorna had no intention of letting the
Austrians escape so easily. In less than a week he had collected from
the garrisons and training camps and reserve battalions an army of
500,000 men. It was one of the most remarkable achievements of the
war. From all parts of Italy he rushed those half million men to the
Trentino front by train--and despite the immense strain put upon the
Italian railways by the rapid movement of so great a body of troops,
the regular passenger service was suspended for only three days. (At
that same time the American Government was attempting to concentrate a
force of only 150,000 men on the Mexican border; a comparison of
Italian and American efficiency is instructive.) He formed that army
into brigades and divisions, each complete with staff and supply
trains and ammunition columns. He organized fresh bases of supply,
including water, of which there is none on the Asiago plateau. He
provided the stupendous quantity of stores and ammunition and
equipment and transport required by such an army. (It is related how
Cadorna's Chief of Transport wired the Fiat Company of Turin that he
must have 545 additional motor-trucks within a week, and how that
great company responded by delivering in the time specified 546--one
over for good measure.) Almost in a night he transformed the rude
mule-paths leading up onto the plateau into splendid military roads,
wide enough and hard enough to bear the tremendous traffic to which
they were suddenly subjected. And finally he rushed his troops up
those roads in motor-cars and motor-trucks, afoot and on horse-back
and astride of donkeys and flung them against the Austrians. So sudden
and savage was the Italian onset that the Austrians did not dare to
spare a man or gun for their Eastern Front--and meanwhile the
Muscovite armies were pressing on toward the Dniester. It is no
exaggeration to assert that the success of Brussiloff's offensive in
Galicia was due in no small measure to the Italian counter-offensive
in the Trentino. That adventure cost Austria at least 100,000 dead and
wounded men.
But not for a moment did the Italians permit the Austrian offensive in
the Trentino to distract them from their real objectives: Gorizia,
the Carso, and Trieste. The "military experts," who from desks in
newspaper offices tell the public how campaigns ought to be conducted,
had announced confidently that Italy had so taxed her strength by her
efforts in the Trentino that, for many months at least, nothing need
be expected from her. But Italy showed the public that the "military
experts" didn't know what they were talking about, for in little more
than a month after the Italian guns had ceased to growl amid the
Tyrolean peaks and passes, they were raining a storm of steel upon the
Austrian positions on the Carso.
Imagine a vast limestone plateau, varying in height from 700 to 2,500
feet, which is as treeless and waterless as the deserts of Chihuahua,
as desolate and forbidding as the Dakota Bad Lands, with a surface as
torn and twisted and jagged as the lava beds of Utah, and with a
summer climate like that of Death Valley in July. That is the Carso.
This great table-land of rock, which begins at Gorizia, approaches
close to the shores of the Adriatic between Monfalcone and Trieste,
and runs southeastward into Istria, links the Alpine system with the
Balkan ranges. Its surface of naked, sun-flayed rock is broken here
and there with gigantic heaps of piled stone, with caves and caverns,
with sombre marshes which sometimes become gloomy and forbidding
lakes, and with peculiar crater-like depressions called _dolinas_,
formed by centuries of erosion. Such scanty vegetation as there is is
confined to these _dolinas_, which form the only oases in this barren
and thirsty land. The whole region is swept by the _Bora_, a wind
which is the enemy alike of plant and man. Save for the lizards that
bask upon its furnace-like floors, the Carso is as lifeless as it is
treeless and waterless. No bird and scarcely an insect can find
nourishment over vast spaces of this sun-scorched solitude; even the
hardy mountain grass withers and dies of a broken heart. So powerful
is the sun that eggs can be cooked without a fire. Metal objects, such
as rifles and equipment, when left exposed, quickly become too hot to
touch. The bodies of the soldiers who fall on the Carso are not
infrequently found to have been baked hard and mummified after lying
for a day or two on that oven-like floor of stone.
The Carso is probably the strongest natural fortress in the world.
Anything in the shape of defensive works which Nature had overlooked,
the Austrians provided. For years before the war began the Austrian
engineers were at work strengthening a place that already possessed
superlative strength. The whole face of the plateau was honeycombed
with trenches and tunnels and dugouts and gun emplacements which were
blasted and drilled out of the solid rock with machinery similar to
that used in driving the Simplon and the St. Gothard tunnels. The
posts for the snipers were armored with inch-thick plates of steel
cemented into the rock. The _dolinas_ were converted into machine-gun
pits and bomb-proof shelters. In one of these curious craters I saw a
dugout--it was really a subterranean barracks--electrically lighted
and with neatly whitewashed walls which had sleeping accommodation for
a thousand men. To supply these positions, water was pumped up by
oil-engines, but the Austrians took care to destroy the pipe-lines as
they retired.
At the northern end of the Carso, in an angle formed by the junction
of the Wippach and the Isonzo, the snowy towers and red-brown roofs of
Gorizia rise above the foliage of its famous gardens. The town, which
resembles Homburg or Baden-Baden and was a popular Austrian resort
before the war, lies in the valley of the Wippach (Vippacco, the
Italians call it), which separates the Carso from the southernmost
spurs of the Julian Alps. Down this valley runs the railway leading to
Trieste, Laibach, and Vienna. It will be seen, therefore, that Gorizia
is really the gateway to Trieste, and a place of immense strategic
importance.