town, rises the enormously strong position of Monte San Michele, and
a few miles farther down the Isonzo, the fortified hill-town of
Sagrado. On the other side of the river, almost opposite Gorizia, are
the equally strong positions of Podgora and Monte Sabotino. Their
steep slopes were slashed with Austrian trenches and abristle with
guns which commanded the roads leading to the river, the bridge-heads,
and the town. To take Gorizia until these positions had been captured
was obviously out of the question. Here, as elsewhere, Austria held
the upper ground. In a memorandum issued by the Austrian General Staff
to its officers at the beginning of the operations before Gorizia, the
tremendous advantage of the Austrian position was made quite clear:
"We have to retain possession of a terrain fortified by Nature. In
front of us a great watercourse; behind us a ridge from which we can
shoot as from a ten-story building."
The difficulties which the Italians had to overcome in their advance
were enormous. From their mountain nests the Austrian guns were able
to maintain a murderous fire on the Italian lines of communication,
thus preventing the bringing up of men and supplies. It therefore
became necessary for the Italians to build new roads which would not
be thus exposed to enemy fire, and in cases where this was impossible,
the existing roads were masked for miles on end with artificial hedges
and screens of grass matting. In many places it was found necessary to
screen the roads overhead as well as on the sides, so that the
Italians could move up their heavy guns without attracting the
attention of the enemy's observers stationed on the highest mountain
peaks, or of the Austrian airmen. But this was not all, or nearly all.
An army is ever a hungry monster, so slaughter-houses and bakeries and
field-kitchens, to say nothing of incredible quantities of
food-stuffs, had to be provided. Fighting being a thirsty business, it
was necessary to arrange for piping up water, for great tanks to hold
that water, and for water-carts, hundreds and hundreds of them, to
peddle it among the panting troops. A prize-fighter cannot sleep out
in the open, on the bare ground, and keep in condition for the ring,
and a soldier, who is likewise a fighting-man but from a different
motive, must be made comfortable of nights if he is to keep in
fighting-trim. So millions of feet of lumber had to be brought up,
along roads already overcrowded with traffic, and that lumber had to
be transformed into temporary huts and barrackments--a city of them.
But the preparations did not end even there. To insure the
co-ordination and co-operation of the various divisions of the army,
an elaborate system of field telegraphs and telephones had to be
installed, and, in order to provide against the lines being cut by
shell-fire and the whole complex organism paralyzed, the wires were
laid in groups of four. Then there had to be repair-stations for the
broken machinery, and other repair-stations--with Red Cross flags
flying over them--for the broken men. So in the rear of the sector
where the Italians planned to give battle on a front of thirty miles,
a series of great base hospitals were established, and, nearer the
front, a series of clearing-hospitals, and, still closer up,
field-hospitals, and in the immediate rear of the fighting-line,
hundreds of dressing-stations and first-aid posts were located in
dugouts and bomb-proof shelters. And along the roads stretched endless
caravans of gray ambulances, for it promised to be a bloody business.
In other words, it was necessary, before the battle could be fought
with any hope of success, to build what was to all intents and
purposes a great modern city, a city of half a million inhabitants,
with many miles of macadamized thoroughfares, with water and telephone
and telegraph systems, with a highly efficient sanitary service, with
railways, with huge warehouses filled with food and clothing, with
more hospitals than any city ever had before, with butcher-shops and
bakeries and machine-shops and tailors and boot-menders--in fact, with
everything necessary to meet the demands of 500,000 men. Yet Mr.
Bryan and his fellow-members of the Order of the Dove and Olive-Branch
would have us believe that all that is necessary in order to win a
modern battle is to take the trusty target-rifle from the closet under
the stairs, dump a box of cartridges into our pockets, and sally
forth, whereupon the enemy, decimated by the deadliness of our fire,
will be only too glad to surrender.
The most formidable task which confronted the Italians was that of
constructing the vast system of trenches through which the troops
could be moved forward in comparative safety to the positions from
which would be launched the final assault. This presented no
exceptional difficulties in the rich alluvial soil on the Isonzo's
western bank, but once the Italians had crossed the river they found
themselves on the Carso, through whose solid rock the trenches could
be driven only with pneumatic drills and dynamite. All of the Italian
trenches that I saw showed a very high skill in engineering. Instead
of keeping the earthen walls from crumbling and caving by the use of
the wicker-work revetments so general on the Western Front, the
Italians use a sort of steel trellis which is easily put in place, and
is not readily damaged by shell-fire. Other trenches which I saw
(though not on the Carso, of course) were built of solid concrete with
steel shields for the riflemen cemented into the parapets.
During these weeks of preparation the Italian aviators, observers, and
spies had been busy collecting information concerning the strength of
the Gorizia defenses and the disposition of the Austrian batteries and
troops. By means of thousands of photographs taken from airplanes,
enlarged, and then pieced together, the Italians had as accurate and
detailed a map of the Austrian lines of defense as was possessed by
the Austrian General Staff itself. Thanks to the data thus obtained,
the Italian gunners were able to locate their targets and estimate
their ranges with absolute precision. They knew which building in
Gorizia was the headquarters of the Austrian commander; they had
discovered where his telephone and telegraph stations were located;
and they had spotted his observation posts. Indeed, so highly
developed was the Italian intelligence service that the Austrians were
not able to transfer a battalion or change the position of a battery
without the knowledge of General Cadorna.
Now the Austrians, like the newspaper experts, were convinced that the
Italians had their hands full in the Trentino without courting trouble
on the Isonzo. And if there was to be an attack along the Isonzo
front--which they doubted--they believed that it would almost
certainly develop in the Monfalcone sector, next the sea. And of this
belief the Italians took care not to disabuse them. Here again was
exemplified the vital necessity of having control of the air. If,
during the latter half of July, the Austrian fliers had been able to
get over the Italian lines, they could not have failed to observe the
enormous preparations which were in progress, and when the Italians
advanced, the Austrians would have been ready for them. But the
Italians kept control of the air (during my entire trip on the Italian
front I can recall having seen only one Austrian airplane), the
Austrians had no means of learning what was impending, and were,
therefore, quite unprepared for the attack when it came--and Gorizia
fell.
By the 4th of August, 1916, all was ready for the Big Push. On the
morning of that day brisk fighting began on the Monfalcone sector.
Convinced that this was the danger-point, the Austrian commander
rushed his reserves southward to strengthen his threatened line. This
was precisely what the Italians wanted. They had succeeded in
distracting his attention from their real objective--Gorizia. Now the
battle of Gorizia was really not fought at Gorizia at all. What
happened was the brilliant and bloody storming of the Austrian
positions on Podgora and Monte Sabotino, a simultaneous crossing of
the Isonzo opposite Gorizia and at Sagrado, and a splendid rush up to
and across the plateau of the Carso which culminated in the taking of
Monte San Michele. Gorizia itself was not organized for defense, and
so astounded was its garrison at the capture in rapid succession of
the city's defending positions, which had been deemed impregnable,
that no serious resistance was offered.
On the morning of August 6 a hurricane of steel suddenly broke upon
Gorizia. But the Italian gunners had received careful instructions,
and instead of blowing the city off the map, as they could easily have
done, they confined their efforts to the destruction of the enemy's
headquarters, observation posts, and telephone-stations, thus
destroying his means of communication and effectually disrupting his
entire organization. Other batteries turned their attention to the
railway-station, the railway-yards, and the roads, dropping such a
curtain of shell-fire behind the town that the Austrians were unable
to bring up reinforcements. Care was taken, however, to do as little
damage as possible to the city itself, as the Italians wanted it for
themselves.
The most difficult, as it was the most spectacular, phase of the
attack was the storming of the Sabotino, a mountain two thousand feet
high, which, it was generally believed, could never be taken with the
bayonet. The Italians, realizing that no troops in the world could
hope to reach the summit of those steep slopes in the face of barbed
wire, rifles, and machine-guns, had, unknown to the enemy, driven a
tunnel, a mile and a quarter long, into the very heart of this
position. When the assault was ordered, therefore, the first lines of
Italian infantry suddenly appeared from out of the ground within a few
yards of the Austrian trenches. Amid a storm of _vivas_ the gray wave,
with its crest of glistening steel, surged up the few remaining yards
of glacis, topped the parapet, and overwhelmed the defenders. Monte
Sabotino, the key to the bridge-head and the city, was in the hands of
the Italians. But the Austrians intrenched on Hill 240, the highest
summit of the Podgora range, still held out, and it took several
hours of savage fighting to dislodge them. This last stronghold taken,
the gray-clad infantry suddenly debouched from the sheltering ravines
and went swarming down to the Isonzo. Almost simultaneously another
division crossed the river several miles below, at Sagrado. Into the
stream they went, their rifles held high above their heads, chanting
the splendid hymn of Garibaldi. The Austrian shrapnel churned the
river into foam, its waters turned from blue to crimson, but the
insistent bugles pealed the charge, and the lines of gray swept on.
Pausing on the eastern bank only long enough to re-form, the lines
again rolled forward. White disks carried high above the heads of the
men showed the Italian gunners how far the infantry had advanced and
enabled them to gauge their protecting curtain of fire. Though
smothered with shells, and swept by machine-guns, nothing could stop
them. "Avanti Savoia!" they roared. "Viva! Eviva Italia!"
Meanwhile, under a heavy fire, the Italian engineers were repairing
the iron bridge which carried the railway from Milan and Udine across
the Isonzo to Gorizia and so to Trieste and Vienna. The great stone
bridge over the river had been destroyed the day before beyond the
possibility of immediate repair. In an amazingly short time the work
was done and the Italian field-batteries went tearing over the bridge
at a gallop to unlimber on the opposite bank and send a shower of
shrapnel after the retreating Austrians. Close behind the guns poured
Carabinieri, Alpini, Bersaglieri, infantry of the line and squadron
after squadron of cavalry riding under thickets of lances. A strong
force of Carabinieri were the first troops to enter the city, and not
until they had taken complete possession and had assumed the reins of
the local government, were the line troops permitted to come in.
The fighting continued for three days, the Austrians, though
discouraged and to some extent demoralized, making a brave
resistance. In one _dolina_ which had been fortified, an officer and
a handful of men fought so pluckily against overwhelming odds that,
when at length the survivors came out and surrendered, the Italians
presented arms to them as a mark of respect and admiration. By the
evening of the 9th of August the attack, "one of the most important
and violent onslaughts on fortified positions that the European War
has yet seen," had been completely successful, and the city of
Gorizia, together with the heights that guarded it, including the
northern end of the Carso plateau, were in Italian hands. The cost to
Italy was 20,000 dead men. It was a high price but, on the other hand,
she captured 19,000 prisoners, 67 pieces of artillery, and scores of
trench mortars and machine-guns. The moral and strategic results were
of incalculable value. The first line of the Austrian defense, deemed
one of the strongest on any front, had collapsed beneath the Italian
assaults; though the crest of the Carso still remained in Austrian
hands, the gateway to Trieste had been opened; and most important of
all, the Italian people had gained the self-confidence which they had
long lacked and which comes only from military achievement.
In order to reach Gorizia we had to motor for some miles along a road
exposed to enemy fire, for the hills dominating the city to the south
and east were still in Austrian hands. The danger was minimized as
much as possible by screening the roads in the manner I have already
described, so, as the officer who accompanied me took pains to
explain, if we happened to be hit by a shell, it would be one fired at
random. I could see no reason, however, why a random shell wouldn't
end my career just as effectually as a shell intended specially for
me. Although, thanks to the tunnels of matting, the Austrians cannot
see the traffic on the roads, they know that it must cross the
bridges, so on them they keep up a continuous rain of projectiles, and
there you have to take your chance. The Gorizia bridge-head was not a
place where I should have cared to loiter.
It is not a simple matter to obtain permission to visit Gorizia (it is
much easier to visit Verdun), for the city is shelled with more or
less regularity, and to have visitors about under such conditions is a
nuisance. Hence, one cannot get into Gorizia unless bearing a special
pass issued by the Comando Supremo. So rigid are the precautions
against unauthorized visitors that, though accompanied by two officers
of the Staff and travelling in a staff-car, we were halted by the
Carabinieri and our papers examined seven times. To this famous force
of constabulary has been given the work of policing the occupied
regions, and indeed, the entire zone of the armies. With their huge
cocked hats, which, since the war began, have been covered with gray
linen, their rosy faces, so pink-and-white that they look as though
they had been rouged and powdered, and their little upturned waxed
mustaches, the Carabinieri always remind me of the gendarmes in comic
operas. But the only thing comic about them is their hats. They are
the sternest and most uncompromising guardians of the law that I know.
You can expostulate with a London bobbie, you can argue with a Paris
gendarme, you can on occasion reason mildly with a New York policeman,
but not with an Italian carbineer. To give them back talk is to invite
immediate and serious trouble. They are supreme in the war zone, for
they take orders from no one save their own officers and have the
authority to turn back or arrest any one, no matter what his rank. Our
chauffeur, who, being attached to the Comando Supremo, had become so
accustomed to driving generals and cabinet ministers that he blagued
the military sentries, and quite openly sneered at the orders of the
Udine police, would jam on his brakes so suddenly that we would almost
go through the wind-shield if a carbineer held up his hand.
Gorizia is, or was before the war, a place of some 40,000 inhabitants.
It has broad streets, lined by fine white buildings and lovely
gardens, and outside the town are excellent medicinal baths. It will,
I think, prove a very popular summer resort with the Italians. Though
for many months prior to its capture it was within range of the
Italian guns, which could have blown it to smithereens, they refrained
from doing so because it was desired, if possible, to take the place
intact. That, indeed, has been the Italian policy throughout the war:
to do as little unnecessary damage as possible. Now the Austrians, who
look down on their lost city from the heights to the eastward, refrain
from destroying it, as they easily could do, because they cling to the
hope that they may get it back again. So, though the bridge-heads are
shelled constantly, and though considerable damage has been inflicted
on the suburbs, no serious harm has been done to the city itself. By
this I do not mean to imply that the Austrians never shell it, for
they do, but only in a desultory, half-hearted fashion. During the day
that I spent in Gorizia the deserted streets echoed about every five
minutes to the screech-bang of an Austrian _arrivé_ or the
bang-screech of an Italian _départ_.
Finding that the big Hotel du Parc, which is the city's leading
hostelry, was closed, we lunched at the more modest Hotel de la Poste.
Our luncheon was served us in the kitchen, as, shortly before our
arrival, the dining-room had been wrecked by an Austrian shell. Though
this had naturally somewhat upset things, we had a really excellent
meal: _minestrone_, which, so far as I could discover, is the only
variety of soup known to the Italians, mutton, vegetables, a pudding,
fruit, the best coffee I have had in Europe since the war began, and a
bottle of fine old Austrian wine, which, like the German vintages, is
no longer procurable in the restaurants of _civilized_ Europe. While
we ate, there was a brisk exchange of compliments between the Italian
and Austrian batteries in progress above the roofs of the town. The
table at which we sat was pushed close up against one of the thick
masonry columns which supported the kitchen ceiling. It probably would
not have been much of a protection had a shell chanced to drop in on
us, but it was wonderfully comforting.
I was accompanied on my visit to Gorizia by Signor Ugo Ojetti, the
noted Florentine connoisseur who has been charged with the
preservation of all the historical monuments and works of art in the
war zone. About this charming and cultured gentleman I was told a
characteristic story. In the outskirts of Gorizia stands the château
of an Austrian nobleman who was the possessor of a famous collection
of paintings. Now it is Signor Ojetti's business to save from injury
or destruction all works of art which are worth saving, and, after
ticketing and cataloguing them, to ship them to a place of safety to
be kept until the war is over, when they will be restored to their
respective owners. Though the château in question was within the
Italian lines, the windows of the ballroom, in which hung the best of
the pictures, were within easy range of the Austrian snipers, who,
whenever they saw any one moving about inside, would promptly open a
brisk rifle fire. Scarcely had Ojetti and his assistant set foot
within the room when _ping_ came an Austrian bullet through the
window, shattering the crystal chandelier over their heads. Then was
presented the extraordinary spectacle of the greatest art critic in
Italy crawling on hands and knees over a ballroom floor, taking care
to keep as close to that floor as possible, and pausing now and then
to make a careful scrutiny of the canvases that hung on the walls
above him. "That's probably an Allori," he would call to his
assistant. "Remember to take that down after it gets dark. The one
next to it is good too--looks like a Bordone, though I can't be
certain in this light. But don't bother about that picture over the
fire-place--it's only a copy and not worth saving. Let the Austrians
have it if they want it." And they told me that through it all he
never once lost his dignity or his monocle.
Another interesting figure who joined our little party in Gorizia was
a monk who had served as a regimental chaplain since the beginning of
the war. He was a broad-shouldered, brown-bearded fellow and, had it
not been for the scarlet cross on the breast of his uniform, I should
have taken him for a fine type of the Italian fighting man. I rather
suspect, though, that when the bugles pealed the signal for the
attack, he quite forgot that the wearers of the Red Cross are supposed
to be non-combatants. During the Austrian offensive in the Trentino,
an Italian army chaplain was awarded the gold medal for valor, the
highest military decoration, because he rallied the men of his
regiment after all the officers had fallen and led them in the
storming of an Austrian position held by a greatly superior force.
Another chaplain who had likewise assumed command of officerless
troops was awarded the silver medal for valor. As the duties of the
army chaplains are supposed to be confined to giving the men spiritual
advice, the doubt arose as to whether they were justified in actually
fighting, thus risking the loss of their character as non-combatants.
This puzzling question was, therefore, submitted to the Pope, who
decided that chaplains assuming command of troops who had lost their
officers in battle were merely discharging their duty, as they
encouraged the men to resist in self-defense. In addition to the
regimental chaplains there are, so I was told, thousands of priests
and monks serving in the ranks of the Italian armies. Whether, after
leading the exciting and adventurous life of a soldier, these men will
be content to resume the sandals and the woollen robe, and to go back
to the sheltered and monotonous existence of the monastic orders, I
very strongly doubt. In any event, their sympathies will have been
deepened and their outlook on life immensely broadened.
It rained in torrents during my stay in Gorizia, but, as we recrossed
the Isonzo onto the Friulian plain, the sinking sun burst through a
rift in the leaden clouds and turned into a huge block of rosy coral
the red rampart of the Carso. Beyond that wall, scarce a dozen miles
as the airplane flies, but many times that distance as the big gun
travels, lies Trieste. It will be a long road, a hard road, a bloody
road which the Italians must follow to attain their City of Desire,
and before that journey is ended the red rocks of the Carso will be
redder still. But they will finish the journey, I think. For these
iron-hard, brown-faced men, remember, are the stuff from which was
made those ever-victorious legions that built the Roman Empire--and it
is the dream of founding another Empire which is beckoning them on.
V
WITH THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE