"A huge tongue of flame, followed by a mighty column of smoke, shot
into the air, blowing the entire top of the mountain into the sky. Ah!
_capitano_, it resembled nothing so much as the eruption of a volcano;
and if it is true, as I am told, that Don Gelasio spoke of imitating
Vesuvius, he could not have chosen a happier image or succeeded better."
But let me tell you the sequel.
At length the men were able to bound forward in the darkness towards
the enemy trenches. Just at that moment the moon suddenly beamed forth
behind the clouds, revealing the shattered summit of the Col, heaps of
mutilated bodies, and groups of dumfounded, trembling survivors, with
arms upraised in token of surrender. All this time our artillery was
raining a shower of shells on the mountain saddle between the Col di
Lana and Monte Sief, with the double object of preventing the flight of
the enemy and their reinforcement. But they were all glad to give in,
being thoroughly unnerved and dazed, and well aware of the fact that
both telegraphic and telephonic communication with their main forces
had been completely destroyed by the explosion.
It seems that at the fateful hour they happened to have an extra force
on the Col, a company sent specially from Sief to relieve the soldiery
in the trenches; hence the large number of victims. Considerably over
two hundred must have been blown to atoms or killed by falling _débris_.
But we had no time that night to bother about the dead and wounded. Our
whole attention was directed towards the prisoners, a first batch of
whom, including four officers, was soon being taken down the mountain
by ten of our brave volunteers. A second batch of five officers and
a hundred and ten men followed soon afterwards. In addition we took
possession of a shattered mountain gun, cleverly mounted in a cavern
and half-a-dozen equally useless mitrailleuses. Five others, with two
hundred rifles, were intact. Stores of food sufficient to have lasted
the entire garrison for another month completed our booty.
So ended the affair of the Col di Lana, which will ever be linked in
the Italian annals of the war with the name of Don Gelasio Caetani,
to whom is due a good deal of the credit of the great advance which,
immediately afterwards, we made along the main highway through the
Dolomites.