1
My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon Udine. So far I had
had only a visit to Soissons on an exceptionally quiet day and the
sound of a Zeppelin one night in Essex for all my experience of actual
warfare. But my bedroom at the British mission in Udine roused perhaps
extravagant expectations. There were holes in the plaster ceiling and
wall, betraying splintered laths, holes, that had been caused by a bomb
that had burst and killed several people in the little square outside.
Such excitements seem to be things of the past now in Udine. Udine keeps
itself dark nowadays, and the Austrian sea-planes, which come raiding
the Italian coast country at night very much in the same aimless,
casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins raid England, apparently
because there is nothing else for them to do, find it easier to locate
Venice.
My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the level roads of the
plain, roads frequently edged by watercourses, with plentiful willows
beside the road, vines and fields of Indian corn and suchlike lush
crops. Always quite soon one came to some old Austrian boundary posts;
almost everywhere the Italians are fighting upon what is technically
enemy territory, but nowhere does it seem a whit less Italian than
the plain of Lombardy. When at last I motored away from Udine to the
northern mountain front I passed through Campo-Formio and saw the
white-faced inn at which Napoleon dismembered the ancient republic
of Venice and bartered away this essential part of Italy into foreign
control. It just gravitates back now--as though there had been no
Napoleon.
And upon the roads and beside them was the enormous equipment of a
modern army advancing. Everywhere I saw new roads being made, railways
pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals; everywhere the villages swarmed
with grey soldiers; everywhere our automobile was threading its way
and taking astonishing risks among interminable processions of motor
lorries, strings of ambulances or of mule carts, waggons with timber,
waggons with wire, waggons with men's gear, waggons with casks, waggons
discreetly veiled, columns of infantry, cavalry, batteries _en route._
Every waggon that goes up full comes back empty, and many wounded were
coming down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. Goritzia had
been taken a week or so before my arrival; the Isonzo had been crossed
and the Austrians driven back across the Carso for several miles; all
the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding up to make good these
gains and gather strength for the next thrust. The roads under all this
traffic remained wonderful; gangs of men were everywhere repairing the
first onset of wear, and Italy is the most fortunate land in the world
for road metal; her mountains are solid road metal, and in this Venetian
plain you need but to scrape through a yard of soil to find gravel.
One travelled through a choking dust under the blue sky, and above the
steady incessant dusty succession of lorry, lorry, lorry, lorry that
passed one by, one saw, looking up, the tree tops, house roofs, or the
solid Venetian campanile of this or that wayside village. Once as we
were coming out of the great grey portals of that beautiful old relic of
a former school of fortification, Palmanova, the traffic became suddenly
bright yellow, and for a kilometre or so we were passing nothing but
Sicilian mule carts loaded with hay. These carts seem as strange among
the grey shapes of modern war transport as a Chinese mandarin in painted
silk would be. They are the most individual of things, all two-wheeled,
all bright yellow and the same size it is true, but upon each there are
they gayest of little paintings, such paintings as one sees in England
at times upon an ice-cream barrow. Sometimes the picture will present
a scriptural subject, sometimes a scene of opera, sometimes a dream
landscape or a trophy of fruits or flowers, and the harness--now much
out of repair--is studded with brass. Again and again I have passed
strings of these gay carts; all Sicily must be swept of them.
Through the dust I came to Aquileia, which is now an old cathedral,
built upon the remains of a very early basilica, standing in a space in
a scattered village. But across this dusty space there was carried the
head of the upstart Maximinus who murdered Alexander Severus, and
later Aquileia brought Attila near to despair. Our party alighted; we
inspected a very old mosaic floor which has been uncovered since the
Austrian retreat. The Austrian priests have gone too, and their Italian
successors are already tracing out a score of Roman traces that it was
the Austrian custom to minimise. Captain Pirelli refreshed my historical
memories; it was rather like leaving a card on Gibbon _en route_ for
contemporary history.
By devious routes I went on to certain batteries of big guns which had
played their part in hammering the Austrian left above Monfalcone across
an arm of the Adriatic, and which were now under orders to shift and
move up closer. The battery was the most unobtrusive of batteries; its
one desire seemed to be to appear a simple piece of woodland in the eye
of God and the aeroplane. I went about the network of railways and paths
under the trees that a modern battery requires, and came presently upon
a great gun that even at the first glance seemed a little less carefully
hidden than its fellows. Then I saw that it was a most ingenious dummy
made of a tree and logs and so forth. It was in the emplacement of a
real gun that had been located; it had its painted sandbags about it
just the same, and it felt itself so entirely a part of the battery that
whenever its companions fired t burnt a flash and kicked up a dust. It
was an excellent example of the great art of camouflage which this war
has developed.
I went on through the wood to a shady observation post high in a tree,
into which I clambered with my guide. I was able from this position to
get a very good idea of the lie of the Italian eastern front. I was in
the delta of the Isonzo. Directly in front of me were some marshes
and the extreme tip of the Adriatic Sea, at the head of which was
Monfalcone, now in Italian hands. Behind Monfalcone ran the red ridge
of the Carso, of which the Italians had just captured the eastern half.
Behind this again rose the mountains to the east of the Isonzo which
the Austrians still held. The Isonzo came towards me from out of the
mountains, in a great westward curve. Fifteen or sixteen miles away
where it emerged from the mountains lay the pleasant and prosperous town
of Goritzia, and at the westward point of the great curve was Sagrado
with its broken bridge. The battle of Goritzia was really not fought at
Goritzia at all. What happened was the brilliant and bloody storming
of Mounts Podgora and Sabotino on the western side of the river above
Goritzia, and simultaneously a crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and
a magnificent rush up the plateau and across the plateau of the Carso.
Goritzia itself was not organised for defence, and the Austrians were
so surprised by the rapid storm of the mountains to the north-west of it
and of the Carso to the south-east, that they made no fight in the town
itself.
As a consequence when I visited it I found it very little
injured--compared, that is, with such other towns as have been fought
through. Here and there the front of a house has been knocked in by
an Austrian shell, or a lamp-post prostrated. But the road bridge had
suffered a good deal; its iron parapet was twisted about by shell bursts
and interwoven with young trees and big boughs designed to screen the
passer-by from the observation of the Austrian gunners upon Monte Santo.
Here and there were huge holes through which one could look down upon
the blue trickles of water in the stony river bed far below. The driver
of our automobile displayed what seemed to me an extreme confidence in
the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was justified. At Sagrado
the bridge had been much more completely demolished; no effort had been
made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one crossed by a sort of
timber switchback that followed the ups and downs of the ruins.
It is not in these places that one must look for the real destruction
of modern war. The real fight on the left of Goritzia went through the
village of Lucinico up the hill of Podgora. Lucinico is nothing more
than a heap of grey stones; except for a bit of the church wall and the
gable end of a house one cannot even speak of it as ruins. But in one
place among the rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand
piano. Podgora hill, which was no doubt once neatly terraced and
cultivated, is like a scrap of landscape from some airless, treeless
planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the Carso to the right
(south) of Goritzia. Both San Martino and Doberdo are destroyed beyond
the limits of ruination. The Carso itself is a waterless upland with but
a few bushy trees; it must always have been a desolate region, but now
it is an indescribable wilderness of shell craters, smashed-up Austrian
trenches, splintered timber, old iron, rags, and that rusty thorny
vileness of man's invention, worse than all the thorns and thickets of
nature, barbed wire. There are no dead visible; the wounded have been
cleared away; but about the trenches and particularly near some of the
dug-outs there was a faint repulsive smell....
Yet into this wilderness the Italians are now thrusting a sort of order.
The German is a wonderful worker, they say on the Anglo-French front
that he makes his trenches by way of resting, but I doubt if he can
touch the Italian at certain forms of toil. All the way up to San
Martino and beyond, swarms of workmen were making one of those carefully
graded roads that the Italians make better than any other people. Other
swarms were laying water-pipes. For upon the Carso there are neither
roads nor water, and before the Italians can thrust farther both must be
brought up to the front.
As we approached San Martino an Austrian aeroplane made its presence
felt overhead by dropping a bomb among the tents of some workmen, in a
little scrubby wood on the hillside near at hand. One heard the report
and turned to see the fragments flying and the dust. Probably they got
someone. And then, after a little pause, the encampment began to spew
out men; here, there and everywhere they appeared among the tents,
running like rabbits at evening-time, down the hill. Soon after and
probably in connection with this signal, Austrian shells began to come
over. They do not use shrapnel because the rocky soil of Italy makes
that unnecessary. They fire a sort of shell that goes bang and releases
a cloud of smoke overhead, and then drops a parcel of high explosive
that bursts on the ground. The ground leaps into red dust and smoke. But
these things are now to be seen on the cinema. Forthwith the men working
on the road about us begin to down tools and make for the shelter
trenches, a long procession going at a steady but resolute walk. Then
like a blow in the chest came the bang of a big Italian gun somewhere
close at hand....
Along about four thousand miles of the various fronts this sort of thing
was going on that morning....
2
This Carso front is the practicable offensive front of Italy. From the
left wing on the Isonzo along the Alpine boundary round to the Swiss
boundary there is mountain warfare like nothing else in the world; it
is warfare that pushes the boundary backward, but it is mountain warfare
that will not, for so long a period that the war will be over first,
hold out any hopeful prospects of offensive movements on a large scale
against Austria or Germany. It is a short distance as the crow flies
from Rovereto to Munich, but not as the big gun travels. The Italians,
therefore, as their contribution to the common effort, are thrusting
rather eastwardly towards the line of the Julian Alps through Carinthia
and Carniola. From my observation post in the tree near Monfalcone I saw
Trieste away along the coast to my right. It looked scarcely as distant
as Folkestone from Dungeness. The Italian advanced line is indeed
scarcely ten miles from Trieste. But the Italians are not, I think,
going to Trieste just yet. That is not the real game now. They are
playing loyally with the Allies for the complete defeat of the Central
Powers, and that is to be achieved striking home into Austria. Meanwhile
there is no sense in knocking Trieste to pieces, or using Italians
instead of Austrian soldiers to garrison it.