Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

The sky was lightening and throwing into ghostly silhouette the line of the mountain ridge across the Vardar by the time we had pushed on out along the communication trench to the Greek Observation Post on the extreme brow of the hill. Since midnight the enemy "heavies" had been coughing gruffly under the mist-blanket that overlaid the plain, dappling it with alternately flashing and fading blotches of light till it glowed fantastically like a lamp-shade of Carrara marble; star-shells, fired with a low trajectory, popped up and dove out of sight again, throwing a fluttering green radiance over the white pall which swathed the battlefield.

[Sidenote: The Bulgar preparing to go over the top.]

The mist-mask must have fended the day-break from the plain long after it was light upon the hill from where we watched, for it was not until the range of serrated peaks to the east of Doiran was all aglow with the red and gold of sunrise that the higher-keyed crack of the enemy's field-guns came welling up to tell us that the Bulgar was getting ready to go over the top. The flame-spurts--paling from a hot red to faded lemon as the light grew stronger--splashed up against the mist-pall as the jet of an illuminated fountain rises and falls, and down where the battered first-line trenches faced each other the dust-geysers of the exploding shells rolled up in clouds to the surface of the thinning vapors as the mud of the bottom boils up through the waters of an agitated pool.

[Sidenote: The Allied artillery opens.]

For a minute or two the ragged line of the barrage wallowed forward through the outraged mist alone. Then, as a sudden flight of rockets spat forth from the Greek first line to warn that the enemy infantry was on the way, all the Allied artillery that could be brought to bear opened up and began dropping shells just behind where the murky mist-clouds marked the swath of the Bulgar barrage.

For the space of perhaps two or three minutes the fog-bank swirled and curled in swaying eddies as the shells came hurtling into it; then--whether it was from a sudden awakening of the wind or through the licking up of its vapors by the first rays of the now risen sun, I never knew--almost in the wave of a hand, it was gone, revealing a broad expanse of trench-creased plain with a long belt of gray figures moving across it in a cloud of dust and smoke.

[Sidenote: Lively hand-to-hand fighting.]

"It isn't much of a barrage as barrages go on the western front," said Captain X---- half apologetically. "Their artillery won't do much harm to us, and, I'm afraid, ours not much to them. And we'll hardly be having enough machine guns emplaced to sting them as they ought to be stung for swarming up in masses like that. But if it's only a second-class artillery show, I still think I can promise you--if only the Bulgar has the stomach for it--a livelier bit of hand-to-hand fighting than you might find in a whole summer of looking for it in France. Do you see those little winking flashes all along where the infantry are moving? Some of them are from bayonets, but most are from knives. A great man with the knife is the Bulgar. Did you ever hear that song about him they sang at a revue the British 'Tommies' had at Saloniki? It was a parody on some other song that was being sung in the halls in London, and went something like this:

[Sidenote: A Bulgar song.]

I'm Boris the Bulgar,
The Man With the Knife;
The Pride of Sofia,
The Taker of Life.
Good gracious, how spacious
And deep are the cuts,
Of Boris the Bulgar,
The Knifer--

"Now for it! Look at that!"

[Sidenote: The barrages lift and the Greeks advance to meet the Bulgars.]

I never did hear just what it was that Boris was a knifer of, for at that juncture the two barrages--having respectively protected and harried to the best of their abilities the advancing wave of infantry down to within a hundred yards or so of the Greek trenches--"lifted" almost simultaneously on to "communications," and that lifting was the signal for the opening of the climacteric stage of the action. Without an instant's delay, a solid wave of Greeks in brown--lightly fringed in front with the figures of a few of the more active or impetuous who had outdistanced their comrades in the scramble over the top--rose up out of the earth and swept forward to meet the line of gray. The gust of their first great cheer rolled up to us above the thunder of the artillery.

"Now for it!" repeated X----, focussing down his telescope and steadying himself with his elbows. "I think you'll find the show from now on worth all the trouble of coming up to see."

[Sidenote: the Bulgars break and retreat.]

I do not attempt to account for what happened now; I only record it. It may have been that the Allied artillery had wrought more havoc in that advancing wave of men than had been apparent from a distance, or it may have been that the enemy artillery had done less to the entrenched defenders than it was expected to do; at any rate, the line of gray began to break at almost the first impact of the line of brown, and the great hand-to-hand fight that X---- had promised me was transformed into a Marathon.

[Sidenote: Greeks have always beaten the Bulgars.]

"As I expected," muttered my companion. "'Boris' has no stomach for a fight to-day with the man who licked him yesterday, and will lick him to-morrow and go right on licking him to the end if they'll only give him a show. The Bulgar never has stood up to the Greek, and he never will."

[Sidenote: The Greek Staff is in a mountain valley.]

[Sidenote: Scarcity of nurses.]

The Greek Staff shared a round bowl of a mountain valley, a few miles back from the front lines, with a clearing station. The equipment of the little hospital had mostly been provided by the British Red Cross, but the Venizelists had made a brave effort to furnish the staff themselves. There were two French-trained Greek surgeons, a Greek matron, Greek orderlies, and two Greek nurses. Since the attack began there had been work for a dozen of the latter, but--as it had been impossible for the women of most of the Venizelist families to get away from Old Greece--no others were available. An English nurse, who had marched in the retreat of the Serbians, and a French nurse from a Saloniki hospital had volunteered to step into the breach, and these five women were courageously trying to make up in zeal what they lacked in numbers.

[Sidenote: Working double hours.]

"We are not enough for a double shift since the fighting began," Madame A----, the matron, had said to me the night of my arrival; "so we are accomplishing the same end by working double hours. We are working to atone for the dishonor our King has brought upon our country, just as our men are fighting to atone for it; and the harder we all work and fight the sooner it will come about."

The last thing to catch my eye as I looked back from the rim of the valley when I rode away at midnight had been the flash of a bar of light on a white uniform, as a tired figure had drooped against the flap of a hospital tent for a breath of air.

[Sidenote: Women nurses go without sleep.]

"If any one of those women has had a wink of sleep in the last three days," Captain X---- had said as we reined in to let a string of ambulances go by, "it must have been taken standing. I have been up most of the time myself, and never once have I looked across to the clearing station but I saw some sign of a nurse on the move."

[Sidenote: Venizelos at the nurses' mess.]

Madame A---- had asked me to drop in at the nurses' mess for luncheon in case I got back from the trenches in time, and this, by dint of hard riding, I was just able to do. Three or four powerful military cars drawn up at the hospital gate indicated new arrivals, but as to who they were I had no hint until I had pushed in through the flap of the mess tent and found M. Venizelos seated on a soap-box, _vis-à-vis_ Madame A---- at a table improvised from a couple of condensed milk cases. At the regular mess table, sitting on reversed water-buckets, were three French flying officers and a civilian whom I recognized as the private secretary of M. Venizelos. Two nurses were just rising from unfinished plates of soup in response to word that a crucial abdominal operation awaited their attendance at the theatre.

"Most of the Provisional Government has come out to pay us a visit this morning," said Madame A----, showing me to a blanket-roll seat at one end of the mess table, "and we are lunching early so that it can get back to Saloniki to take up the reins of State again. The General has carried off the Admiral and the Foreign Minister, but I have managed to keep the President for _our_ banquet. He has made the round of the hospital and spoken to every man here--that is," she added with a catch in her voice, "to all that could hear him. We've--we've lost three men this morning just because there wasn't staff to operate quickly enough."

[Sidenote: A strange banquet at which the guests contribute.]

That was, I think, one of the strangest little "banquets" I ever sat down to. Every one travels more or less "self-contained" in the Saloniki area, and whenever a party is thrown together the joint supplies are commandeered for the common good. The mess menu was a simple one of soup, tinned salmon, rice, and cheese, but by the time M. Venizelos's hamper had yielded a box of fresh figs, a can of the honey of Hymettus, and a couple of bottles of Cretan wine, and the French officers had "anted up" cognac, some tins of _flageolet_ for salad, and a tumbler of _confiture_, and the English nurse had brought out the last of her Christmas plum-cake, and I had thrown in a loaf of Italian _pan-forte_ and a can of chocolates, the little crazy-legged camp-table had assumed a passing festal air.

[Sidenote: No one speaks of war at the feast.]

A number of toasts were proposed and drunk, but no one spoke of the nearer or remoter progress of the war. M. Venizelos adverted several times to the wonder of the spring flowers as he had seen them from the road, especially the great fields of blood-red poppies, and I overheard him telling Madame A---- some apparently amusing incidents of his early life in Crete. But it was not until, the banquet over, he had settled himself in his car for the ride to Saloniki that he alluded to any of the things with which his mind must have been so engrossed all the time.

"So you thought that our troops had all the best of the enemy this morning?" he said with a grave smile as he shook my hand.

"Incomparably the best of it," I answered.

[Sidenote: Why Venizelos is confident in the power of Greece.]

"Then perhaps you will understand why I felt so confident that the Bulgars would not have come into the war if they had known that Greece would stand by Serbia. And you will also understand why I feel so confident that our military help to the Allies will be a very real one, perhaps enough of a one even to save Greece from herself."

This was, I believe, the latest occasion on which M. Venizelos visited his troops at the front. Before another fortnight had gone by the forces of the "Protecting Powers" were moving into Old Greece, and in a month Constantine had abdicated and opened the way for the return of his former Prime Minister to Athens.

[Sidenote: The maker and Savior of Modern Greece.]

From the time of the Balkan wars of 1912-13 to the outbreak of the present one Venizelos was often referred to as "The Maker of Modern Greece." After this war he may well be known as "The Savior of Modern Greece"; and of the two achievements there can be no doubt that history must record that the one of "saving" was incomparably greater than the one of "making."

[Sidenote: What the influence of Venizelos may do.]

It is still too early to make it worth while to endeavor to forecast what is on the knees of the capricious war-gods of the Balkans, and there is no use in trying to deny that the Bulgar--just as long as Germany has the power and will to back him up--will take a deal of beating. But that Venizelos will be able to make the army of reunited Greece a potently contributive factor in bringing about that devoutly-to-be-wished consummation may now be taken as assured.

Copyright, World's Work, January, 1918.

* * * * *

We have seen in a previous narrative the difficulties which the Italians encountered in conducting their campaign against Austria. As a result of German falsehood and propaganda, the Italian line was weakened and penetrated by a great German army, and the Italian lines were swept back. They finally held, however, and the strength of their resistance is indicated in the following pages.

THE ITALIANS AT BAY

G. WARD PRICE

[Sidenote: Udine as it seemed before the war.]

Udine was a typically quaint and sleepy little Italian town galvanized into unnatural life and prosperity. Every one who has spent a week in Italy can put the picture of the place before his imagination in a moment: streets of dark, restful, Gothic cloisters; a broad piazza flanked by a graceful loggia; remains of medieval fortification of which the towering gate-houses still narrowed each entrance to the town; a general air of pleasant tranquillity and of a well-being that was a legacy from the more spacious days of centuries gone by. The nature of the place was that of mellow old wine, very gracious, rich with associations that brought a glow to the palate of memory, but for all that something of which one wanted only little at a time. A glimpse of Udine as she had been for centuries was delightful, to dwell there would seem like being buried alive.

[Sidenote: Bustle and congestion when Udine becomes Army Headquarters.]

To this forgotten township of the old Venetian province had come suddenly in the spring of 1913 all the bustle and congestion of the headquarters of the whole Italian Army. For the next two and a half years you could hardly find a room in Udine to sleep in; the people of the place opened large modern restaurants and cafés for the officers and soldiers who crowded its streets; big shops filled the gloom of the old arcades with an incongruous expanse of plate-glass windows; the good burgesses of Udine made money and waxed fat.

[Sidenote: A tactical dead-lock on the western front.]

It seemed, indeed, as if the steady shower of war prosperity that had fallen upon them for two years might last until that indefinite, but to most minds far-off, day when peace should come. For it was the general opinion that in the West, at least, the war had reached a condition of tactical dead-lock. Trench warfare had petrified movement, except in laborious shifting of a few hundred yards at a time, hardly perceptible on a small-scale map. The day of sweeping advances, of sudden retirements, was over. At a reasonable distance behind that unbudging wall of trenches you were as secure from personal displacement by the war as if you were at the other end of Italy; indeed, no earlier than the beginning of this month of October some people had arrived with their families at Udine from other parts of the country to carry on trades connected with the life of the army.

[Sidenote: General Cadorna praises the British batteries.]

I myself set foot in Udine for the first time on October 20. I was going back to the Macedonian front, where for two years I had been the official correspondent of the British Army, and I had asked the War Office to authorize me to visit on the way the British batteries which since April had been cooperating with the Italian Army on the Isonzo. General Cadorna had given them high praise in a message to the British Government after the fighting in which they had taken part in May, and I thought it would be interesting to see British and Italian troops side by side in the field for the first time.

[Sidenote: Visits to the Italian front yield important information.]

Visitors to the Italian front used to find most convenient arrangements made to give them a rapid idea of conditions there. Lying almost entirely among mountains, the line presented unusual opportunities for survey from dominating heights, and there were many places where, at leisure and in virtual safety, one could watch the Austrian intrenchments from close range. Fast cars took you up to these vantage-points, and a number of staff-officers, speaking perfect English and knowing every detail of the front and its history, raised these visits from the level of sight-seeing excursions to opportunities for learning a great deal that was important and technical.

[Sidenote: The Austro-German offensive begins.]

The very last of these journeys, which had been made by visitors of every country, took place on October 24, the day that the great Austro-German offensive began, and I remember how, as we drove along in the rain, all our talk was of the bad news of that morning--that the enemy, reinforced by a huge number of divisions brought secretly from the Russian front, and profiting by a night of rain and fog, had thrust down into the valley of the Isonzo between Plezzo and Tolmino, carried, apparently by surprise, two Italian lines across the ravine after a short and very violent bombardment, and then, pushing on, had captured Caporetto, thus cutting off the Italian troops on Monte Nero and the other mountains beyond the Isonzo, and opening a most serious gap in the very center of the Italian line.

[Sidenote: Gorizia has suffered from the war.]

[Sidenote: A shell interrupts the sight-seers.]

The day was one of evil omen. We went to Gorizia, that pretty Austrian spa that was taken by the Italians last year, and has suffered from the war as much as Udine, its neighbor across the old frontier, has prospered. In the heart of the town its old castle towers up from an isolated crag, and from the battlements you can look across the valley to the Italian and Austrian lines on the slopes of San Marco opposite. Scores of parties like our own had made this visit to Gorizia Castle, and to-day the driving rain and valley mists made observation so bad that it seemed more than usually safe to show oneself above the ramparts on the side toward the enemy. Yet we had not been there three minutes--a group of two well-known American correspondents and one Italian, with an Italian officer, and myself--when an Austrian six-inch shell burst with a crash hardly ten feet from the right-hand man of our line. A black wall of flying mud towered up and blotted out the sky; three of us were thrown headlong by the force of the explosion. Only the fact that the shell had fallen deeply into the rain-softened bank of earth on top of the battlements saved the names of the last four visitors to the Italian front from being recorded on graves in Gorizia cemetery.

"I've brought people here seventy or eighty times," said the officer who was with us, "and nothing like that has ever happened before."

"We've evidently brought bad luck," said some one, and so, little though we guessed it, we had.

[Sidenote: The Italians expect an Austrian push.]

During the first fortnight of October it had been a remark frequently made throughout Italy that an Austrian push was probable before the real winter set in. I had heard this likelihood discussed by people at the Chamber of Deputies on my way through Rome, but without serious significance being given to it. The Austro-Swiss frontier had been closed for five weeks, always a sign that important movements of troops were going on in the enemy's country; something more unusual was that even the postal mails from Austria to Holland and Scandinavia had been suspended.

[Sidenote: Cadorna believes the enemy will use large reserves.]

According to the talk one heard in Italy, Cadorna had already had in mind the chance of a strong autumn attack on his army when he arrested his own offensive in September after capturing by a brilliant stroke the greater part of the Bainsizza plateau beyond the Isonzo, taking thirty thousand prisoners and one hundred and fifty guns. The French and British general staffs, it was said, had asked Cadorna whether he meant to go on with his offensive, for which they had contributed contingents of guns. Cadorna's reply had been that he had strong Austrian forces against him, of which he knew the total, but that he also believed large reserves of unknown quantity were available for use against him, owing to the collapse of the Russian Army. In these circumstances he preferred to consolidate and prepare rather than to continue to challenge forces that could not be exactly estimated.

Both the increase of enemy strength on the Italian front and the paralyzing uncertainty under which the Allies labored, were directly due to the debacle of the Russian Army during the summer. The means by which commanders-in-chief arrive at the indispensable knowledge of what forces they have against them is through a highly organized intelligence department, working in close cooperation with the similar departments of the other Allied armies.

[Sidenote: How the enemy's strength is ascertained.]

Each of these departments, by interrogating prisoners and reading papers found on enemy dead, by collating the reports of the air service, by minutely sifting the enemy press, arrives at a fairly accurate knowledge of the enemy's order of battle on the front of its own army. So essential is this system to the successful carrying-on of operations that raids are often specially organized on the enemy trenches with the sole object of capturing prisoners who may be able to give information that will clear up some point about which there is uncertainty. All the knowledge of the enemy's dispositions thus collected by each of the Allied armies is open to all of them; it is exchanged and compared and collated, so that they finally arrive at a fairly complete knowledge of the distribution of the enemy's forces in each one of the theaters of war.

[Sidenote: The Russian intelligence department collapses.]

Now, when the Russian Army went to pieces in the summer, its intelligence department collapsed with the rest. The Russian Army has taken virtually no prisoners for a long time, and consequently the facts about what troops the Austrians and Germans have on that front have not been ascertainable. It was known that the enemy used to have about one hundred and thirty divisions there, but no one could tell whether they still remained or whether they had been brought away to be held in reserve for some sudden operation on another front.

[Sidenote: The attack by the Austro-Germans a surprise.]

In this way it came about that the sudden attack by an unexpectedly large Austro-German force upon the Isonzo line took the Italians by surprise, with the result that they lost in three days not only all they had won in two and a half years of hard fighting, by sacrifices and sufferings and labors beyond human estimation, but also the larger part of that rich north-eastern department of their country which was for centuries the metropolitan province of the great Venetian republic.

[Sidenote: Enemy has a great number of fresh guns.]

On October 22 we learned at Italian headquarters that ten German divisions, about one hundred and twenty thousand men, had arrived behind the enemy front on the Isonzo and were concentrated in reserve round Laibach. This was the first time in the whole war that German troops had met the Italians on this front. The number of new Austrian divisions was reported to be even greater. Many new batteries of heavy caliber had also arrived and were registering their ranges; indeed, when the attack actually came, it was found that the number of fresh guns was even greater than had been thought, for some of them did not reveal their position by registering, but, taking their ranges from guns earlier in position, fired not a round until they joined in that terrific first bombardment with which the attack opened on the morning of October 24.

[Sidenote: Italians expect to hold west side of Isonzo.]

Most serious was the situation, but even yet no one grasped how bad the reality was going to be. It was generally accepted that all ground beyond the Isonzo would have to be abandoned, but it seemed beyond all doubt that the Italians would be able to make good their defense along the steep ridge that forms the western side of the Isonzo valley. As you looked from those heights across the river, it was like looking from the wall of a medieval castle; you dominated everything, and behind you were great Italian guns ready to fill the gorge of the Isonzo and the slopes beyond with a barrier of bursting steel.

But one of those combinations that have often helped the Germans in this war helped them to the success that seemed impossible. It was made up of the secrecy with which they had been able to complete their preparations, of the luck of surprise and bad weather, and above all of the fatal failure in their duty of certain detachments of the Italian forces.

[Sidenote: German propaganda has created disaffection in every Allied country.]

[Sidenote: Soldiers everywhere are weary of war.]

One of the successes of this year's German offensive was the creation in the heart of an efficient and gallant army of this canker of disaffection by propaganda that has been as energetic and as dangerous to our cause as any of the enemy's operations in the field. In every Allied country it has been active; among the English it is at work corrupting labor, preying on the nerves of the overstrained worker, and whispering any subtle lie that will sap his will and undermine his spirit. In France one fractional part of the widespread organization that carries on this treacherous work is being exposed by the revelations in the Bolo case. In Italy the Germans cunningly twisted fanatics, both socialist and clerical, into agents for forwarding their work, and they had flooded the country with money to corrupt the army which they had not been able to beat in the field. The individual soldiers of every country, including above all the Central empires themselves, are dead-weary of the war, but the enemy alone has had the cunning and the baseness deliberately to exploit this feeling to his profit, working through the agency of bought traitors and hired spies. And so the Austro-Germans had managed to imbue a limited part of the Italian Army with the distorted idea that the quickest way to regain the longed-for comforts of peace was to refuse to fight and thus open the way for a rapid Austrian victory.

When this ferment of disloyalty had done its work, the Germans were ready to attack the particular sector of the line held by the troops that it had most affected. These were on the left wing of the Italian Second Army, which held the front of the Isonzo from Plezzo down to Tolmino, and it was on that point that the enemy directed his first thrust.

[Sidenote: The news of the taking of Caporetto.]

The news of the taking of Caporetto on the morning of October 24 had about as startling an effect at Italian headquarters as would be produced on the British front if it were suddenly announced that the Germans were in Ypres. Not only was Caporetto a town on the Upper Isonzo which the Italians had seized by dashing forward across the frontier the very morning that war was declared, but it also stood at the head of a most important strategical valley leading back into the mountains on which the Italian main line lay, and from the town lead several easy roads that follow various routes into the plain beyond. Already the enemy was pressing in force along those roads. The Italians had, indeed, fallen back to reserve positions, but were the enemy to win through--as he did within two days--he would be on the flank and almost in the rear of the whole Italian Army of a million men.

[Sidenote: Rapid progress of the Germans is difficult to explain.]

[Sidenote: Italian outposts are surrounded.]

Just how the Germans progressed so fast that by noon on October 24 they had a machine-gun posted on the square in Caporetto still remains, eight days later, incompletely explained. All that is really known is this: at 2 a.m. they started a very violent bombardment. When the shelling suddenly stopped after only two hours, the Italians regarded the interruption merely as a lull, for the artillery preparation for an infantry attack in force usually lasts much longer. With the valley hidden by darkness, mist, and rain, and seeing more dimly than usual through the mica of their gas-masks, the Italians knew nothing of the German infantry's advance up the valley from the Santa Lucia bridgehead, south of Tolmino, until the enemy had actually reached their wire. In this way the Plec line of defense across that reach of the Isonzo known as the Conca di Plezzo, a line specially designed to check an offensive from Santa Lucia, was captured by surprise, and then German troops poured down into the river gorge from Mrzli on its eastern side, until the valley was full of the enemy, and Monte Nero and the other Italian outpost positions on the heights beyond the Isonzo were completely surrounded.

[Sidenote: Violent fighting on the Bainsizza plateau.]

The valley being in their possession, the Germans wasted no time. Pushing northward along the river, one detachment occupied Idersko and Caporetto; another proceeded to assault the height of Starijok, just above Caporetto; yet another strong force made a frontal attack on the ridge of Zagradan, which runs like a wall along the Italian side of the river, and after fierce fighting took Luico, one of the pivots of the defenses upon it. Elsewhere he had attacked at the same time with less definite result. Mount Globocak was seized by surprise. It was an Italian big-gun position, and orders were given for it to be retaken at any cost. So a distinguished brigade of bersaglieri was sent up to counter-attack, and drove the Germans from the captured guns down the slopes of Globocak again. North of Caporetto, too, the angle of the Italian line at Zaga had been assailed, but had resisted, and across the river on the Bainsizza plateau the most violent fighting of all took place, as a result of which the Italian line was withdrawn from Kal, and the heavy guns and equipment were sent back across the Isonzo, though the Italian counter-attacks on the Bainsizza were carried out with such dash that they captured several hundred Austrian prisoners.

[Sidenote: Danger that the Italian Army may be trapped.]

Now the enemy's plan stood out in all its formidable strength and strategy. He had opened a gap in the Italian front; through this gap he was pouring overwhelming forces. Already the rest of the Italian Second Army and the Third Army on the Carso to the south of it were outflanked. If the whole of that great force was not to have its line of communications cut and be surrounded, it must be immediately and rapidly withdrawn for a great distance. An immense sacrifice of Italian territory was imperative if the Italian Army was to be saved from a trap by the side of which the fall of Metz was the capture of an outpost. During the afternoon of October 25 the general order of retreat was given.

[Sidenote: Austrians use seventeen-inch howitzers.]

I went up again to visit the British batteries which were with the Third Army on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, and from one of their observatories watched the heavy shelling. The Austrians were using huge seventeen-inch howitzers, and the explosions of their gigantic shells, each weighing a ton, was like a small eruption. A solid block of piebald smoke as big as a cathedral sprang into the air and it was a minute or more before the last of it had drifted away.

[Sidenote: Monfalcone the most romantic point in the fighting line.]

And as the sun was setting I went down to Monfalcone, to a place which could not be mentioned then, but which was at the same time probably the oddest and the most romantic point of the world's fighting-line. Monfalcone was for the Austrians a sort of combination of Birkenhead and Bournemouth. There were important ship-building yards there, and it had besides popularity as a seaside place. In the shipyard the Austrians had left an eighteen-thousand-ton liner, of which the hull was complete and the decks built in.

[Sidenote: Tools of constructive labor are dropped.]

To reach the ship you passed through a yard that was a rusty monument to the futility of war. There were all the tools of constructive labor just as they had been dropped when this nightmare of destructive passion burst upon the world; weather-reddened traveling cranes rusted to the tracks on which they will never move again; trucks overturned, a lathe smashed by a shell that had torn a wide gap in the roof above. Here, where the air used to tremble all day long with the clang of giant hammers, there was now silence and desertion, and the offices from which great ships were controlled on their voyages to far-off seas had become the barracks of Italian artillery-men.

[Sidenote: The partly built Austrian liner.]

There was a big wooden staircase that the Italians had built leading up to the various decks of the great liner, and, once on board, you could walk out to the forward bridge of the ship where from a sort of conning-tower you looked out at the Austrian trenches less than a mile away without the possibility of being seen. An odd observation post, neither asea nor ashore, and to make the confusion of elements more complete, the gunners whose guns barked continually from just behind it were sailors of the Italian Navy, dressed not in blue, but in military gray-green.

[Sidenote: A view of coveted Triest.]

Triest, the coveted city, lay ten miles away in full view, and each night the Italians saw its windows answer with flashes of dull gold the last rays of the sun setting behind Italy. As you looked from Monfalcone across the dreamy blue of the empty gulf between, the town lay like a stone image, lifeless except for the white smoke curling gently from a single tall chimney into the quiet evening air. Much nearer along the coast was the Castle of Duina standing on an abrupt cliff. It belongs to the Grand Duchess of Thurn and Taxis, who used to gather parties of poets, painters, and writers there to stay in what was like a legendary palace looking down from its high headland upon the sunlit, sail-flecked Adriatic, stretching away into the shining distance.

[Sidenote: The Italians are evacuating the Bainsizza plateau.]

It was from that last fair glimpse of Triest that you turned back to the grave realities of situation. On the next morning, the twenty-sixth, the Italian supreme command announced that the Bainsizza plateau was being evacuated. It had been won with great losses and gallantry in August, and the Italians had laboriously equipped it with roads and military establishments to create a firm taking-off place for the next attack upon the crest of Mount Gabriele, which was expected to drive the Austrians back for five miles up the Vippaco valley, on the way to Laibach, one of the back-doors to Triest.

The same day came the news of the fall of the Italian Government, which had been attacked during the fortnight by a strange combination of the advanced wing of the pro-war party who considered that the ministry was not displaying enough firmness in its conduct of the campaign, with the pacifist socialist party who denounced the Government for infringing the constitutional rights of the people in the interests of militarism. A feeling of _malaise_ was in the air. All the elements of success were present in the Italian Army except the most important of all, the psychological element.

[Sidenote: Evacuation of Udine.]

By this time motor-lorries had already begun to pour back through Udine, and in the streets the Signal Corps were taking down the telegraph-wires. You saw little parties of father, mother, and children suddenly emerge from house or shop, each with hand-luggage. If you looked closely you generally saw that the woman was crying.

[Sidenote: Air fights between Germans and Italians.]

On the twenty-sixth there were frequent attempts to reach Udine by German flyers who were new to the ground. It was the first time that the Italian Air Corps had had to deal with a German attempt to contest their supremacy and they came well out of the trial. Ten enemy machines were brought down during the day, two individual Italian airmen accounting for three each. When the enemy machines were sighted heading for Udine the jarring scream of a siren gave the alarm, and the police cleared the streets.

Saturday, October 27, was the day of general exodus.

[Sidenote: Batteries hold rearward positions.]

I left Udine early on Saturday morning, in the car of the British general commanding our artillery contingent on the Italian front, to go up to the batteries and see how they got on in the retreat. We crawled out toward the front along roads blocked with rearward-moving traffic for which there was no organization, and after lunching at the general's headquarters at Gradisca, I went on to Rubbia, just across the Isonzo, to the south of Gorizia, where was the group headquarters of the batteries. Already the supply service of the Third Army were pouring in a black mass along the road, screened at the side and overhead by rushmats from the observation of the enemy. Voices and hammering under the long wooden bridge across the Isonzo at Rubbia were signs that the Italian engineers were putting in position charges of explosive to blow it up when as much material as possible had been brought over. Some of our batteries had already been withdrawn to rearward positions not far from group headquarters and were firing as fast as the guns could be reloaded. The others were still in their old emplacements a mile or so farther forward, being shelled terrifically by the Austrian twelve-inch batteries, but having extraordinary luck. They were using up as much of their ammunition as they could, because it was becoming clearer every moment that the Italian transport service was not going to be able to supply the lorries to move the shells, which were big enough for fifty of them to make a full lorry-load.

[Sidenote: Lack of motor lorries to move ammunition.]

A major from one of the batteries came into group headquarters while I was in the mess. He was dark under the eyes after a couple of sleepless nights, for his men had been working hard all round the clock to get the ammunition back from the forward dumps, labor that afterward proved wasted, as there were no lorries forthcoming to carry it farther on. Sixty twelve-inch shells and one aeroplane bomb a yard away from one of his four guns was the afternoon's experience of his battery, and only one man wounded made up the casualty-list for the same period.

"And I'm going to have a damn good dinner to-night whatever happens," he announced. "Goodness knows when we shall eat or sleep again. So the fowls and the rabbits we had in the battery are being killed this afternoon."

[Sidenote: English and French artillery dependent on Italian transport.]

There were Austrian shells falling on the hill by group headquarters, but none fell on that dense-packed road along which military traffic of every kind and shape crawled and stuck and crawled on again. The tension grew greater at our headquarters. The guns needed tractors to move them, and motor-lorries were required to carry the battery stores. For the English artillery contingent had no transport of its own, the arrangement having been that this should be supplied by the Italians. The French artillery contingent with the Italian Army, on the other hand, was independent in this respect.

The organization with regard to the transport of guns is different in the Italian and the British armies. The British system is that every gun shall have its motor or horse-haulage permanently assigned to it, so that it is always mobile at a moment's notice. In the Italian army the mechanical transport service provides haulage for all units when required, and as it is only in extraordinarily exceptional circumstances that every single thing in the army needs moving at once, they are able to effect considerable economies over the British method, which constantly keeps large numbers of lorries and tractors and cars, together with their drivers and mechanics, idle, since the units to which they are attached are not at the moment in need of transport.

[Sidenote: Doubtful if all the British guns can be moved.]

By the time it was dark on Saturday evening the likelihood of all the British guns getting away seemed doubtful, and the Italian artillery colonel who supervised their employment as corps artillery came to our group headquarters to say that preparations must be made for blowing the last of them up, and that in any case each tractor must tow more than one gun and come back for others directly it had got its first tows behind the Isonzo.

[Sidenote: Enormous conflagration of military stores.]

And now the darkening landscape suddenly began to spring out into brilliant points of light, as everywhere behind the Italian front, supply-depots, military stores, and vast collections of wooden sheds were set in a blaze. Gorizia was the site of a special conflagration, and the enemy gun-fire was steadily increasing, till sometimes the barrage rose to a single prolonged roar, and you could not have got a knife edge between the bursts.

By 7.30 p.m. six of our guns were across the river and the rest were now firing like field artillery, with no other batteries between them and the enemy. They kept up this protection of the retreat of the infantry so long, in fact, that the last round of all, at about 10 p.m., was fired just before the gun was hitched to the tractor, and there was yet another gun that had its breech mechanism smashed for fear it might have to be left behind.

[Sidenote: Abandoned ammunition is exploded.]

[Sidenote: Like a volcanic eruption.]

The bright moon hung in a pale-green sky, looking down on a dozen roads each crawling like a black snake with the close press of retreating troops. As I was making my way back to Gradisca the whole firmament leaped into sudden brilliance and every feature in every face among the throngs around me on the road stood out for several seconds under a ghastly light. Then followed from behind Monte Michele, a deep, rolling roar. It was the first of the explosions of the great abandoned stores of gun-ammunition behind the front. From then till dawn the night sky was continually breaking into a glare like that of gigantic sunset, and the crash of destroyed artillery ammunition shook the ground. The less brilliant, but steadier, glow of burning stores and sheds and houses was constantly multiplied, and the flash of every new explosion revealed fresh masses of black smoke rising in sharp outline against the lurid horizon. It was an apocalyptic spectacle; nothing short of a volcanic eruption could produce those tremendous effects of infernal illumination. Millions of pounds' worth of material, all the fruits of two and a half years of labor, were burned and blasted out of existence in a few hours.

[Sidenote: The necessity for speed.]

[Sidenote: Valuable stores abandoned for lack of lorries.]

The difficulty that complicated the Italian evacuation of their war-zone was the fact that every hour the need for speed became more urgent, if utter disaster was to be averted. A unit would be given twelve hours to get to the point on the railway where it was to entrain and then an hour later its time-limit would be reduced to two hours. A headquarters might be told that a sufficient supply of motor-lorries would be available to evacuate all its material and that it had better begin getting rid of chairs and tables and its superfluous stuff at once, but no sooner had these less important stores gone than word would come that no more transport was available and that all the immensely valuable stores and reserves of ammunition that still remained, must be abandoned, as no lorries could be found for them.

[Sidenote: Difficulties in a sudden retreat.]

[Sidenote: Every officer tries to save his supplies.]

Moving a great army is an affair of time-tables. There is room for only a certain amount of men and material on the roads and railways at one time, and every man and every wagon above that maximum becomes a factor of confusion and retards the movement of the whole mass to a dangerous degree. The sudden retreat of an army is often reduced to chaos, first, because a thoroughly worked-out plan of general retirement exists but rarely in the strong-boxes of any general staff, and secondly, because in the absence of a time-table drawn up in detail and strictly enforced, the elementary principle of self-preservation leads every unit of the army to put itself on the road as quickly as it can get transportation. This is not to say that confusion is an invariable indication of personal panic; but it is very natural, and even very proper, that every battery commander, the director of every military store and depot, and the leader of every body of troops which is not definitely ordered to remain, should have the individual determination that his particular command shall not fall into the hands of the enemy. The artillery officer firmly resolves that he will save his guns at all costs; the heads of supply departments are in charge of valuable stores which their army needs for its very existence and which would be of great aid to the enemy if captured, and the troop-leader naturally argues that it would be futile to allow his men to be cut off when a general retreat has already been ordered. So if the organization of withdrawal is left to the discretion of the people involved in it, as it has to be when the whole thing has not been deliberately arranged beforehand, confusion is almost inevitable.

[Sidenote: Fear of being cut off by the enemy.]

[Sidenote: Only severest means can stop civilian traffic.]

[Sidenote: Modern war is a wild fury of destruction.]

Moreover, the enemy always seems to be advancing much faster than he really is. Under the discouragement that every army feels in falling back, it is easy to credit the pursuer with exaggerated powers of rapid motion; the defeated soldier forgets that the miles are just as long and weary for his adversary trudging painfully after him as they are for himself. Rumor, too, spreads wildly among tired and disheartened men. Enemy cavalry, enemy armored motor-cars, hurrying ahead to cut him off--that idea haunts the mind of each man in an enforced retirement. A further complication is caused when, as was the case in the Italian withdrawal, the civilian population is also desperately anxious to be gone before the arrival of the enemy. The news of the forthcoming evacuation of territory spreads backward with rapidity, and the roads along the route of the retreating army fill at once with unregulated, disorderly swarms of frightened civilians and their household baggage, hastily stowed on slow-moving dilapidated carts that are likely to break down at narrow points of the way and block whole miles of military traffic for hours at a time. The Italian Army had to endure a great deal of that kind of complication. Theoretically, of course, a general could throw back cavalry and mounted police along the line of his retreat and forbid any civilian traffic whatever under pain of military penalties; but it is very difficult to use such measures against your own countrymen threatened with invasion, specially when the whole aim and object of your war is to free men of your own race from foreign domination. And not only does the sentimental reason of saving fellow-citizens from the yoke of an invader forbid this course, but also considerations of common humanity. In the old wars, when the danger-area of fighting was restricted to the places where opposing troops actually came into contact, there was no particular danger for the civilian inhabitants remaining in invaded territory; though their property might suffer from the enemy's requisitions, their lives were likely to be safe. But wars of this modern character spread destruction broadcast over a whole region. A rear-guard action will involve a rain of shells that may smash to pieces any village on the line of retreat; gas may be used, creeping into the refuges where the non-combatant population has taken shelter, and choking them there like vermin in a hole. War is no longer a civilly organized affair of pitched battles; it is a wild fury of destruction, raging across the whole country-side like a typhoon.

If the English batteries on the Italian front had brought with them to Italy their full organization of transport, they could have saved all their ammunition and stores, their ordnance workshops and supplies. As it was, they had been incorporated in the Italian Army as corps artillery on the Italian basis; they had to take their chance of getting transport along with every one else, and consequently of all their equipment they could save only the guns themselves, which after all was what chiefly mattered.

[Sidenote: A marching army does not seem as numerous as the same in confusion.]

Discipline is a camouflage of numbers. A thousand men marching past in column of fours does not make upon the mind the same impression of multitude as the sight of half that number in a disordered rabble. Regularity and compactness reduce the appearance of mass; and you receive a profounder suggestion of size from a comparatively small pile of natural rocks than you do from the geometrical pyramids. In the same way an army whose formations are suddenly relaxed seems to swell enormously in numbers. You can drive through a region where a million men are stationed under regular military organization and get no idea of congestion, but if those men are suddenly dissolved from a closely knit body into a crowd of individual persons, the same country-side seems hardly large enough to hold them all.

[Sidenote: Discomforts of the retreat.]

So, as with that little party of Englishmen I started on the retreat in the early morning hours of October 28, we seemed to be engulfed in a constantly broadening flood of human beings. We were in a train, the men in open trucks, miserable enough under the cold, streaming rain, the officers crowded into a closed van with the baggage. When we started in the dark we had the train to ourselves, but as I awoke three hours later from an uneasy sleep and looked out of the van, the rest of the train already swarmed with Italian soldiers who had clambered upon it as it crept along at a snail's pace. And when dawn came we saw ahead of us a long vista of trains stretching out of sight, while behind stood another queue of them, whistling impatiently like human beings at a ticket office; sometimes one of them would back a little and make the others behind it back too, all screeching furiously with their whistles exactly as if they were trying to shout, "Where are you coming to?"

[Sidenote: The one idea is to keep on moving.]