to come. Then the ground hiccupped a few yards in front of us, and stones - the poisonous edged stones of the Carso - whirred like partridges. ‘Mines,’ said the officer serenely, while the civils automatically turned up their collars. ‘They are working up the steep side of the ridge, but they might have warned us!’
The mines exploded in orderly line, and it being impossible to run away over the stones, one had to watch them with the lively consciousness that those scores of thousands of dead beneath and around and behind were watching too. A pneumatic drill chattered underground, as teeth chatter.
‘I didn’t know there were so many loose stones in the world,’ I said.
‘They are not all loose. We wish they were. They’re very solid. Come and see!’
Out of the ginning sunshine we walked into a great rock-cut gallery with rails running underfoot and men shovelling rubbish into trucks. Half-a-dozen embrasures gave light through thirty feet of rock. ‘These are some of the new gun-positions,’ said the officer. ‘For six-inch guns perhaps! Perhaps for eleven.’
‘And how’d you get eleven-inch guns up here?’ I asked.
He smiled a little - I learned the meaning of that smile up in the mountains later.
‘By hand,’ said he, and turned to the engineer in charge to reprove him for exploding the mines without warning.
We came off the belly of stones, and when we were on the flat lands beyond the Isonzo again, looked back at it across its girdling line of cemeteries. It was the first obstacle Italy found at her own threshold, after she had forced the broad uneasy Isonzo, ‘where troops can walk, though the walking is not good.’ It seemed enough.
Podgora
(June 9, 1917)
‘We have finished with stones for a little,’ said the officer. ‘We are going to a mountain of mud. It is dry now, but this winter it never stayed quiet.’
An acre or so of the the climbing roadside was still uneasy, and had slid face-down in a splatter of earth and tree-roots which men were shovelling off.
‘It’s rather a fresh road. Altogether we have about four thousand miles of new roads - and old roads improved - on a front of about six hundred kilometres. But you see, our kilometres are not flat.’
The landscape, picked out in all the greens of spring, was that of early Italian holy pictures - the same isolated, scarred hummocks rising from enamelled meadows or drifts of bloom into the same elaborate entablatures of rock, crowned by a campanile or tufted with dark trees. On the white roads beneath us the lines of motors and mule transport strung out evenly to their various dumps. At one time we must have commanded twenty full miles, all working at once, but never could we spy a breakdown. The Italian transport system has been tried out by war long ago.
The more the road sunk to the plains, the more one realised the height of the mountains dominating us all round. Podgora , the mountain of mud, is a little Gibraltar about eight hundred feet high, almost sheer on one side, overlooking the town of Gorizia, which, in civil life, used to be a sort of stuffy Cheltenham for retired Austrian officers. Anywhere else, Podgora hill might be noticeable, but you could set down half-a-dozen Gibraltars among this upheaval of hills, and in a month the smooth Italian roads would overrun them as vine tendrils overrun rubbish-heaps. The lords of the military situation round Gorizia are the four- and five- thousand-foot mountains, crowded one behind the other, every angle, upland and valley of each offering or masking death.
The mountains are vile ground for aeroplane work, because there is nowhere to alight in comfort, but none the less the machines beat over them from both sides, and the anti-aircraft guns which are not impressive in the open plains fill the gorges with multiplied coughings more resembling a lion’s roar than thunder. The enemy fly high, over the mountains, and show against the blue like bits of whirling ash off a bonfire. They drop their bombs generously, and the rest is with fate - either the blind crack on blank rock and the long harmless whirr of slivered stone, or that ripe crash which tells that timber, men and mules have caught it full this time. If all the setting were not so lovely, if the lights, the leafage, the blossom, and the butterflies mating on the grassy lips of old trenches were not allowed to insult the living workmen of death, their work would be easier to describe without digressions.
When we had climbed on foot up and up and into the bowels of the mountain of mud, through galleries and cross-galleries, to a discreetly veiled observation-point, Gorizia, pink, white, and bluish, lay, to all appearance, asleep beneath us amid her full flowering chestnut-trees by the talking Isonzo. She was in Italian hands - won after furious fights - but the enemy guns from the mountains could still shell her at pleasure, and the next move, said our officer, would be to clear certain heights -‘Can you see our trenches creeping up to them?’ - from their menace. There and there, he pointed , the Italian troops would climb and crawl, while thus and thus would the fire of our guns cover them, till they came to that bare down and must make their rush - which is really a climb - alone. If that rush failed, then they must dig in among the rocks. And lie out under the bitter skyline, for this was war among the mountains where the valleys were death-traps and only heights counted.
Then we turned to the captured hills behind us that had lived so unconsidered since they were made , but now, because of the price paid for them, would stand forth memorable as long as Italy was remembered. The heathen mountains in front had yet to be baptized and entered on the roll of honour, and one could not say at that moment which one of them would be most honourable, or what cluster of herdsmen’s huts would carry the name of a month’s battle through the ages.
The studied repose that heralds a big push cloaked both lines. No one, except a few pieces who were finishing some private work, was saying anything. The Austrians had their own last touches to put in too. They were ranging on a convent up a hillside - one deliberate shell at a time. A big gun beneath us came lazily into the game on our side, shaking the whole mountain of mud, and then asking questions of its observing officer across the valley.
Suddenly a boy’s voice, that had been taking corrections, spoke quite unofficially at the receiver in the gloom under our feet. ‘Oh! Congratulations!’ it cried. ‘Then you dine with us to-night, and you’ll pay for the wine.’
Every one laughed.
‘Rather a long walk,’ said our guide and friend. ‘The observing officer - he is down near Gorizia - has just telephoned that he has been promoted to Aspirant - Sub-Lieutenant, don’t you say? He will have to climb up here to the artillery Mess tonight and stand drinks on his promotion.’
‘I bet he’ll come,’ some one said. There were no takers. So you see, youth is always immortally the same.
Gorizia
We dropped from Podgora into Gorizia by a road a little more miraculous than any we had yet found. It was in the nature of a toboggan-run, but so perfectly banked at the corners that the traffic could have slid down by itself if it had been allowed.
As we entered the town, men were mending the bridge across the river - for a reason. They do a great deal of mending in Gorizia. Austrians use heavy pieces on the place - twelve-inch stuff sometimes - dealt methodically and slowly from far back, out of the high hills. I tried to find a house that did not carry that monotonous stippling of shrapnel, but it was difficult. The guns reach everywhere.
There was no air in the still hollow where the place lay - hardly a whisper among the domed horse- chestnuts. Troops were marching through to their trenches far up the hillside beyond, and the sound of their feet echoed between the high garden-walls where the service wires were looped among pendants of wistaria in full flower.
There are several hundred civilians in the city who have not yet cared to move, for the Italian is as stubborn in these things as the Frenchman. In the main square where the house-fronts are most battered and the big electric-light standard bows itself to the earth,