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When one reached the great Venetian plain near Army Headquarters , the Italian fronts were explained with a clearness that made maps unnecessary.
‘We have three fronts,’ said my informant. , ‘On the first, the Isonzo front, which is the road to Trieste, our troops can walk, though the walking is not good. On the second, the Trentino, to the north, where the enemy comes nearest to our plains, our troops must climb and mountaineer, you will see.’
He pointed south-east and east across the heat haze to some evil-looking ridges a long way off where there was a sound of guns debating ponderously. ‘That is the Carso, where we are going now,’ he said; then he turned north-east and north where nearer, higher mountains showed streaks of snow in their wrinkles.
‘Those are the Julian Alps,’ he went on. ‘Tolmino is behind them , north again . Where the snow is thicker - do you see? - are the Carnic Alps; we fight among them. Then to the west of them come the Dolomites, where tourists use to climb and write books. There we fight, also. The Dolomites join on to the Trentino and the Asiago Plateau, and there we fight. And from there we go round north till we meet the Swiss border. All mountains, you see.’
He picked up the peaks one after another with the ease of a man accustomed to pick up landmarks at any angle and any change of light. A stranger’s eyes could make out nothing except one sheer rampart of brooding mountains - ‘like giants at a hunting’ - all along the northern horizon.
The glass split them into tangled cross-chains of worsted hillocks, hollow-flanked peaks cleft by black or grey ravines, stretches of no-coloured rock gashed and nicked with white, savage thumbnails of hard snow thrust up above cockscombs of splinters , and behind everything an agony of tortured crags against the farthest sky. Men must be borne or broke to the mountains to accept them easily. They are too full of their own personal devils.
The plains around Udine are better - the fat, flat plains crowded with crops - wheat and barley patches between trim vineyards, every vine with her best foot forwards and arms spread to welcome spring. Every field hedged with old, strictly pollarded mulberry-trees for the silkworms, and every road flanked with flashing water-channels that talk pleasantly in the heart.
At each few score yards of road there was a neat square of limestone road-metal, with the water- channel led squarely round it. Each few hundred yards, and old man and a young boy worked together, the one with a long spade, the other with a tin pot at the end of a pole. The instant that any wear showed in the surface, the elder padded the hollow with a spoonful of metal, the youth sluiced it, and at once it was ready to bind down beneath the traffic as tight as an inner-tube patch.
There was curiously little traffic by our standards, but all there was moved very swiftly. The perfectly made and tended roads do most of the motor’s work. Where there are no bump there can be no strain, even under maximum loads. The lorries glide from railhead to their destination, return, and are off again without overhaul or delay. On the simple principle that transportation is civilisation, the entire Italian campaign is built, and every stretch of every road proves it.
But on the French front Providence does not supply accommodating river-beds whence the beautiful self-binding stuff can be shovelled ready-made into little narrow-gauge trucks all over the landscape. Nor have we in France solid mountains where man has but to reach out his hand to all the stone of all the pyramids. Neither, anywhere, have we populations expert from birth at masonry. To parody Macaulay, what the axe is to the Canadian, what the bamboo is to the Malay, what the snow-block is to the Esqimaux, stone and cement is to the Italian, as I hope to show later.
They are a hard people habituated to handling hard stuffs, and, I should imagine, with a sense of property as keen as the Frenchman’s. The innumerable grey-green troops in the bright fields moved sympathetically among the crops and did not litter their surroundings with rubbish. They have their own pattern of steel helmet, which differs a little from ours, and gives them at a distance a look of Roman Legionaires on a frieze of triumph. The infantry and, to a less extent, other arms are not recruited locally but generally, so that the men from all parts come to know each other, and losses are more evenly spread. But the size, physique, and, above all, the poise of the men struck one at every step. They seem more supple in their collective movements and less loaded down with haberdashery than either French or British troops. But the indescribable difference lay in their tread - the very fall of their feet and the manner in which they seemed to possess the ground they covered. Men whose life runs normally in the open own and are owned by their surroundings more naturally than those whom climate and trade keep housed through most of the year. Space, sunlight, and air, the procession of life under vivid skies, furnish the Italian with a great deal of his mental background, so when, as a soldier, he is bidden to sit down in the clean dust and be still as the hours while the shells pass, he does so as naturally as an Englishman draws a chair to the fire.
The Belly of Stones
‘And that is the Isonzo River ,’ said the officer, when we reached the edge of the Udine plain. It might have come out from Kashmir with its broad sweeps of pale shoals that tailed off downstream into dancing haze. The milky jade waters smelt of snow from the hills as they plucked at the pontoon bridges’ moorings which were made to allow for many feet rise and fall. A snow-fed river is as untrustworthy as a drunkard.
The flavour of mules, burning fuels, and a procession of high-wheeled Sicilian carts, their panels painted with Biblical stories, added to the Eastern illusion. But the ridge on the far side of the river that looked so steep, and was in reality only a small flattish mound among mountains, resembled no land on earth. If the Matoppos had married the Karroo they might have begotten some such abortion of stone-speckled, weather- hacked dirt. All along the base of it, indifferent to the thousands of troops around, to the scream of mules, the cough of motors, the whirr of machinery and the jarring carts, lay in endless belts of cemeteries those Italian dead who had first made possible the way to the heights above.
‘We brought them down and buried them after each fight,’ said the officer. ‘There were many fights. Whole regiments lie there - and there - and there. Some of them died in the early days when we made war without roads, some of them died afterwards, when we had the roads but the Austrians had the guns. Some of them died at the last when we beat the Austrians. Look!’
As the poet says, the battle is won by the men who fall. God knows how many mothers’ sons sleep along the river before Gradisca in the shadow of the first ridge of the wicked Carso. They can hear their own indomitable people always blasting their way towards the east and Trieste. The valley of the Isonzo multiplies the roar of the heavy pieces around Goritzia and in the mountains to the north, and sometimes enemy aeroplanes scar and rip up their resting-places. They lie, as it were, in a giant smithy where the links of the new Italy are being welded under smoke and flame and heat - heat from the dry shoals of the river-bed before, and heat from the dry ridge behind them.
The road wrenched itself uphill among the dead trenches, through wire entanglements red-rusted on the ground - looking like ‘harrows fit to reel men’s bodies out like silk’- between the usual mounds of ruptured sand-bags, and round empty gun-pits softened at their angles by the passage of the seasons.
Trenches cannot be dug, any more than water can be found, on the Carso, for a spade’s depth below the surface the unkindly stone turns to sullen rock, and everything must be drilled and blasted out. For the moment, because spring had been wet, the stones were greened over with false growth of weeds which wither utterly in the summer, leaving the rocks to glare and burn alone. As if all this savagery were not enough, the raw slopes and cusps of desolation were studded with numberless pits and water-sinks, some exquisitely designed by the Devil for machine-gun positions, others like small craters capable of holding eleven-inch howitzers, which opened at the bottom through rifts into dry caverns where regiments can hide - and be dug out.
We wound under the highest rise of the ridge and came out on its safest side, on to what the Arabs would call a belly of stones. There was no pretence of green - nothing but rock, broken and rebroken, as far as the eye could carry, by shell-fire, as though it were the far end of Lydd ranges. Earth, however battered, one