This country was Austrian before the war, though inhabited wholly by Italians, and Italian troops had conquered it with extraordinary feats of endurance and daring in their first great onrush all along their old frontiers in the spring of 1915. But now a big advance here by either side, in the face of carefully prepared opposition, seemed almost inconceivable, except as the result of some wide turning movement, hinging on some point many miles away.

The special military problems presented by warfare in such country were numerous and difficult. Our guns had to be dragged into position up a rough mountain track, which at some points was too narrow and at others too weak to allow the passage of a six-inch howitzer without much preliminary blasting and building up. Our first gun to go up took twenty-four hours of continuous labour between the time of starting up the track and the time of arriving in position, a distance of only about two miles of zig-zag. No tractor or other power engine could be used here. The only force available was that of men hauling on drag ropes, and a party of sixty Italian gunners reinforced our men.

What may be called the problems of pure gunnery were still more difficult. British Heavy guns had never fired under such conditions before and, for the benefit of such of my readers as may be practical Artillerymen, it may be interesting to remark that for one of our targets the angle of sight, properly so called, worked out at more than twenty degrees, while the map-range elevation was only about fifteen. The devising of an accurate formula for correction of elevation for a large "dislivello," as the Italians shortly call it, which in English means a large "difference of level" between a gun and its target, is one of the most intricate problems of theoretical gunnery, or, for that matter, of theoretical mechanics, involving, among other factors, the various shapes and sizes of projectiles, their comparative steadiness during flight, the resistance of the air, and the effect of other atmospheric conditions and of the force of gravity.

There was a splendid opportunity for systematically testing various rival formulae in the Trentino, but it was allowed to slip. Among gunners, as among other classes, and especially among Regular Army gunners, the so-called practical man sees little value in scientific experiments, which do not produce large, obvious and quick returns. We fired many hundred rounds in the Trentino and I have no doubt that they were tolerably effective. But most of them were fired at night, with no observation possible, and we were often restricted in our registrations by daylight to four rounds a section per target, from which no really reliable conclusions could be drawn.[1]

[Footnote 1: We could get no help from Italian range tables, which were not merely for different guns and ammunition, but were drawn up on different principles from our own.]

* * * * *

We were billeted in the village of Tiarno di Sotto, where the Mayor under the Austrian regime, an Italian by race, was still carrying on his duties. "But I shall have to disappear, if the Austrians ever come back," he said with a smile. It was a tremendous climb from our billets to get anywhere, the least tremendous being to our Battery position, straight up the nearest mountain side. A very active and energetic man could get up in a quarter of an hour. It used to take me twenty minutes. The weather, moreover, was hot, though considerably cooler than on the plains.

Some Czecho-Slovaks were billeted in the next house to ours, but, owing to lack of a common language, we were unfortunately unable to talk to them. They were well-built fellows, and gave one an impression of great tenacity and intelligence. And I know that they were fine fighters. But they had not the gaiety of the Italians, partly perhaps because they were exiles in a strange land, and must so remain till the day of final victory, which might then have seemed still infinitely remote. An amusing incident happened one evening. Four officers had deserted from the Austrian lines and surrendered to the Czecho-Slovaks; it was one of their military functions to induce surrenders. Two of these officers were themselves Czecho-Slovaks, the third a Jugo-Slav and the fourth an Italian from Istria. They were very hungry and were in the midst of a good meal, in the presence of a Czecho-Slovak guard, when a Corporal and two gunners from our Battery, passing outside the house and hearing some language being spoken within, which they recognised to be neither English not Italian, rightly thought it their duty to enter and investigate the matter. The deserters were astonished to see these unfamiliar looking persons, speaking a strange tongue and wearing a uniform which they had never seen before. But they were still more astonished to learn that they were British. They seemed hardly to be aware that the British were at war with Austria, much less that any British troops had been within hundreds of miles of them. The incident closed in much mirth and friendliness.

In the village were also billeted many Italian troops, who used to fill the night with song, long after most of us had gone to bed:—

"'Addio, mia bell', addio!' Cantava nel partir la gioventu,"

which is never very far from the lips of any Italian soldier, and those endless stornelli, which to an invariable tune they multiply from day to day.

"II General Cadorna Mangiava la bifstecca; Ai poveri soldati Si dava castagna secca,"[1]

[Footnote 1: "General Cadorna used to eat beefsteak. To the poor soldiers they gave dried chestnuts."]

or

"Il Re dal fronte Giulio Ha scritto alla Regina, 'Arrivato a Trieste Ti mandero una cartolina,'"[1]

[Footnote 1: "The King has written to the Queen from the Julian Front 'when I get to Trieste, I will send you a picture post card.'"]

with its sardonic variant or sequel,

"Il General Cadorna Ha scritto alla Regina 'Se vuoi veder Trieste, Compra una cartolina.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: "General Cadorna has written to the Queen, 'if you want to see Trieste, buy a picture post card.'"]

Many of the others are for various reasons unprintable, though many are extremely witty and amusing. Even those which I have quoted were nominally forbidden by the High Command to be sung, but the prohibition was not very rigorously enforced. And General Cadorna, after all, had now passed into history. Of his successor I never heard any evil sung, though I remember once hearing a great crowd of soldiers and civilians at Genoa shouting monotonously.

"Viva, viva il Generale Dia!"

The refrain of the stornelli was onomatopoeic, and was intended to represent the sound of gunfire.

"Bim Bim Bom, Bim Bim Bom, Al rombo del cannon."

* * * * *

What a theatrical country Italy is! I remember being out in the streets of Tiarno one evening with a stream of song issuing from almost every house, and looking up at the full moon riding high over the towering peaks that locked in our valley and all but shut out the night sky. I could hardly believe that it was neither a stage setting nor a dream.

I remember another day, when I did a great climb above Bezzecca to carry out a front line reconnaissance, and arrived limp and perspiring to lunch at the Headquarters of an Italian Artillery Group, high, high up, looking out upon a glorious and astounding view. And in the afternoon I took my first ride on a teleferica, or aerial railway, slung along a steel rope across the deeps, seated on a sort of large wooden tea tray, some six feet long and two and a half across, with a metal rim some six inches high running round the edge. I was quite prepared to be sick or at least giddy. But I was pleasantly disappointed. My journey took about a quarter of an hour; walking it would have taken about three hours of very stiff climbing. The motion is quite steady, except for a slight jolt as one passes each standard, and, provided one sits still and doesn't shift one's centre of gravity from side to side, there is no wobbling of the tea tray. And looking down from time to time I saw tree tops far below me, and men and mules on mountain tracks as black specks walking.

* * * * *

There were various theories to account for our being sent to the Trentino. One was that an Austrian attack was feared there, another that an Italian attack was intended, but that the intention was afterwards abandoned, a third that the whole thing was a feint to puzzle the Austrians. But in any case we did not remain there long. By the beginning of August we were back on the Plateau. On the return journey, which was again by road all the way, we were given three days' rest at Desenzano and I was able to spend half a day in Verona.



CHAPTER XXXIV

SIRMIONE AND SOLFERINO

"Leave is a privilege and not a right," according to a hack quotation from the King's Regulations. This quotation has done good service in the mouth of more than one Under Secretary of State for War, heading off tiresome questioners in the British House of Commons. Leave was a very rare privilege for the British Forces in Italy. In France, taking a rough average of all ranks and periods, British troops got leave once a year. In my Battery in Italy, the majority were without leave home for nineteen months. How much longer they would have had to wait, if the war had not conveniently come to an end in the nineteenth month of their Italian service, I do not know. Even in Italy, of course, the privilege was extended somewhat more freely to junior regimental officers and much more freely to Staff officers and Lieutenant-Colonels, in view of the danger of brain fag and nervous strain following upon their greater mental exertions and their abnormal exposure to shell fire and the weather. The former class went home about every eleventh, the latter about every third month.

The French Parliament fairly early in the war, with that gross lack of discrimination and of military understanding habitual to politicians, insisted on the granting of leave every three months to all ranks in all theatres of war. The Italian Parliament pedantically laid down a uniform period of six months. The British Parliament, with the sure political instinct of our race, preferred to leave the whole matter in the hands of the War Office. The interference in purely military affairs of unpractical sentimentalists was strongly discouraged at Westminster.

Why no leave to England could be granted except in special cases, was cogently explained from time to time during the summer in circulars written by Staff officers of high rank, who had frequent opportunities of informing themselves of the realities of the situation, while visiting London. These circulars were read out on parade and treated with the respect which they deserved. To allay possible, though quite unreasonable, unrest, it was determined to open a British Club, or Rest Camp, at Sirmione, which, as every reader of Tennyson knows, stands on the tip of a long promontory at the southern end of Lake Garda. Here a week's holiday was granted to a large proportion of the officers and a small proportion of the rank and file. Many officers went there more than once. Two large hotels were hired, which had been chiefly frequented before the war by corpulent and diseased Teutons, for whom a special course of medical treatment, including sulphur baths, used to be prescribed.

One of these hotels was now set apart for British officers, the other for men. A funny little person in red tabs was put in charge; there were various speculations as to his past activities, but all agreed that he had got into a good job now, and wasn't going to lose it, if tact could prevent it. This little man used to stand outside the hotel gates as each week's guests arrived from the steamer, and always had a cheery smile of welcome for every Field officer; to General officers he showed special attentions. He took his meals in the same room as the rest of us, but at what was known as "the Staff table," where he invited to join him any officers of high rank, who might be staying at the hotel, or, if there were none such available, certain of his private friends. The food supplied to ordinary people like myself was good, wholesome, reasonably plentiful and cheap. At "the Staff table" special delicacies were provided and additional courses, with no increase of charge. The profits, he used to say, were made entirely on the drinks and smokes.

A series of rules was drawn up, that none of us might be led into any avoidable temptation. All towns within reach,—Milan, Verona, Mantua, Brescia, Peschiera,—were placed out of bounds. So, too, were some of the larger villages on the shores of the Lake. The hours during which alcoholic liquor might be obtained, either in the Hotels or in the Cafes of Sirmione, were narrowly limited. Beer was strictly rationed. Carefully regulated excursions on the Lake, by steamer or launch, were permitted and even encouraged. Likewise bathing.

I spent a week here, from August 14th to 21st, in gloriously fine, hot weather. Some said that the damp heat was relaxing and depressing, but I, in my second Italian summer, was getting acclimatised. The place was wonderfully beautiful. The end of the promontory is covered with olive trees, the ground thickly carpeted with wild mint and thyme, surrounded on three sides by the deep blue water of the Lake, along the shores of which lie little white villages, backed by groups of straight, dark cypresses, with mountain ranges rising in the background, range behind range, and overhead the hot Italian sun, shining from a cloudless sky. Here, at the point, were the ruins of what are called, upon what evidence I know not, the Villa, the Baths and the Grotto of Catullus. Here, too, was an Italian Anti-Aircraft Battery, and the Grotto of Catullus was filled with their ammunition.

The Austrians still held the upper end of the Lake, including the town of Riva. But only Italian motor boats now survived on the Lake, occasionally raiding Riva. The Austrian boats had all been sunk early in the war.

* * * * *

On the 15th I went round the lower end of the Lake in a steamer and, passing along the shores of the beautiful Isola di Garda, on which stands the less beautiful Villa Borghese, landed at Maderno, famous for its lemon groves. Here a church was being used as a ration store. It had fine carving on the door. The French had established Artillery and Machine Gun Schools close to the Lake and several of their officers were on the steamer.

On the 16th I went with a young officer from a Yorkshire Battalion, a most agreeable companion, to Desenzano, which was out of bounds. We played billiards and lunched, and in the afternoon went to sleep on the grass in the shade beside the Lake. We were driven back in a carrozza along the promontory by an old Garibaldino, a Capuan by birth, who in 1860 at the age of eleven joined Garibaldi, when he crossed from Sicily to the mainland, and held older people's horses at the Battle of the Volturno. He served with the Fifth Garibaldini in the Trentino campaign of 1866 and knew intimately the country where I had lately been, the Val d'Ampola and Storo, Tiarno and Bezzecca. He then joined the Italian Regular Army, and in 1870 was a Corporal in the Pavia Brigade. He was present at the taking of Rome and claimed that, although an Infantryman, he helped to load one of the guns which breached the Porta Pia. If this claim be true, there must have been either a lack of gunners on this famous occasion, or a certain degree of enthusiastic confusion. Having entered Rome, he got very drunk and absented himself from his Regiment without leave for three days. As a punishment he was made to march on foot, carrying a full pack, from Rome to Padua. He showed us his old military pay-book, his medals and other souvenirs. Next year he will be seventy years old and will begin to draw a pension. Having returned to Sirmione, we arranged with him to drive us next day to the neighbouring battlefields of 1859, San Martino and Solferino. Much delighted, he assured me, quite without necessity, that next day he would put on his best clothes, would wash and shave, and give his horse an extra bit of grooming.

Accordingly next morning at ten o'clock we started off again in the carrozza. We visited first San Martino della Battaglia, only a few miles from the southern end of the Lake. This was the northern extremity of the battlefield of Solferino. It was here that the Sardinians and Piedmontese, forming the left wing of the Franco-Italian Army, attacked and drove back the Austrian right wing. A memorial tower has been erected here, 250 feet high, with great avenues of cypresses radiating outwards from it. The custodian is a handsome boy, who lost a leg at the taking of Gorizia two years ago. There is no stair-case within the tower; one goes up by a spiral inclined plane. At successive stages, as one ascends, are large and detailed paintings, running right round the inner circumference of the tower, representing the battles of the Italian Wars of Liberation from 1848 to 1870. As works of art they are not of the first class, but they convey here and there a vivid sense of life and movement, an advance of the Bersaglieri with their cocks' feathers waving in the wind, Garibaldini in their red shirts rushing Bomba's gunners on the Volturno, Italian cavalry charging a Battalion of brown-coated Croats at Custozza, the defence of a fort in the Venetian lagoons against Austrian warships.

On a fine day the view from the top is very good, but that day it was hazy in the great heat. Close by is an Ossario, containing the skulls and bones of seven thousand dead collected in the neighbourhood, washed clean with white wine and set out in neat rows, the majority Italian. A good warning, one would think, against war, and more compact and less wasteful of space than a conventional graveyard.

Thence we drove on to Solferino, a little remote village with a single street paved with cobble stones, seldom visited by foreign tourists. The plaster on the walls of the farmhouses hereabouts still bears many bullet marks. As we drove, the Garibaldino pointed out to us some of the positions where Napoleon III.'s Generals had sited their Batteries. We were the first British officers seen here during the war, and had an enthusiastic reception. I was surprised to find that none of our Regulars had come over from Sirmione, as a matter of professional interest and duty, to study the tactics of 1859 upon the ground.

We lunched well at a small albergo. There were four good-looking daughters of the house, who came and sat with us in turn and watched us eat. They had the naturalness and simple charm of dwellers in remote places. "Four good cows," said the Garibaldino, with the frank realism of the South, "but all the local proprietors are too old." After lunch my companion remained in the village, and I climbed the ridge from which the French drove the Austrians, a very strong natural position even now. I went up La Rocca, at its south-eastern extremity, on which stands an old square tower, also converted into a battle memorial. Here again there are no steps within, but an ascending spiral plane. The slopes at this end of the ridge are thickly planted with young cypresses, and the place will grow in beauty year by year. Even now it is well wooded, with larger trees just below the tower. The village lies at the foot of the slope. Just outside it, off the road on slightly rising ground at the end of an avenue, is another and larger Ossario, containing twenty thousand skulls and sets of bones, French and Austrian. The building is full of banners and wreaths and memorial tablets, including one lately sent by the French troops now fighting on the Italian Front.

"Ceux de la grande guerre A ses glorieux anciens. 1859-1918."

A few skeletons have been preserved intact, including one said to have been an Austrian bandmaster, a giant eight feet tall. The nationality of some of the skulls can be determined by bullets, French or Austrian, found in the head and now attached by a string.

I stepped forth from this well-ordered tomb into the outer sunshine with a sense of personal oppression and of human ineffectiveness. How slowly and how clumsily do the feet of History slouch along! And yet, if Napoleon III. had kept faith with Cavour, the fighting here might have liberated Venetia without the necessity for another war a few years later. How quiet and silent lie these battlefields of yesterday! Even so, one day, will lie the pine woods round Asiago, shell-torn and tormented now, and populous with the soldiers of many nations, yet of a wondrous beauty in the full moonlight and the fresh night air. I shall be back up there in three days' time!

* * * * *

We drove back in the warm evening, by the road through Pozzolengo toward Peschiera, along which many of the defeated Austrians fled in 1859. The roadside was dusty, but along all the hedges the acacias still showed a most delicate and tender green.



CHAPTER XXXV

THE ASIAGO PLATEAU ONCE MORE

During August and September we were kept pretty busy on the Plateau. Concentrations on enemy trenches and wire and special counter-battery shoots by day and counter-battery support of Infantry raids by night were continually required of us. We fired high explosive by day and chiefly gas shell at night. Our own Infantry and the French on our right raided the enemy's front and support lines very frequently, bringing back many prisoners. The French constantly penetrated and reconnoitred the enemy's defensive system on Mount Sisemol. Many of us were inclined to think that the casualties, sometimes heavy, which were incurred in these raids, and the great quantity of ammunition shot away, were largely wasted. We saw no sufficient return for them, beyond a certain amount of information obtained from prisoners, much of which was of small and doubtful value. But in view of what happened later, I think it must be agreed that these continual raids and bombardments did their share in gradually wearing down the morale and power of resistance of the Austrian Army.

There was a persistent rumour that the enemy was on the point of retiring to a line, on which he was known to be working hard, along the lower slopes of Monte Interrotto and Monte Catz on the far side of the Plateau. This line, we learned from prisoners, was commonly referred to as the Winterstellung (winter position). It would have been stronger, defensively, than his existing line, and would have had the great advantage of being able largely to be supplied and munitioned during daylight, as there was much good cover and roads hidden in the pine woods leading down immediately behind it. It would have involved the moral disadvantage of evacuating the ruins of Asiago. But, with the snow down on the Plateau, every Austrian track and foot-mark would have been visible from our O.P.'s, and the Austrian situation, bad as it already was from this point of view, would have become quite intolerable. If, on the other hand, we had followed up an Austrian retreat to their Winterstellung by the occupation of Asiago and the throwing forward of our line across the Plateau, the relative situation would have been reversed. Our Infantry and many of our Batteries would then be out in the open, in view from the Austrian O.P.'s, unable to light a fire by day, and only able to send up supplies by night; and our general situation would be so much the worse with heavy snow increasing our discomfort and the visibility of any work we might undertake and of our every movement.

For this reason, as has been explained in an earlier chapter, it was taken for granted that a small advance from our present excellent line would be worse than useless, and that only an advance at least to the crest of the first mountain range beyond the Plateau would be of any military value. The possibility of such an advance being attempted was evidently still in the minds of the Staff, for our forward or Battle Position at San Sisto had to be kept in constant readiness for occupation, and it was suggested by some that the occasion for a big attack would be the moment when the enemy was in the act of retiring voluntarily to his Winterstellung, necessarily a somewhat difficult and risky operation.

Meanwhile the enemy guns were not silent. They were indeed unpleasantly active, constantly sweeping the road just behind our Battery, putting down violent, though brief, concentrations on the cross roads at Pria dell' Acqua, less than a hundred yards to our right, and apparently also endeavouring to carry out occasional counter-battery shoots after our own pattern. The British Batteries in this sector suffered a number of casualties during this period, and one in particular, not my own, was frequently shelled with great precision by twelve-inch howitzers, most disagreeable weapons, firing at extreme ranges from the cover of some distant valley. Many efforts were made to locate these particular guns, but I am not confident that any of them were successful. Among the victims in this Battery was Preece, a young officer who had served under me in a Training Battery in England. He was the only son of a widowed mother, and, had he lived, might have become a world-famous chemist. His grave, too, is in the Baerenthal Valley.

Our own officers' Mess had several narrow escapes, especially on one occasion when the impact of an enemy shell was broken by a trench cart and a box of tools, only seven or eight yards away. None of the tools were ever found again and portions of the trench cart were seen next morning hanging on the telephone wires beside the road. Only a few splinters came into the Mess and did no harm, all the occupants, myself included, warned by the sound of the approaching shell, having flung ourselves face downwards on the floor. Another frequent exercise of the enemy at this time was night bombing, which during the full moon became somewhat serious. But a big raid by our own airmen on the enemy aerodrome at Borgo in the Val Sugana put an end to this source of trouble.

I was able now and then to make short expeditions down the mountains in the Battery car to Thiene, and sometimes even to Vicenza, for the ostensible purpose of buying canteen and mess stores and drawing the Battery pay. Thiene is the ugliest and dullest little town in Italy. But Vicenza, with its exquisite Olympian theatre, and other fine Palladian architecture, varied by many smaller buildings which are beautiful examples of the Venetian Gothic style, with its busy and animated Piazza, centring round the ever-crowded Cafe Garibaldi, and with the wooded slope of the famous Monte Berico, rich with historic memorials, rising behind the town, never failed to lift my mind out of the dreary monotony of war into an atmosphere of cleaner and more enduring things. I remember, too, the strange thrill I had one day, when, having passed the sawmills and dumps of stores and shells and the huddle of Headquarter offices at Granezza, I came out on the last edge of the mountain wall, into sudden full view of the great plain below, full of rivers and cities, and saw, for the first time from up here, the sunlight flashing on a strip of distant golden sea. It was the lagoons round Venice.

I spent also many interesting days about this time at our tree O.P. on Cima del Taglio. The Italians had an O.P. in a neighbouring tree, which they called Osservatorio Battisti. The British Field Artillery occupied a third tree, and the French a fourth. The pine trees on that summit were, literally, full of eyes. But the enemy never discovered any of us, though he sometimes dropped a few stray shells in our neighbourhood. Our own O.P. was not generally manned at night, unless some prearranged operation was taking place, but the officer on duty had to remain within call and slept in a log hut near the foot of the tree, in telephonic communication with Battery and Brigade. The French and Italians also had huts close by, and I spent several evenings playing chess with them, or talking, or listening to the mandolin and the singing of Italian stornelli. One young Italian, in particular, I remember with some affection, a certain Lieutenant Prato, a mandolin player of great skill and a very charming personality.

One day in September, when the news from the French Front was getting better and better, I remember talking, on our tree top, to the Italian officer, who was at that time acting as liaison officer to our Brigade, a member of a family well known in Milan. He knew every inch of those mountains, now in Austrian hands, along the old Italian frontier. His Battery had fought there in the early part of the war. He knew, too, Gorizia and the Carso battlefields. And he was sick at heart, as every Italian always silently was, at the memory of the retreat of last autumn. And I remember saying that what was now happening in the Somme country would happen soon in Italy. There, I reminded him, was a stretch of country which we had once conquered, inch by inch, with terrible losses and infinite heroism and insufficient Artillery, just as Italy had conquered those positions on the Carso and on Monte Santo. And all those gains of ours had been wiped out in a few disastrous hours last March, as Italy's had been wiped out last October, and now we were advancing again over that same country and beyond it, far more rapidly and with far smaller losses than in those bloody days two years ago. And so, I prophesied to him, would it be on this Front too. The day was coming when Italy would win back all she had lost, and far more than she had ever won before, far more swiftly and cheaply than in her early brave offensives, and Austria, like Germany, would be broken in hopeless, irretrievable defeat. He said to me then that he hoped it might come true, but that he was less certain of the future than I. But, two months later, when I had proved to be a true prophet, he reminded me of that conversation of ours.



PART VI

THE LAST PHASE

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE MOVE TO THE PIAVE

The second week in October we moved down from the Plateau and lay for a week at Mestre, within sight of Venice. One clear afternoon it looked as though one could throw a stone across the intervening water. Every one took for granted that a big Italian offensive was imminent. The rumour was that it would be timed to begin, as near as possible, on the anniversary of the defeat of Caporetto. In Italy more weight is attached to anniversaries than with us. One felt expectation everywhere in the air.

* * * * *

It was during these days that I fell in with the Rumanian Legion. I had been in Padua and saw a group of them standing on the platform at the railway station. They were obviously not Italians. Their uniform was similar to that of the Italian Infantry, but their collars were red, yellow and blue, and they wore a cockade of the same three colours on their hats. They wore Sam Browne belts, too, and carried a pugnale like the Italian Arditi. I asked a Carabiniere on duty who they were. He smiled but did not know. "Perhaps Yugo-Slavs," he suggested. One of them overheard our conversation and came up to me saying, "Siamo Rumeni, Legione Rumena." Then followed a tremendous fraternisation. We shook hands all round and began to talk. We talked Italian, which, being very like their own language, they all understood. Indeed, for an Italian Rumanian is much easier to understand than many of the Italian local dialects.

They were attractive people, of all ages and very friendly, rather like Italians, but with a queer indescribable racial difference. They were natives, mostly, of Transylvania and had much to say of the oppression of their nationality by the Magyars. Most of them had been conscribed to fight in the Austro-Hungarian Army, but had crossed over to the Italian lines at the first opportunity. One said, "There are four millions of us in Austria and Hungary." Then, with an air of restrained fury, "Is that not enough?" Another said, "But after the war there will be a Great Rumania—great and beautiful." And another said, "We Rumanians must be very grateful to Guglielmone.[1] If he had not made this war, we should not have seen the Greater Rumania in our lifetime. But now, if it was not certain before, the blunders of Carluccio[2] have put it beyond all doubt." And another told me that his father wrote and spoke English very well, having lived for twelve years in America at St Louis. And another explained to me how the Rumanians had retained, more than any other modern nation, the speech and customs and dress and traditions of the ancient Romans, which things they had originally derived from the legionaries of the Emperor Trajan.[3] When we parted I said, "May we all meet again on the field of victory beyond the Piave. Long live the Greater Rumania!" And they all cried, "Long live England! Long live victory!" And so I was going away, when one of them, a little fellow, with a rather sad, earnest face, who had apparently missed a parting handshake, ran after me about twenty yards, and seized me by the hand and cried again, "Long live victory!"

[Footnote 1: "Big William."]

[Footnote 2: "Wretched little Charles."]

[Footnote 3: This common boast of the Rumanians is quite true. It is partly to be accounted for by the fact that they were able to retreat before successive invading hordes of barbarians into the inaccessible valleys of the Carpathians, and come down again on to the plains when the danger had passed by.]

* * * * *

From Mestre we moved up through Treviso to a Battery position, on which an advance party had been at work for several days. It grew more and more certain that the offensive was coming at last. Troops of all arms were moving forward in unending streams along every road leading toward the Piave. Prominent among them were many Italian Engineers and bridging detachments with great numbers of pontoons. Beyond Treviso all troop movements took place at night, and our defensive (and offensive) measures against aircraft were apparently sufficient to prevent the enemy from getting any clear idea of what was going on. It seems that he expected an attack in the mountains, but not on the plain. The Italian High Command, on the other hand, considered that the relative strength and morale of the opposing Armies was now such that we could attack on the plain without fear of a successful counter-attack in the mountains, and that, the attack on the plain once well under way, we could pass to the offensive in the mountains also. This view of things was justified by the events which followed. Two British Divisions were moved down to the plain, and one was left in the mountains. The Heavy Artillery was divided proportionately and, of my own Brigade, one Battery was left in the mountains but the rest moved down.

Our new Battery position lay between the ruined village of Lovadina and the river Piave, about three-quarters of a mile from the nearer bank. There was a farmhouse, not much knocked about, close to the gun pits and, with the aid of a few tents erected out of sight along a shallow ditch, the whole Battery was very tolerably billeted. Another British Battery was less than a hundred yards in rear of us, and two others not far away on our right flank. We were once more in a land of acacia hedges, beginning now to take on their autumn tints. For miles round us the country was dead flat. Beyond the river we could see, on a little rise, what was left of Susegana Castle, near to Conegliano, and on a higher, longer ridge further away the white campanile of San Daniele del Friuli, above Udine. It was there that, almost a year ago, in the first newspaper I saw after the retreat, I had read that Italian rearguards were still fighting. In the far distance rose great mountain masses. Up there were Feltre and Belluno, and behind, just visible when the light was very bright, the peaks of Carnia and the Cadore.

It was an unaccustomed feeling, after months of comparative immunity from observation behind mountain ridges, to be in flat country again. At first we all felt a queer sense of insecurity whenever we walked about, even when thick hedges manifestly screened us from enemy eyes. But the road from Lovadina to the river bank at Palazzon, which ran right through our position and within a few yards of our billet, was in full view, and no movement along it was permitted during daylight. When we first arrived we found a deep sense of gloom prevailing amongst our advanced party. They were convinced that our position had been spotted already, for the Austrians that morning had put down a five minutes' concentration all round the place. Nothing much heavier than Field Guns had been firing, but it had been lively while it lasted. It seemed probable, however, on further inquiry, that this outburst had been caused by the fact that an idiotic officer belonging to the Battery immediately in rear of us had marched a working party up the road in fours, then halted them and allowed the men to stand about in groups on the road for several minutes. It was at these groups that the Austrians had apparently been firing. A vigorous protest extracted from our neighbours a promise that more common sense should be used in future.

We were to remain a silent Battery until the start of the offensive, and this was to be dependent on the height of the river, which at that time was in full flood owing to heavy rains in the mountains. Our guns were well camouflaged and the chances of our detection seemed small. But one day we had a lucky escape. It was very clear and there had been great activity in the air on both sides all the morning. All seemed quiet again, however, and we had the camouflage off one of our guns, and two small parties working in the open on shelter trenches behind. A plane was seen approaching, but the air sentry, whose duty it was to keep a sharp look out through glasses and signal the approach of enemy aircraft by two blasts of a whistle, gave no warning. He had been deceived by the marking on the plane, a very thin black cross instead of the thick one usually found on enemy aircraft. Not till it was right upon us did he blow the whistle, and then it was too late. The plane flew very low over us. We could see the pilot looking calmly down at our uncovered gun, and our men trying, ineffectually and belatedly, to take cover. He certainly took it all in and marked us down on his map. The position was 'very easy to identify owing to the solitary farmhouse and the road close by. A few rifle shots were fired, but they did him no harm, and he sailed away toward the river and his own lines.

We had certainly been spotted. And then we suddenly saw another plane, this time an Italian, coming from the left, flying high, hard in pursuit. The Austrian began to rise, but the Italian outpaced him and got right above him, and pressed him gradually down towards the ground. We heard the wooden-sounding clack-clack-clack of machine gun fire. And then we saw the Austrian evidently go out of control, diving toward the ground, more and more rapidly, and the Italian circling downwards above him; and then the Austrian went out of sight behind the acacias and a few moments later a column of smoke began to rise. He had crashed in flames, just this side of the river, and his valuable information with him. The Italian flew back over us, triumphantly and very low this time, and waved his hand to us. And we gave him a grateful cheer.



CHAPTER XXXVII

THE BEGINNING OF THE LAST BATTLE

By the night of October 24th the river had fallen a few inches, and British Infantry crossed in small boats to the Grave di Papadopoli, a long island of sand in the middle of the stream. On the right a Battalion of the Gordons crossed, rowed over by Venetian boatmen. I met one of their officers afterwards. "Everyone of those boatmen deserved a decoration," he said. "They were all as cool under heavy shell fire as if they had been rowing on the Grand Canal." Our Infantry held their preliminary positions here for two days, in spite of considerable Austrian bombardment and counter-attacks. British aeroplanes flew over the island and dropped rations in sandbags. Throughout the fighting of these two days, we were standing by ready to open fire, if orders should come. But no orders came and we remained a silent Battery.

But on the night of October 26th, half an hour before midnight, the big bombardment opened and our guns spoke again. It was to be their last great oration. It was, of its kind, a fine, thunderous performance, and the Austrian reply, in our own neighbourhood, was feeble. Evidently they had not spotted our position, thanks to that Italian airman. Our targets were enemy Batteries and Brigade Headquarters. We fired gas shells continuously for many hours, switching from one target to another, until a strong wind got up, rendering gas shelling comparatively ineffective. Then we got orders to change to high explosive. The gun detachments worked splendidly, as always. We were below strength and could not furnish complete reliefs, but no one spared himself or grumbled.

On the morning of the 27th, just before 7 o'clock, our Infantry attacked, crossing from the island to the further bank of the river. There were no bridges, and the water was breast high in some places. In places it came right over the heads of the smaller men, but their taller comrades pulled them through. Where the current was strongest, cables were thrown across and firmly secured, and to these men held on, as they forced their passage through the water.

About ten o'clock I went forward from the Battery position to the river bank at Palazzon to ascertain the situation. A little man named Sergeant Barini, half an Italian and half an Englishman, but serving in the English Army and attached to our Battery, accompanied me. At Palazzon the river was broad and, under fire, unbridgeable, and we went half a mile down stream along what up to this morning had been our front line trench, to the bridgehead at Lido Island. The islands in mid stream were crowded with prisoners and wounded coming back and fresh troops going forward, and dead bodies lay about, British and Austrian together, of men who had fought their last fight, and two crashed aeroplanes. The Austrians had put up elaborate barbed-wire defences on the island, but these had been pretty well broken up by our fire.

Some enemy guns of big calibre were still shelling the crossings and causing casualties among a Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers, who were in reserve, waiting on the bank for the order to cross. I tried to locate as accurately as possible the direction of these guns and reported them by telephone to our Brigade Headquarters. I saw an Infantry Brigadier, who said that things were going well, but asked for some additional Artillery support for his left flank on the other side, and, if possible, for an enemy Battery, which he thought was near Susegana Castle, to be knocked out. I looked across the river and saw the dense white smoke screen which our Field Guns were putting up to cover the advance.

These Italian rivers of the Venetian Plain, fed by the melting Alpine snows, are not at all like the Thames. Where I was, there were about nine successive channels, varying in breadth and depth, and in between, stones and sand and rough vegetation on islands varying in size and shape and number with the height of the river. And it was no uncommon thing for the river to rise or fall several feet in a night, for whole islands to be submerged, or for whole channels to run dry. The difficulty here of carrying out military operations according to a time table arranged several days in advance was very great.

Over the main channels pontoons had been thrown, over others light plank bridges, less strongly supported, through others everybody was wading. Large bodies of Engineers, mostly Italian, were ceaselessly working at these river crossings, and working magnificently. For not only was it necessary to be constantly strengthening and multiplying the bridges already made, to take the ever-increasing volume of traffic that would be required to supply the troops across the river, but the enemy's guns were still firing with terrible accuracy at the crossings, and swarms of enemy planes were constantly appearing, bombing the bridges and the islands in a last desperate effort to hold up our advance. Our planes, too, were never far away, and succeeded in driving off or driving down many of these attackers. But others got through and were constantly undoing the work of the Engineers.

When we had got all the information we could, Barini and I went back to the Battery and reported what we had heard and seen. On the way I let myself go and spouted much cheap rhetoric, I am afraid, at the little man. And he laughed rather nervously and thought me, I expect, a queer companion in rather unpleasant surroundings. For several shells kicked up great clouds of earth and stones pretty close to us. But he too, I know, smelt victory in the air that day.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

ACROSS THE RIVER

Next day I went over the river and right on, one of the two F.O.O.'s (forward observation officers) from my Brigade who were to establish and maintain contact with the advancing Infantry. Three signallers and a runner came with me, carrying rifles, bayonets and ammunition, a day's rations and much signalling gear. The other officer had his own party. We soon subdivided our work and separated.

The twenty-four hours of my duty do not lend themselves to a sustained description. I passed and identified from the map one of the targets of my Battery in the preliminary bombardment, an Austrian Battery position, which we had bombarded for many hours with gas and high explosive alternately. Our shooting had been accurate and deadly. The position was a mass of shell holes. One of the guns had been blown up, a second badly damaged. A third had been pulled out of its pit and half way up a bank by a team of horses. The enemy had made a desperate effort to get it away. But horses and men and fragments of men lay dead around it. It was a well prepared position, and well concealed by trees. But Italian airmen had spotted it, and marked it down with precision on the map, marked it down for destruction. The enemy had done much work here. There were fine, deep dug-outs, well timbered and weatherproof, comfortable dwelling places in quiet times and strong enough to resist shell splinters and even direct hits by guns of small calibre. But we had got a direct hit on one dug-out and killed half a dozen occupants. And the others had not been proof against our gas. They were full of corpses, mostly victims of gas. Some were wearing their gas masks, but our gas had gone through them. Some had apparently been gassed outside, some with masks on and some without, and had crawled, dying, into the dug-outs in the vain hope of finding protection there. However hardened one may grow, by usage, to the common facts of war, few can look on such a sight as this, without feeling a queer thrill of very mixed emotion. My men looked with solemn faces at the work they had helped to do. One said, "poor chaps, they were pretty well done in!" And then we turned and went on.

* * * * *

It was a very rapidly moving warfare that day. One Infantry Brigade Headquarters, with whom I kept in intermittent touch, occupied four successive positions, miles apart, in the course of twelve hours. About noon I came to a ruined village, Tezze. I went on to reconnoitre it with one signaller. In a half wrecked house we heard the voices of Italian peasant women and saw through an open door an ugly, little, dirty child, probably about a year old, crawling among rubbish and refuse. The village was only just ours. On the far side of it men of the Manchester Regiment were lining a ditch, under cover of a hedge, waiting the order to charge. They warned me to go no further along the road which, they said, was under enemy machine gun fire. Every few minutes enemy shells whistled over our heads and burst in the fields and houses behind us. A wet wind blew down the road. There was no fixed, clearly marked line. Everything was in movement and rather uncertain....

Enemy guns, captured with their ammunition, swung round and firing at the enemy, big guns and little guns....

On the British left the Como Brigade were advancing rapidly in spite of pretty strong opposition. For a while our left flank had been perilously in the air, but the danger was past now....

All the roads were thick with Austrian equipment thrown away in the confusion of departure, rifles, steel helmets (grotesquely shaped, like high-crowned bowler hats), ammunition, coats, packs (handsomely got up, with furry exteriors), mail bags, maps, office stores, tin despatch boxes, photographs of blonde girls, bayonets, hand bombs, ... everything dead thrust into the ditches, both men and horses, the latter smelling earlier and stronger than the former. (The more I look at dead bodies, the more childish and improbable does the old idea of personal immortality appear to me!) ...

At one cross-roads a huge pool of blood, mingling with and overwhelming the mud. Here a whole transport team of heavy grey horses with wagons had been hit and blown up. Close by, in a ditch, two British wounded lay on stretchers, covered with blankets. One, only lightly wounded, gave us information and directions. The other was very near to death. His face was growing pale already, as only the faces of the dead are pale. He was shifting feebly and ineffectually, with the vain instinct to escape from pain. He was past speech, but he looked at us out of wide open half-frightened eyes that seemed to question the world despairingly, like an animal, broken helplessly in a trap....

There were some civilians wandering on the roads, liberated now but uncertain whither to go or what place was safe, their possessions on carts. But soon the storm of battle will have passed well beyond them and they will be able to return to what is left of their homes. One old woman in black, walking lame, asked me if the Austrians would come back, and began to cry. I heard some of our soldiers saying in wonder to each other, "did you see those civies going along the road just now?" Queer, irrelevant creatures in the battle zone!...

Others, more fixed, liberated in their own villages, were eager to talk and to welcome us, but a little lost with the British and their unfamiliar ways and language, full of tales of the lack of food under the Austrian occupation, and the robbery of all their livestock and metal and many other things. But the retreat hereabouts had been too rapid and involuntary for deliberate burning or destruction or trap-setting on an appreciable scale....

That night I made my headquarters in a wrecked church, from the tower of which I sent back signals in the morse code by means of a lamp. I slept for an hour or two under an Austrian blanket, none too clean as it afterwards appeared, and drank Austrian coffee and ate Austrian biscuits....

All through that day and night and the day following the cannonading continued, but with very variable intensity at different points and times. Sometimes a tremendous affair, heavies, field guns and trench mortars all pounding away together, creeping barrage, smoke screens and the rest of it. Elsewhere and at other times, nothing, Infantry well ahead of the guns, going forward almost into the blue, with nothing heavier than machine guns to support them.

British Cavalry went through in the dawn, spectral, artistically perfect, aiming at ambitious, distant objectives, Northamptonshire Yeomanry who had come from France to Italy a year ago and had been kept behind the lines all through the war and were having their first show at last. The next day they suffered many casualties, but they did fine work. Their reconnaissance officer came into the church soon after midnight and asked me if the Austrians still held any part of the village. I told him no, not since yesterday morning.

Later on in the morning great masses of Infantry moved up through the village; British Infantry with a look of evident satisfaction in their faces, but unemotional; Italian Infantry, looking usually even less expressive, but ready to burst into electrical enthusiasm at a touch, at a word, at a sign.... A British General, all smiles, rode past on his horse and stopped to ask me a question or two. He tapped me playfully on the helmet with his riding crop. "When will you get your guns across the river?" he asked. "As soon, Sir, as the Sappers can build a bridge that will carry them," I replied....

Now and again Italian planes going on, or coming back from, raids and reconnaissances, flying very low over our heads, the pilots waving their hands over the side and cheering, the troops on the roads cheering back and upwards in return....

When I was relieved, I tramped back to the Piave, many miles now, and wading those of the channels that were still unbridged returned, tired and footsore but with a song in my heart, to my Battery.

* * * * *

Not till later did we come to comprehend the vast sweep and the triumphantly executed plan of this Last Great Battle.[1]

[Footnote 1: For a full and lucid account see the official Report by the Comando Supremo on the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, 24th October—2nd November 1918.]

At dawn on the 24th, the same day that the British Divisions had crossed to the Grave di Papadopoli, the Italian Fourth Army had attacked in the Grappa sector, where fighting was desperate and progress slow for several days. On the evening of the 26th the Piave was bridged in three sectors, and on the 27th three bridgeheads were in being; the first on the Upper Piave, in the hands of Alpini and French Infantry of the Italian Twelfth Army; the second on the Middle Piave, in the hands of Arditi and other troops of the Italian Eighth Army; the third further downstream, in the hands of our two British Divisions and the Italian Eleventh Corps. For a while the situation had been critical owing to the gap between the second and third bridgeheads. But by the 28th fresh Divisions had crossed the river at all three bridgeheads, and spread out fanwise, linking up the gaps in the line. The same day on the Asiago Plateau the enemy at last fell hurriedly back to his Winterstellung, and British troops occupied the ruins of Asiago itself. During the next two days the advancing troops on the plain swept steadily eastwards. On the 31st the enemy's line in the Grappa Sector completely collapsed, with great losses of men and guns. On the 1st of November an attack was launched along the whole of the Italian Front, from the sea to the heights of the Stelvio, amid the glaciers and the eternal snows on the Swiss frontier, and on this day Italian, British and French troops carried at last, after strong resistance, the whole northern ridge of the Asiago Plateau, at which we had gazed with eyes of desire for many long months.



CHAPTER XXXIX

LIBERATORI

On November the 1st a reconnaissance by car was ordered, to test the practicability and the need of accelerating the forward movement of our guns. Leary and I and two others started early in a car, adequately armed and carrying a day's rations and a flask in which rum had been mixed accidentally with florio (marsala). This most original mixture, which we christened "florium," was excellent, more thirst-quenching than rum, more sustaining to the spirit than florio.

That day we travelled 76 miles at the least, in a great curve, through liberated country. We had everywhere an astounding reception, never to be forgotten. Everywhere we passed, we were wildly, deliriously, cheered by the civilian population. Old men ran up to us waving their hats, old women clapped their hands, young girls waved and threw flowers at us, little boys ran shouting after us, all crying "Evviva! Evviva! Liberatori! Viva gl' Inglesi!" The radiant joy of them, and their smiles, never far from tears, were the manifestation of a form of human emotion, singularly pure and indescribably moving. Every town and village was hung with the Italian flag, and at one place an arch of flowers ran from tree to tree above the road. Everywhere crowds with smiling, wondering faces, stood watching the Allied troops moving up along the roads, wave upon wave upon wave, triumphant, unendingly. Here a few days ago the foreign invader had ruled, perhaps only yesterday, perhaps only a few hours ago: Now he had vanished, like a bad dream from which one suddenly awakes, leaving behind him only his dead, and certain grim marks of his occupation, and vivid memories of many brutal and cruel and thoughtless acts, to prove that he was worse and more real than a dream.

* * * * *

We crossed the Piave at Spresiano, on a series of wooden bridges and pontoons, similar to those further down the stream at Palazzon and Lido Island. On the further bank we came first to Conegliano. Here just a year ago some of von Below's German troops, who broke the line at Caporetto, had been billeted, and later a Bulgarian Governor and staff had been installed, for the encouragement and flattery of the wavering minor allies of the enemy powers. On the same principle a Turkish Governor had been appointed at Feltre. The troops of occupation had been guilty of wicked excesses at Conegliano. The little town had been ruthlessly ravaged and set on fire and the majority of the houses had been completely burnt out, only the charred shells of them remaining.

Hence we turned northwards up into the Alpine foothills, through country of exceptional beauty, and along the shores of a piece of long blue water, to the village of Revine Lago. Here were many captured and abandoned Austrian guns. Some, in the last desperate moments of departure, had been thrown down a steep cliff which overhangs the lake, and lay below us, for the time being out of reach. Here I met again several officers of the Italian Field Artillery, whom I met above Val Brenta in January, including the Neapolitan Adjutant of Colonel Bucci. Also General Clerici of the Bersaglieri, who for the moment had his Headquarters here, a friend of one of my companions. They all substantiated the rumour that last night, or the night before, Austrian envoys had appeared with a white flag in the Val Lagarina and had been taken to Diaz's Headquarters.

We parted from our friends and sped on to Vittorio Veneto, which gives its name to this last great battle, being the point on which those Italian forces moved, whose purpose and whose successful achievement it was to cut the Austrian Armies in two, separating the Armies in the mountains from the Armies in the plain. Vittorio stands on and around the summit of a little hill, itself one of the foothills, the older part of the town picturesque with little winding streets, the newer part well laid out with broad roads, shaded with avenues of trees. Here the Austrian flight had been more rapid and the damage smaller. But we were still many miles behind the ever advancing battle line. We determined, therefore, to turn sharply eastward and make for Pordenone, in the hope of coming up with the fighting thereabouts. For last night, we heard, the Austrians were still defending themselves on the near side of that town.

The road from Vittorio to Sacile grew thicker with advancing troops, at first all Italian, then, as we approached Sacile, mixed Italian and British, much Italian Cavalry and Artillery, then British Infantry and some Batteries of Field Guns. In Sacile itself, which British troops had liberated, the crush of troops was dense, and held us up for more than half an hour. Union Jacks hung out from many houses, side by side with the Italian tricolour. As we waited for a chance to go forward, a Battalion of the Bisagno Brigade went past along the side of the road, two deep, at a steady double. Several officers I recognised, whom I had met at dinner at a little restaurant at Marostica many months before, and again near Casa Girardi on the Plateau. We waved to one another and cheered as they passed. When at last we moved on again, we found the road from Sacile to Pordenone pretty clear for several miles and were able to get up speed. But what a sight this road presented! Along it a confused mass of Austrian transport was moving yesterday in headlong retreat. They were bombarded by Artillery, ceaselessly bombed and machine-gunned from the air. The slaughter here had been great, the ditches were full of dead men and horses, and the loss in wrecked and abandoned material of every kind had been immense. And the civilians, who had been practically without food for many days, had been cutting up and eating the dead horses. "Poverini!" said an Italian officer to whom we gave a lift into Pordenone, "they are all starving and we have little chance yet to bring them food."

Pordenone was ours. It had fallen in the early hours of this morning, but the departing Austrians had burnt and wrecked it. The streets were full of the debris and furniture which they had thrown out of the houses and shops in the last mad search for loot. We pushed on, and came up with British Infantry advancing, and the transport wagons and the steaming field cookers of two Battalions, and some cyclist companies of Bersaglieri. But the transport was at a standstill and the dismounted men only going forward slowly. We soon discovered the cause. The wooden bridge over the Meduna river was on fire, pouring forth clouds of smoke. The Austrians had been here only four hours before and had blown up two spans as they retreated and soaked the rest with paraffin and set it alight. The bridge was effectually destroyed. Italian Cavalry, we heard, had gone through the water in pursuit, and likewise some British Infantry patrols, swimming and wading and making use of various ingenious, improvised devices. But the Austrian had a good three hours start, and was running fast and travelling light, it was thought.

But we, being unable to get our car across, turned northward along the river bank and drove furiously and, after a mile or two, outran the foremost Infantry patrols (I think, of the Royal Warwicks), who were pushing cautiously forward, searching the woods and farmhouses for lurking rearguards. And so it was that, first of all the Allied troops, we four entered the little village of Nogaredo. And, as we came in, we sang, very loudly and perhaps somewhat out of tune, the chorus of La Campana di San Giusto, the forbidden song which to the Italian Irredentists stands for somewhat the same officially repressed but inextinguishable emotions, as that once forbidden song The Wearing of the Green stood for to the Nationalist Irishmen of a now vanished generation.

"Le ragazze di Trieste Cantan tutte con ardore, 'O Italia, O Italia del mio core, Tu ci vieni a liberar!'"[1]

[Footnote 1: All the maidens of Trieste sing with passion, "O Italy, O Italy of my heart, thou comest to set us free!"]

So to that village we were the visible liberators. All the villagers came running towards us, crowding around our car, weeping and cheering, pouring out their stories, touching and holding and kissing us. It is seldom that things happen with such dramatic perfection.

The last Austrians, they said, had been gone only half an hour. We pressed on along a narrow road, but it was late afternoon, and the light was failing. The road grew worse, and the mud thicker. Much retreating traffic had only lately traversed it. At last we stuck deep in two muddy ruts. The wheels skidded round helplessly. We could go neither forward nor backward. Three of us got out and shoved with all our strength. There was a crackle of rifle shots not far away. We were prepared for an encounter. But nothing came of it. We got the car out at last, but the road was too bad for further progress and it was almost dark. We turned and drank up the remains of our "florium" and came back. But that day had been unforgettable.



CHAPTER XL

THE COMPLETENESS OF VICTORY

The end was almost come. On November 3rd we received the official announcement that an armistice had been signed, and that at 3 p.m. on November 4th hostilities on the Italian-Austrian Front would cease. That same day Trento, Trieste and Udine fell. One began to be aware of the completeness of victory. On this day and the days that followed the communiques of Diaz were decisive and historical.

"November 4th. Noon. The war against Austria-Hungary which ... the Italian Army, inferior in numbers and resources, undertook on the 24th of May, 1915, and with unconquerable faith and stubborn valour conducted uninterruptedly and bitterly for 41 months, has been won. The great battle begun on the 24th October, in which there took part 51 Italian Divisions, 3 British, 1 French, 1 Czecho-Slovak and 1 American Regiment against 73 Austrian Divisions, is finished.... The Austrian Army is annihilated. It has suffered very heavy losses in the fierce resistance of the first days of the struggle and in the pursuit; it has lost immense quantities of material of every kind and almost all its magazines and depots; it has left in our hands, up to the present, about 300,000 prisoners with complete staffs and not less than 5000 guns.[1] The remnants of what was once one of the most powerful Armies in the world are now flowing back in disorder and without hope up the mountain valleys down which they came with proud self-assurance."

[Footnote 1: These figures increased later to more than 430,000 prisoners and 6800 guns.]

"November 4th, 4 p.m. According to the conditions of the armistice ... hostilities by land, sea and air on all the fronts of Austria-Hungary have been suspended at 3 p.m. to-day."

"November 6th. At 3 p.m. on the 4th of November our troops had reached Sluderno in the Val Venosta, the Pass of Mendola and the Defile of Salomo in the Val d'Adige, Cembra in the Val d'Avisio, Levico in the Val Sugana, Fiera di Primiero, Pontebba, Plezzo, Tolmino, Gorizia, Cervignano, Aquileia and Grado."

Some of these names filled me with memories of a year, and more than a year, ago. Old Natale's message to the enemy chalked on our hut at Pec had come true. We had soon come back.

* * * * *

The fighting was over! That night of the 4th of November all the sky was lit up with bonfires and the firing of coloured rockets and white Very lights. One could hear bells ringing in the distance, back toward Treviso, and singing and cheering everywhere. It was an hour of perfection, and of accomplishment; it was the ending of a story. An epic cycle of history was finished, the cycle of the wars of Italy against Austria. The task of completing Italian unity was finished, so far as a series of wars could finish it.

"The fight is done, but the banner won; Thy comrades of old have borne it hence, Have borne it in triumph hence. Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave: 'I am content.'"

The soldier had done his duty, now let the statesman do no less. Let wisdom and imagination make sure the fruits of valour.

* * * * *

The old Austria is dead, and from her grave, which Italian hands have dug, are rising up new nations, the future comrades of the old nations and of Italy, who in these bloody years has grown from youth to full manhood. It has been said that a nation is a friendship, and the common life of nations in the future must also be a friendship, necessarily less intimate but in no way less real. The youth of the world must never be called to swim again, with old age on its back, through seas of needless death to the steep and distant cliffs of military victory. There must be no more secret plots, nor seeming justification of plots, by little groups of elderly men against the lives and happiness of young men everywhere. The world must be made safe for justice and for youth.

* * * * *

Youth was rejoicing that night in Italy, when the war against Austria ended. And not youth only, nor Italians only. The British troops loudly and healthily and almost riotously sang also, all the temporary soldiers and nearly all the regulars. Yet here and there were gloom, and drab, wet blankets, trying to make smoulder those raging fires of joy. In a few officers' Messes, especially among the more exalted units, men of forty years and more croaked like ravens over their impending loss of pay and rank, Brigadier Generals who would soon be Colonels again, and Colonels who would soon be Majors. To have been, through long uneventful unmental years, a peace-time soldier puts the imagination in jeopardy and is apt to breed a self-centred fatuity, which the inexperienced may easily mistake for deliberate naughtiness. Yet these brave men, who hate peace and despise civilians, have many human qualities. They are generally polite to women, and they are kind to animals and to those of their inferiors who show them proper deference and salute them briskly. It is not always easy to judge them fairly. And that night one did not try. They jarred intolerably. They seemed a portent, though in truth they were something less. They found themselves left alone to their private griefs, ruminating regretfully over the golden age that had suddenly ended, gazing into the blackness of a future without hope.



CHAPTER XLI

IN THE EUGANEAN HILLS

November 12th, 1918

It is all over. For a few days it seemed possible that we might be sent northward, through redeemed Trento and over the Brenner and the crest of the Alps and down through Innsbruck, to open a new front against Germany along the frontier of Bavaria. But that will not be necessary now. It is all over.

Our Battery is living partly in a little terra-cotta Villa and partly in a barn close by. We are among the Euganean Hills, a group of little humps, shaped like sugar loaves, which rise out of the dead level of the Venetian Plain, south-west of Padua. Here Shelley wrote a famous and beautiful poem, and Venice, on a clear day, is visible in the distance from a monastery perched among trees upon one of the loftiest humps. Our guns, which will never fire any more, sit in a neat row, "dressed by the right," along the garden path outside the Villa, their noses pointing across a grass lawn. Their names, which are the Battery's Italian history, are painted on their muzzles and their trails in large white letters, picked out with red upon a dark green ground: Carso, Piave, Altipiano and Trentino. Trentino is my gun. They look very ornamental in their new coats of paint, and with a high polish on their unpainted metal parts.

It is an hour of anticlimax. There is nothing to do, and one has to "make work" in a hundred silly, ingenious ways. Next week some of the men who have been out of England for 19 months will go on leave. Then, after a fortnight in England, unless something tremendous and unexpected happens, they will all come back again. And there will still be nothing to do. Was it Wordsworth who said that poetry is "emotion remembered in tranquillity"? Wordsworth would undoubtedly have written much poetry here. Our chief delight is Leary's musical voice. He sings to us in the evenings after dinner, "La Campana di San Ginsto" and "Addio, mia bell', addio" and choice stornetti, and "Come to Ferrara with me," a cheerful song of his own composing, set to a music-hall tune which was famous three years ago, and "We'll all go a-hunting to-day," an old song with a superb chorus. And so the days pass, one very like another.

I dreamed last night that a regular soldier of high degree and uncertain nationality appeared to me and said, "Do you not see now, young man, that peace is degeneracy, and that war is an ennobling discipline?" And I, chancing my luck, replied, "Yes, the great von Moltke himself said that peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream." Whereupon my visitor changed into a white owl and vanished with a hoot. And I awoke, and found that I had overslept myself and that the nine o'clock parade, which I was due to attend, was already falling in outside.

Then said I to myself bitterly, "At any rate we here have all survived, and, therefore, since war is the greatest of all biological tests, we must all be very fit to have survived, especially that most fit young man, who came out to the Battery from England a day or two before the armistice was signed, after three years at Shoeburyness, and the fittest of all must be those whose survival, apart from such dangers as influenza and air raids, has never been in doubt, the valuable people who have been kept in England, because they were members of concert parties or football teams at the depots, or officers' servants to influential imboscati, or influential imboscati themselves."

And then, with a great and well-disciplined effort, I pulled my thoughts together, and said to myself, "Enough of these musings of the peace-time soldier!"



CHAPTER XLII

LAST THOUGHTS ON LEAVING ITALY

On the 3rd of December I passed out of Italy, after eighteen months spent as a soldier within her borders. These eighteen months will always be lit up for me by the memory of a great comradeship between men of Allied nations. We have lived together through the dark days and the sunshine, through sorrow and joy, through uncertainty and defeat to final victory.

I have been very fortunate in my personal relations in Italy. I have found always among Italians, both civilian and military, and from simple soldier to General, the most open friendliness, the most unsparing kindliness, the most happy spirit of good fellowship. And on my journey home I closed my eyes and imagined myself back once more at Venice in full Summer, and at Milan, and at hospitable Ferrara, and at Rome in the Spring, and on the shores of the Bay of Naples, and out on Capri, and in the wonder world of Sicily,—and always among friends. And then my steps went back in fancy to the battlefields, where our guns had been in action. I saw again the great peaks and the precipitous valleys of the Trentino. I saw the wreck of liberated Asiago, ringed round with mountains whose sides were clothed with shattered pine trees, heavy with snow, and I went down once more by that astounding mountain road from Granezza to Marostica, with the Venetian Plain and all its cities spread out beneath my feet, and Venice herself on the far horizon, amid the shimmer of sunshine on the distant sea. I stood again on the bridge at Bassano, looking up the Val Brenta, with Monte Grappa towering above me on my right hand, and then turning south-eastward across the level plain I heard again the rushing waters of the Piave and, crossing to the farther side, passed through Conegliano, burnt out and ravaged, and Vittorio Veneto, a name that will resound for ever, to the broken bridge over the Meduna, east of Pordenone, and the village of Nogaredo, whither I came as one of its first liberators. And, as in a dream, I saw Udine, unspoilt and radiant as she was fifteen months ago, before Caporetto, and poor little Palmanova, as I last saw her, wreathed in the black smoke of her own burning, and the cypresses and the great church of Aquileia and the lagoons of Grado.

Then the flying feet of memory carried me beyond the Isonzo, up the wooded slopes of San Michele, where the dead lie thicker, and along the Vippacco, running swiftly between banks thick with acacias, and among the ruined suburbs of Gorizia, up towards those desolate lands, which for future generations of Italians will be, I think, the holiest ground of all,—the bare summit of Monte Santo, and the mountain-locked tableland of Bainsizza, and the rocky, inexorable Carso. These rocks have, perhaps, been more deeply soaked with blood than any other part of the entire Allied line on any continent. Here died many thousands of the bravest and the best of the youth of Italy. "Nella primavera si combatte e si muore, o soldato." How many great lovers, fathers, thinkers, poets, statesmen, that might have been, but never were, lie here! These lands will ever be more thickly peopled with the cemeteries of the dead than with the villages of the living, lands desolate and barren, yet strange and beautiful. Clear and clean is the beauty of those graves in the noonday brightness, delicate and tremulous in the early dawn and in the soft light of a fading day, and for us, who think of those dead with a proud and tender emotion, that beauty is, in some sort, a frail consolation. The dust of strong men from the great mountains is buried here, and of men from the historic cities and the small unknown towns and the little white villages of Italy, and of peasants from the wide plains, and of brave men from the islands, and a handful of Frenchmen and Englishmen along with them, and very many of those tragic soldiers, drawn from many races, who died in the service of the Austro-Hungarian State, fighting against their own freedom. I see again, as vividly as though it were yesterday, those high-hearted legions of Italy, sturdy men and fresh-faced boys, going forward with a frenzied courage, supported by an Artillery preparation which elsewhere would have been thought utterly insignificant, to assault positions which elsewhere would have been declared impregnable.

"The world," said Lincoln at Gettysburg, "will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." So may it be! They died for the dream of a greater, a free and a secure Italy, and, the more reflective of them, for a better, more coherent world and no more war. A part of their dream is already come true, but part is a dream still, a debt to them that only we can pay. It will need to be a far better world, with a progress sustained and ever growing through centuries to come, if this tremendous sum of wasted youth, of broken hearts, of embittered souls, of moral degradation, of wounds that cannot be healed until all this ill-fated generation has passed away, if this great sum of past and present evil is to be cancelled by future good in the cold balance of historic reality. Of the dead we may say, their task is over, their warfare is accomplished. But not of the living. The future is theirs, to make or mar.

THE END