THE COMPLETE MILITARY WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING. Rudyard 1865-1936 Kipling

invisible mouths.

      A little later I was being told confidentially by some English woman among a garden of irises, who owned a radiographic installation and a couple of shrapnel-dusted cars, that they had been promised, when the push came, that they and their apparatus might go into Gorizia itself, to a nice underground room, reasonably free from shells which disconcert the wounded and jar the radiograph, and ‘wasn’t it kind of the authorities?’

       The Ridge of the Waiting Guns

      The amazing motor-lorries were thicker on the more amazing road than they had been. Our companion apologised for them. ‘You see, we have been taking a few things up to the Front in this way in the last few days,’ he said.

      ‘Are all Italians born driving motors?’ I demanded, as a procession of high-hooded cars flopped down the curve we were breasting, pivoted on its outside edge, their bonnets pointing over a four-hundred-foot drop, and slid past us with a three-inch clearance between hub and hub.

      ‘No,’ he replied. ‘But we, too, have been at the game a long time. I expect all the bad chauffeurs have been killed.’

      ‘And bad mules?’ One of them was having hysterics on what I thought - till I had climbed a few thousand higher - was the edge of a precipice. ‘Oh, you can’t kill a mule,’ and sure enough, when the beast had registered its protest, it returned to the dignity of its sires. The muleteer said not a word.

      We bored up and into the hills by roads not yet mapped, but solid as lavish labour can make them against the rolling load of the lorries, and the sharp hoofs of the mule, as well as the wear and tear of winter, who is the real enemy. Our route ran along the folded skirts of a range not more than three or four thousand feet high, more or less parallel with the Isonzo in its way from the north . Rivers that had roared level beside us dropped and shrunk to blue threads half visible through the forest. Mountains put forward hard shaly knees round which we climbed in a thousand loops that confused every sense of direction. Then, because the enemy seven miles off , could see, stretches of the crowded road were blinded with reed mats while torn holes above or below us proved that he had searched closely.

      After that, the colossal lap of a mountain alive with dripping waters would hide us in greenery and moisture, till the sight of a cautious ash-tree still in bud - her sister ten minutes ago had been clothed from head to foot - told us we had risen again to the heights of the naked ridge. And here were batteries upon batteries of the heaviest pieces, so variously disposed and hidden that finding one gave you no clue to the next. Elevens, eights, fours - sixes, and elevens again, on caterpillar wheels, on navy mountings adapted for land work, disconnected from their separate tractors, or balanced and buttressed on their own high speed motors, were repeated for mile after mile, with their ammunition caves, their shops, and the necessary barracks for their thousand servants studded or strung out on the steep drop behind them. Obscure pits and hollows hid them pointing to heaven, and how they had been brought up to be lowered there passed imagination as they peeped out of the merest slits in green sod. They stood back under ledges and eaves of the ground where no light could outline them, or became one with a dung-heap behind a stable. They stalled themselves in thick forest growth, like elephants at noon, or, as it were, crawled squat on their bellies to the very bows of crests overlooking seas of mountains, They, like the others down the line, were waiting for the hour and the order . Not half-a-dozen out of a multitude opened their lips.

      When we had climbed to a place appointed, the shutter of an observation-post opened upon the world below. We saw the Isonzo almost vertically beneath us, and on the far side were the Italian trenches that painfully climbed to the crest of the bare ridges where the infantry live, who must be fed under cover of night until the Austrians are driven out of their heights above.

      ‘It is just like fighting a burglar across housetops,’ said the officer. You can spot him from a factory chimney, but he can spot you from the spire of the cathedral - and so on.’

      ‘Who sees those men down yonder in the trenches?’ I asked.

       ,br> ‘Everybody on both sides, but our guns cover them . That is the way in our war. Height is everything.’

      He said nothing of the terrific labour of it all, before a man or a gun can come into position - nothing of the battle that was fought in the gorge below when the Isonzo was crossed and the Italian trenches clawed and sawed their red way up the hillside, and very little of the blood-drenched snout of the height called the Sabotino that was carried, lost and recarried most gloriously in the old days of the War, and now lay out below as innocent-seeming as a mountain pasture.

      They are a hard people, these Latins, who have had to fight the mountains and all that is in them, metre by metre, and are thankful when their battlefields do not slope at more than forty-five degrees.