He told us tales of regiments wiped out, reconstituted and wiped out anew, who achieved, at their third or fourth resurrection, what their ancestors had set out to win. He told us of enemy dead in multitudes put away somewhere beneath the ringing stones, and of a certain Austrian Honved division which by right of blood claim that this section of the Carso is specially theirs to defend. They, too, appear out of the rocks, perish, and are born again to be slain.
‘If you come into this shell-hole - I don’t think I should stand up too much - I’ll try to show you what we want to do at our next push,’ the officer said. ‘We’re just getting ready for it’ - and he explained with a keen forefinger how it was intended to work along certain hills that dominate certain roads which lead, at last, towards the head of the Adriatic - one could see it, a patch of dull silver to the southward - under some dark, shadowy hills that covered Trieste itself.
A sun-warmed water-pipe crossed our shell-hole at about the height of one’s chin, and the whirr of a distant shell. The officer’s explanation was punctuated by the grumble of single big guns on the Italian side, ranging in anticipation of the serious work to come. Then the ground hiccupped a few yards in front of us, and stones - the poisonous edged stones of the Carso - whirred like partridges. ‘Mines,’ said the officer serenely, while the civils automatically turned up their collars. ‘They are working up the steep side of the ridge, but they might have warned us!’
The mines exploded in orderly line, and it being impossible to run away over the stones, one had to watch them with the lively consciousness that those scores of thousands of dead beneath and around and behind were watching too. A pneumatic drill chattered underground, as teeth chatter.
‘I didn’t know there were so many loose stones in the world,’ I said.
‘They are not all loose. We wish they were. They’re very solid. Come and see!’
Out of the ginning sunshine we walked into a great rock-cut gallery with rails running underfoot and men shovelling rubbish into trucks. Half-a-dozen embrasures gave light through thirty feet of rock. ‘These are some of the new gun-positions,’ said the officer. ‘For six-inch guns perhaps! Perhaps for eleven.’
‘And how’d you get eleven-inch guns up here?’ I asked.
He smiled a little - I learned the meaning of that smile up in the mountains later.
‘By hand,’ said he, and turned to the engineer in charge to reprove him for exploding the mines without warning.
We came off the belly of stones, and when we were on the flat lands beyond the Isonzo again, looked back at it across its girdling line of cemeteries. It was the first obstacle Italy found at her own threshold, after she had forced the broad uneasy Isonzo, ‘where troops can walk, though the walking is not good.’ It seemed enough.
Podgora
(June 9, 1917)
‘We have finished with stones for a little,’ said the officer. ‘We are going to a mountain of mud. It is dry now, but this winter it never stayed quiet.’
An acre or so of the the climbing roadside was still uneasy, and had slid face-down in a splatter of earth and tree-roots which men were shovelling off.
‘It’s rather a fresh road. Altogether we have about four thousand miles of new roads - and old roads improved - on a front of about six hundred kilometres. But you see, our kilometres are not flat.’
The landscape, picked out in all the greens of spring, was that of early Italian holy pictures - the same isolated, scarred hummocks rising from enamelled meadows or drifts of bloom into the same elaborate entablatures of rock, crowned by a campanile or tufted with dark trees. On the white roads beneath us the lines of motors and mule transport strung out evenly to their various dumps. At one time we must have commanded twenty full miles, all working at once, but never could we spy a breakdown. The Italian transport system has been tried out by war long ago.
The more the road sunk to the plains, the more one realised the height of the mountains dominating us all round. Podgora , the mountain of mud, is a little Gibraltar about eight hundred feet high, almost sheer on one side, overlooking the town of Gorizia, which, in civil life, used to be a sort of stuffy Cheltenham for retired Austrian officers. Anywhere else, Podgora hill might be noticeable, but you could set down half-a-dozen Gibraltars among this upheaval of hills, and in a month the smooth Italian roads would overrun them as vine tendrils overrun rubbish-heaps. The lords of the military situation round Gorizia are the four- and five- thousand-foot mountains, crowded one behind the other, every angle, upland and valley of each offering or masking death.
The mountains are vile ground for aeroplane work, because there is nowhere to alight in comfort, but none the less the machines beat over them from both sides, and the anti-aircraft guns which are not impressive in the open plains fill the gorges with multiplied coughings more resembling a lion’s roar than thunder. The enemy fly high, over the mountains, and show against the blue like bits of whirling ash off a bonfire. They drop their bombs generously, and the rest is with fate - either the blind crack on blank rock and the long harmless whirr of slivered stone, or that ripe crash which tells that timber, men and mules have caught it full this time. If all the setting were not so lovely, if the lights, the leafage, the blossom, and the butterflies mating on the grassy lips of old trenches were not allowed to insult the living workmen of death, their work would be easier to describe without digressions.
When we had climbed on foot up and up and into the bowels of the mountain of mud, through galleries and cross-galleries, to a discreetly veiled observation-point, Gorizia, pink, white, and bluish, lay, to all appearance, asleep beneath us amid her full flowering chestnut-trees by the talking Isonzo. She was in Italian hands - won after furious fights - but the enemy guns from the mountains could still shell her at pleasure, and the next move, said our officer, would be to clear certain heights -‘Can you see our trenches creeping up to them?’ - from their menace. There and there, he pointed , the Italian troops would climb and crawl, while thus and thus would the fire of our guns cover them, till they came to that bare down and must make their rush - which is really a climb - alone. If that rush failed, then they must dig in among the rocks. And lie out under the bitter skyline, for this was war among the mountains where the valleys were death-traps and only heights counted.
Then we turned to the captured hills behind us that had lived so unconsidered since they were made , but now, because of the price paid for them, would stand forth memorable as long as Italy was remembered. The heathen mountains in front had yet to be baptized and entered on the roll of honour, and one could not say at that moment which one of them would be most honourable, or what cluster of herdsmen’s huts would carry the name of a month’s battle through the ages.
The studied repose that heralds a big push cloaked both lines. No one, except a few pieces who were finishing some private work, was saying anything. The Austrians had their own last touches to put in too. They were ranging on a convent up a hillside - one deliberate shell at a time. A big gun beneath us came lazily into the game on our side, shaking the whole mountain of mud, and then asking questions of its observing officer across the valley.
Suddenly a boy’s voice, that had been taking corrections, spoke quite unofficially at the receiver in the gloom under our feet. ‘Oh! Congratulations!’ it cried. ‘Then you dine with us to-night,