Italy at War and the Allies in the West | Page 9

unnecessary risks himself, neither will he permit others. When the
Prince of Wales visited the Italian front last summer, he asked
permission to enter a certain first-line trench, which was being heavily
shelled. The King bluntly refused. "I want no historic incidents here,"
he remarked dryly.
[Illustration: The King of Italy and General Cadorna at Castelnuovo.
Scarcely a day passes that the King does not visit some sector of the
battle-line, but he rarely gives advice unless it is asked for, and never
interferes with the decisions of the Comando Supremo.]
[Illustration: The Peril in the Clouds. The gunners of an Italian
anti-aircraft battery sight an Austrian airplane.]
To obtain a room in Udine is as difficult as it is to obtain hotel
accommodation in New York during the Automobile Show. But,
because I was a guest of the Government, I found that a room had been
reserved for me by the Comando Supremo at the Hotel Croce di Malta.
I was told that since the war three proprietors of this hotel had made
their fortunes and retired, and after I received my bill I believed it.

There was in my room one of those inhospitable, box-shaped porcelain
stoves so common in North Italy and the Tyrol. To keep a modest
wood-fire going in that stove cost me exactly thirty lire (about six
dollars) a day. But a fire was a necessity. Luxuries came higher. Yet the
scene in the hotel's shabby restaurant at the dinner-hour was well worth
the fantastic charges, for there gathered there nightly as interesting a
company as I have not often seen under one roof: a poet and novelist
who has given to Italy the most important literary work since the days
of the great classics, and who, by his fiery and impassioned speeches,
did more than any single person to force the nation's entrance into the
war; an American dental surgeon who abandoned an enormously
lucrative practice in Rome to establish at the front a hospital where he
has performed feats approaching the magical in rebuilding
shrapnel-shattered faces; a Florentine connoisseur, probably the
greatest living authority on Italian art, who has been commissioned
with the preservation of all the works of art in the war zone; an English
countess who is in charge of an X-ray car which operates within range
of the Austrian guns; a young Roman noble whom I had last seen, in
pink, in the hunting-field; a group of khaki-clad officers from the
British mission, cold and aloof of manner despite their being among
allies; a party of Russians, their hair clipped to the skull, their green
tunics sprinkled with stars and crosses; half a dozen French military
attachés in beautifully cut uniforms of horizon-blue; and Italian officers,
animated and gesticulative, on whose breasts were medal ribbons
showing that they had fought in forgotten wars in forgotten corners of
Africa. At one table they were discussing the probable date of some
Roman remains which had just been unearthed at Aquileia; at another
an argument was in progress over the merits of vers libre; one of the
Russians was explaining a new system he had evolved for breaking the
bank at Monte Carlo; the young English countess was retailing the
latest jokes from the London music-halls, but nowhere did I hear
mentioned the grim and bloody business which had brought us, of so
many minds and from so many lands, to this shabby, smoke-filled,
garlic-scented room in this little frontier town. Yet, had the door been
opened, and had we stilled our voices, we could have heard, quite
plainly, the sullen grumble of the cannon.

II
WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR
To understand why Italy is at war you have only to look at the map of
Central Europe. You can hardly fail to be struck by the curious
resemblance which the outline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire bears
to a monstrous bird of prey hovering threateningly over Italy. The body
of the bird is formed by Hungary; Bohemia is the right wing, Bosnia
and Dalmatia constitute the left; the Tyrol represents the head, while
the savage beak, with its open jaws, is formed by that portion of the
Tyrol commonly known as the Trentino. And that savage beak, you
will note, is buried deep in the shoulder of Italy, holding between its
jaws, as it were, the Lake of Garda. To continue the simile, it will be
seen that the talons of the bird, formed by the Istrian Peninsula, reach
out over the Adriatic in threatening proximity to Venice and the other
Italian coast towns. It is to end the intolerable menace of that beak and
those claws that Italy is fighting. There you have it in a nutshell.
[Illustration: (Austria-Hungary map)]
Just as in France, since 1870, the national watchword has been
"Alsace-Lorraine,"