With British Guns in Italy | Page 9

as "fiamme nere,"
or black flames.
A large proportion of Arditi are Sicilians, and their fighting quality is
very high. Certain detachments of Bersaglieri are also classified as
Assault Detachments and wear low-cut tunics like the Arditi.
The Italian Mountain and Field Artillery are excellent; their Heavy
Artillery is handicapped, in comparison with ours, by its smaller
ammunition supply and fewer opportunities for prolonged practice, but
its methods are scientific and its personnel very keen and capable. The
Italian Engineers have done much wonderful work, to which I shall
refer later.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAR ON THE ISONZO FRONT
From Monte Nero to the Adriatic the distance is, in a straight line,
some 35 miles. Allowing for the curves of the actual line, the length of
Front is between 40 and 50 miles. This portion of the Italian and
Austrian lines is commonly spoken of as the Isonzo Front. It is not like
the Front in the higher Alps, where, as on the Adamello, trenches are
cut in the solid ice, where the firing of a single gun may precipitate an
avalanche, where more Italians are killed by avalanches than by
Austrians, where guns have to be dragged up precipices and perched on
ledges fit only, one might think, for an eagle's nest, where food,
ammunition, reinforcements, wounded and sick have all to travel in
small cages attached to wire ropes, slung from peak to peak above
sheer drops of many thousand feet, where sentries have to stand rigidly
stationary, so as to remain invisible, and have to be changed every ten
minutes owing to the intense cold, where Battalions of Alpini charge
down snow slopes on skis at the rate of thirty miles an hour, where

refraction and the deceiving glare of the snow make accurate rifle fire
impossible even for crack shots,--the Isonzo Front is not so astounding
and impossible a Front as this, but it is yet a very different Front from
any on which British troops are elsewhere fighting in this war.
It is a country with a strange beauty of its own; it is, in its own measure,
rough and mountainous, and it is within sight of other and loftier
mountains to the north-west. At my first view of it I remembered a
speech of Carlo, the hero of Meredith's Vittoria, concerning Lombard
cities away on the other side of the Trentino, "Brescia under the big
Eastern hill which throws a cloak on it at sunrise! Brescia is always the
eagle's nest that looks over Lombardy! And Bergamo! You know the
terraces of Bergamo. Aren't they like a morning sky? Dying there is not
death; it's flying into the dawn. You Romans envy us. You have no
Alps, no crimson hills, nothing but old walls to look on while you fight.
Farewell, Merthyr Powys...." To me those words were always recurring
on the Italian Front. "Dying here is not death; it's flying into the dawn."
I would have liked to have them engraved on my tombstone, if Fate had
set one up for me in this land, whose beauty casts a spell on all one's
senses.
* * * * *
The Isonzo Front is divided into two parts by the Vippacco river, which
flows roughly from east to west and joins the Isonzo at Peteano. Of
these two parts the northern is three times as long as the southern. The
northern part was held by the Italian Second Army, under General
Capello, the southern by the Italian Third Army, under the Duke of
Aosta. In the north the Isonzo runs through a deep ravine, with Monte
Nero rising on its eastern side. Monte Nero is some 6800 feet high. The
Alpini took it by a marvellous feat of mountain warfare in the first year
of the war. South of Monte Nero, also on the east bank of the river, lies
the town of Tolmino, the object of many fierce Italian assaults, but not
yet taken. Here the Isonzo bends south-westward and continues to flow
through a deep ravine past Canale and Plava, with the Bainsizza
Plateau rising on its eastern bank. This Plateau is of a general height of
about 2400 feet, and is continued south-eastward by the Ternova

Plateau, rising to a general height of about 2200 feet. Bending again
towards the south-east, the Isonzo flows out into the Plain of Gorizia.
Here stand Monte Sabotino and Monte Santo, the western and eastern
pillars of this gateway leading into the lower lands. East of Monte
Santo, along the southern edge of the Plateau, stand Monte San
Gabriele and Monte San Daniele. Here the Plateau falls precipitously
down to the Vippacco valley, only the long brown foothill of San
Marco breaking the drop.
Gorizia has scattered suburbs: Salcano to the north, in the very mouth
of