THE ISONZO FRONT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1745, 27 October 1917, Page 1

THE ISONZO FRONT.

CARSO’S CRUEL ROCKS

HOW THE ITALIANS DIED,

(By Ruclyard Kipling, in the Daily

Telegraph)

“And' that is the Isonzo River,” said the officer, when he had reached the edge of the Udine Plain,

It might have come out of Kashmir, with its broad sweeps of pale shoals that tailed off down stream into dancing haze. The milky-jade waters smelt of snof from the hills as they plucked at the pontoonbridge’s moorings, which were remade to allow for many foot of rise and fall. A snow-fed river is as untrustworthy as a drunkard. The flavour of mules, burning fuels, and a procession of high-wheeled Sicilian carts, their panels painted with Biblical stories, added to the Eastern illusion. But the ridge on the far side of iho river that looked so steep, and was in reality only a small flattish mound among mountains, resembled no land on earth. If the Maloppos had married the Karroo they might have begotten some such abortion of stone-speck-led weather-hacked dirt. All along the base of it, indifferent to. the thousands of troops around, to the scream of mules, the cough of motors, the whirr of machinery, and the jarring carts, lay, in endless belts of cemeteries, those Italian dead who had first made possible the way to the heights above. .

“We brought them down and buried them after each fight,” said the officer, “There were many fights. Whole regiments lie there —and there! Some of them died in the early days, when we made Avar without roadV; some of them died afterwards, when we had the roads but the Austrians had the guns. Some of them died at the last, when we beat the Austrians. Look!”

Truly, as the poet says, the battle is won by the men who tall. God knows how many mothers’ sons sleep along the river before Gradisea, in the shadow of the first ridge of the wicked Carso. They can hear their own indomitable people always blasting their way towards the cast and Trieste ; the valley of the Isonzo multiplies the roar of the heavy pieces around Gorizia, and in the mountains to the north; and sometimes enemy aeroplanes scar and rip up their resting-places. They lie, as it were, in a giant smithy, where the links of the New Italy are being welded, under smoke and' (lame and heat—heat from the dry shoals of the river bed before, and heat from the dry ridge behind them.

The road wrenched itself uphill among dead trenches, through wire entanglements, red-crusted on the ground —looking like ‘‘harrows fit to reel men’s bodies out like silk” between the usual mounds of ruptured sandbags, and round empty gun-pits softened at their angles by the passage of the seasons. Trenches cannot be dug, any more than water can be found, on the Carso. A spade’s depth below the surface the unkindly stone turns to sullen rock, and everything must be drilled and blasted.

For the moment, because the spring has been wet, the stones were greened over with a false growth of weeds which will wither utterly in summer, leaving the rocks to glare and burn alone. As if all this savagery were not enough, the raw slopes and crusps of desolation were studded with numberless natural pits and water-sings, some expuisitcly designed by the devil for machine-gun positions, others like small craters, capable of holding 11-inch howitzers, which opened at the bottom through rifts into dry caverns where regiments can hide—and be dug -out, I saw one such place which had been used as a bomb-proof by a couple of Austrian battalions, not far from a forlorn little assembly of inside house walls, all silvery grey, who leaned and whispered together in the thin air like ghosts. These were what remained of a village often taken and retaken. The only thing with life in it was an engine pumping water through pipes up the hills and over the stone fiats and beyond, across the far haze, to thirsty troops lying in waterless trenches, . “We had the Austrians full on the run here once,” said the officer. “The only thing that stopped us then was want of water. Our men went on till they choked in the dust. Now these pipes go with them.” We wound under the highest rise of the ridge and came out on its

safe side, on to what Arabs would call a belly of stones. There was no pretence of green —nothing but rock, broken and rebroken, as far as the eye could carry, by shellfire. Earth, however battered, can make some sort of shift to walk on, but here there was no more foothold than in a nightmare. No two splinters were the same size, and when a man stumbled on the edge of a shell-crater, its sides rolled down with the rattle of a dried tongue in the mouth. Great communial graves were heaped up and walled down their long sides with stones; and on one such stack of Death’s harvest someone had laid an old brown thighbone. The place shivered with ghosts in the hot daylight as the stones shivered in the heat. Dry, ragged points, like a cow's hips, rose along the ridge which wo overlooked. One of them, only a few feet lower than' where we stood, had been taken and lost six times. “They cleared us out with machine; —guns from where wo are now,” said the officer,” so we had to capture this highest point first. It cost a good deal.” He told us tales of regiments wiped out, re-constituted, 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 between the ringing stones, and of a certain Austrian Honved division which by right of blood claim that this section of the Carso is especially 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 you should stand up so much —I’ll try and show yon 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 the chin, and the water within it hummed like 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 work to come. Then the ground hiccupped a few yards in front of us, and stones—the poisoned-edged stones of the Carso —whirred like partridges. “Mines,” said the officer, serenely, while- the civils automatically turned up their collars. “They are working on the steep side of Ihe 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 us were amusedly 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 arc not all loose. We wish they were. They’re very solid. Come and see.”

Out of the grinning sunshine we walked into a great rock-cut gallery, with rails running under foot and men shovelling fallen rubbish into trucks. Half a dozen embrasures gave light through 30ft. of rock.

“These arc some new gun positions,” said the officcx 1 . “For Gin. guns, perhaps; perhaps for llin.” “And how d’you get llin, guns up here?” I asked. He smiled a little. I learnt 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 mines without warning. We came off the Belly of Stones, and when we. were op 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; but the walking is not good.” It seemed enough.