THE ISONZO FRONT

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 14 September 1917, Page 1

THE ISONZO FRONT

CARSO'S CRUEL ROCKS. HOW THE ITALIANS DIED. [By R-cdyabd Kivuxg, in the ' Daily Telegraph/] " And that is the Isonzo River," said the officer, when we had reached the edge of the Udine Plain. It might have come out of Kashmir, with its broad sweeps of pale shoals tliat tailed off down stream into dancing haze. The milkv-jade waters smelt of snow from • the hills as they plucked at the pontoonbridge's moorings, which were made to allow for many feet of rise and fall. A snow-fed river is as untrustworthy as drunkard. The flavor 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 the river that looked so steep, and was in reality only a small flattish mound among mountains, resembled no land on earth. If the Mat oppose had the Karroo they might nave begotten some such abortion of stone-speckled weatherhacked dill. 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! Somo of them died in the early days, when we made war without roads; some of them died afterwards, when we had the roads but the Au stria us had tho guns. Some of them died at tho last, when we beat the Aust-rians. Look!"' Truly, as the poet says, the battle is won by the men who fall. God knows how many mothers' sons sleep along the river before Gradisca, in the shadow of the first ridee of the wicked Carso. They can hear their own indomitable people always blasting their way towards the east 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 Same and heat—heat from the dry shoals of the river bed before, and heat from the dry ridge behind them. Ihe road wrenched itself uphill aijiong, • dead trenches, through wire entanglements, red-rusted on ground—looking like '" harrows fit to reel men's bodies out like silk"—between the usual mounds of ruptured sandbags, and round empty gunpits softened at their angles by the passage of the seasons. Trenches caunot- be dug, any more than water can be found, on the Cavso. 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 had been wet, the stones wei'e greened over with 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 cusps of desolation were studded with numberless natural pits and watersinks, some exquisitely designed by the Devil for machine-gun positions, others like small craters, capable of holding 11luch 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 silverv 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 tiling with life in it was an engine pumping water through pipes up the hills and over the stone flats and beyond, across the far haze, to thirstv troops lying in waterless trenches. " had the Austrians full on the run here once," eaid t3ie officer. "The only thing that stopped us then was want of water. Our men went- on till they choked m the dust-. Now these pipes "O with them." ,

We wound under the highest rise of the ridge and canio out on its saiest side, on to what Arabs ,woii3d call a belly of stones, There was ni» pretence of green—nothing but rock, broken and rebroken, as far as the eye could cany, by shell-fire. Earth, however battered, one can make some sortof shift to walk on, but here there was no more foothold than 111 a night-mare. Xo two splinters were the same size, and when a man stumbled on the edge of a shelicrater, its sides rolled down with the rattle of a dried tongue in the mouth. Great communal graves were heaped Tip 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 ii\ the heat. Dry. ragged points, like a ccw s hips, rose along tile ridge which we overlooked. One of them only a few feet lower than where-we stood had been t-»ken and lost six times. " Thev cleared us out *viih n.achine guns from -where ve arfc 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, 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 lionve<l

division which by right of blood claim that this section of the Carso is specially theirs to defend. They, too, appear out of tho rocks, perish, and are born again, to be slain. "If you come into this shell-hole—l don't think you should stand up too much —l*ll try and 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 Adriaticone could see it. a patch of dull silver, to the southward under some dark, shadowy hills that covered Trieste itself. A sunwarmed water-pipe crossed our shell-hole at about the height of the chin, and the water within it hv.mmed like the whirr of a distant shell- The officers' explanation war punctuated by the grumble of single big guns on the Italian side, ranging' in

anticipation of the serious work to come. Tlien the ground hiccupped a few yards in front of us, and stones—the poisonousedged 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 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 us were amusedly watching too. A pneumatic drill chattered underground, as teetli 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 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 lock. These are some new gun positions," said the officer. "For 6in guns, perhaps; perhaps for llin." " And how d'you get llin guns up here 1" I .asked. .He smiled a little. I learned the meaning of that smile up in the mountains later. "By hand," sadd he, and turned to the engineer in charge to reprove him for exploding mines without warning. We came off the Bellv of Stones, and when' we were on the flat lands beyond the Isonzo again looked back at it across its girdling lines of cemeteries. It- was the first obstacle Italy found at her own threshold, after she had forced the abroad, uneasy l6onzo. Ti where troops can walk; but the walking is not good." It seemed •enough.