INTO THE JAWS OF DEATH.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 January 1918, Page 6

INTO THE JAWS OF DEATH.

GLORIOUS WORK OF THE ITALIAN CAVALRY i'N THE GREAT RETREAT. Renter's special correspondent on the Italian front paid a line tribute .to this gallantry of the Italian eav;tlry during the first days of the great retreat. ''The Italian cavalry have emulated the glory of the famous Light Brigade at Balaclava sixty-four years ago," said an English officer who is following the operations on the Italian front. Ever since the opening of the war the Italian cavalry have been deeply disappointed that mountain warfare gave no opportunity for the use of their branch of tlio service. Cavalrymen were drafted into infantry and bomb-thrower contingents or into the air service, but Italian cavalry officers now remark that the opportunity has arisen to show that cavalry is not, as a well-known writer has said, "as obsolete as crossbowmen," but vital to the safety of the infantry and all other arms. In fact, the successful retirement of the Italian Army along the Tagliamento River, despite strategic difficulties, was entirely due to their selfsacrifice. The splendid manoeuvring in great masses, and the reckless gallantry of the Italian horsemen, against a hail of ma-chine-gun projectiles, will remain one of the most 'brilliant features of this war, and can be compared to the charges of the Austrian cavalry at Koniggratz, which drove back the Prussians, enabling ißtnedCki's, defeated troops to retire in safety. The Italian cavalry practically repeated tha same feat in screening, with constant daring dashes under fire, the march of the main body of the arm}', enabling the latter to occupy a new pre-arranged position, in which* they are already busily engaged in fortifying themselves. The charges, hand-to-hand encounters, and irresistible rushes of squadrons and whole brigades, were executed with such admirable precision at the highest speed as to astonish experts, who declared that never had greatmasses of horsemen been more easily controlled. On several occasions magnificent feats of that trick-riding for which the Italian cavalry has always been celebrated at English military tournaments were performed. Riders and horses, like centaurs, climbed down the sides of the precipitous hills on both sides of tha road leading from the Friuli Plain to

the Tagliamento River, showing greatmastery of both horses and weapons. Machine-guns could not arrest them.

Some regiments were practically annihilated, but? their heroic sacrifice was not in vain, since it protected the road by which the Third Army, led by the Duke of Aosta, and its munitions and stores, passed to safety.