e 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 o