any lying stories with the object of discrediting the
British. Among these was one, the details of which do not matter now,
concerning the fact that only British Artillery, and no British
Infantry, had at that time been sent to Italy. Our Reconnaissances,
involving our visible and daily presence among the gallant succession of
Italian Brigades, who held the blood-stained line on the Carso and
across the valley of the Vippacco, were the most fitting reply which we
could make to German propaganda.
* * * * *
I made my first Front Line Reconnaissance on July 27th, two days after
we had moved forward to our new Battery position. That day I visited the
trenches on the Volconiac, starting in the early afternoon and getting
back at nightfall. I took with me as a guide a young Italian gunner, a
Neapolitan by birth, who had been a waiter in an Italian restaurant in
New York before the war. He had been in the Austrian offensive of 1916
in the Trentino, where all the guns of his Battery had been lost and
nearly all his comrades killed or captured.
From the Battery position we followed the road behind Hill 123, up a
glorious valley, whose sides were thickly wooded with pines, gradually
thinning under the destruction wrought by Austrian shell fire and the
Italian military need for timber. The only other vegetation here was a
little coarse grass. On the lee side of Hill 123, sheltered from
Austrian fire, was a whole village of wooden huts, admirably
constructed, capable of housing several Battalions. At the head of the
valley, the road, a good example of the war work of the Italian
Engineers, turned sharply up the hillside, securing tolerable gradients
by means of constant zigzags--tolerable that is to say for men on foot
and for pack mules, for wheeled transport could not proceed beyond this
point. It was a steep climb and I perspired most visibly right through
my thin tunic. Three-quarters of the way up we stopped and got a drink
of water from the Infantrymen in charge of the water barrels. There are
no springs or streams on the Volconiac or on Dosso Faiti. All water has
to be pumped up from below through pipes, and at the point where we
rested, water barrels were being continually filled from the pipes and
then hauled on by hand, on sleighs, for the remainder of the ascent.
Water was also carried up from this point by individual soldiers in the
fiaschi, or glass bottles encased in plaited straw,
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