horns and thickets of
nature, barbed wire. There are no dead visible; the wounded have been
cleared away; but about the trenches and particularly near some of the
dug-outs there was a faint repulsive smell....

Yet into this wilderness the Italians are now thrusting a sort of order.
The German is a wonderful worker, they say on the Anglo-French front
that he makes his trenches by way of resting, but I doubt if he can
touch the Italian at certain forms of toil. All the way up to San
Martino and beyond, swarms of workmen were making one of those carefully
graded roads that the Italians make better than any other people. Other
swarms were laying water-pipes. For upon the Carso there are neither
roads nor water, and before the Italians can thrust farther both must be
brought up to the front.

As we approached San Martino an Austrian aeroplane made its presence
felt overhead by dropping a bomb among the tents of some workmen, in a
little scrubby wood on the hillside near at hand. One heard the report
and turned to see the fragments flying and the dust. Probably they got
someone. And then, after a little pause, the encampment began to spew
out men; here, there and everywhere they appeared among the tents,
running like rabbits at evening-time, down the hill. Soon after and
probably in connection with this signal, Austrian shells began to come
over. They do not use shrapnel because the rocky soil of Italy makes
that unnecessary. They fire a sort of shell that goes bang and releases
a cloud of smoke overhead, and then drops a parcel of high explosive
that bursts on the ground. The ground leaps into red dust and smoke. But
these things are now to be seen on the cinema. Forthwith the men working
on the road about us begin to down tools and make for the shelter
trenches, a long procession going at a steady but resolute walk. Then
like a blow in the chest came the bang of a big Italian gun somewhere
close at hand....

Along about four thousand miles of the various fronts this sort of thing
was going on that morning....

2

This Carso front is the practicable offensive front of Italy. From the
left wing on the Isonzo along the Alpine boundary round to the Swiss
boundary there is mountain warfare like nothing else in the world; it
is warfare that pushes the boundary backward, but it is mountain warfare
that will not, for so long a period that the war will be over first,
hold out any hopeful prospects of offensive movements on