it
was merely an insane escapade. The Austrians had behind them--and some
way behind them--one little strangulated railway and no good pass road;
their right was held at Pasubio, their left was similarly bent back. In
front of them was between twice and three times their number of first
class troops, with an unlimited equipment. If they had surmounted
that last mountain crest they would have come down to almost certain
destruction in the plain. They could never have got back. For a time
it was said that General Cadorna considered that possibility. From the
point of view of purely military considerations, the Trentino offensive
should perhaps have ended in the capitulation of Vicenza.

I will confess I am glad it did not do so. This tour of the fronts has
made me very sad and weary with a succession of ruins. I can bear no
more ruins unless they are the ruins of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Berlin,
or suchlike modern German city. Anxious as I am to be a systematic
Philistine, to express my preference for Marinetti over the Florentine
British and generally to antagonise aesthetic prigs, I rejoiced over
that sunlit land as one might rejoice over a child saved from beasts.

On the hills beyond Schio I walked out through the embrasure of a big
gun in a rock gallery, and saw the highest points upon the hillside
to which the Austrian infantry clambered in their futile last attacks.
Below me were the ruins of Arsiero and Velo d'Astico recovered, and
across the broad valley rose Monte Cimone with the Italian trenches
upon its crest and the Austrians a little below to the north. A very
considerable bombardment was going on and it reverberated finely. (It
is only among mountains that one hears anything that one can call the
thunder of guns. The heaviest bombardments I heard in France sounded
merely like Brock's benefit on a much large scale, and disappointed me
extremely.) As I sat and listened to the uproar and watched the shells
burst on Cimone and far away up the valley over Castelletto above
Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the position of the Austrian
frontier. I doubt if the English people realise that the utmost depth to
which this great Trentino offensive, which exhausted Austria, wasted the
flower of the Hungarian army and led directly to the Galician disasters
and the intervention of Rumania, penetrated into Italian territory was
about six miles.

III. BEHIND THE FRONT

1

I have a peculiar affection for Vero