ust received word that, as the
result of yesterday's snow-storm, our communications with them have
been cut off. We will not be able to relieve them, or get supplies to
them, much before next April."

And it was then only the middle of December!

In the Carnia and on the Upper Isonzo one finds the anomaly of
first-line trenches which are perfectly safe from attack. I visited
such a position. Through a loophole I got a little framed picture of
the Austrian trenches not five hundred yards away, and above them, cut
in the mountainside, the square black openings within which lurked the
Austrian guns. Yet we were as safe from anything save artillery fire
as though we were in Mars, for between the Italian trenches and the
Austrian intervened a chasm half a thousand feet deep and with walls
as steep and smooth as the side of a house. The narrow strip of valley
at the bottom of the chasm was a sort of no man's land, where forays,
skirmishes, and all manner of desperate adventures took place nightly
between patrols of Jaegers and Alpini.

As with my field-glasses I was sweeping the turmoil of trench-scarred
mountains which lay spread, below me, like a map in bas-relief, an
Austrian battery quite suddenly set up a deafening clamor, and on a
hillside, miles away, I could see its shells bursting in clouds of
smoke shot through with flame. They looked like gigantic white peonies
breaking suddenly into bloom. The racket of the guns awoke the most
extraordinary echoes in the mountains. It was difficult to believe
that it was not thunder. Range after range caught up the echoes of
that bombardment and passed them on until it seemed as though they
must have reached Vienna. For half an hour, perhaps, the cannonade
continued, and then, from an Italian position somewhere above and
behind us, came a mighty bellow which drowned out all other sounds. It
was the angry voice of Italy bidding the Austrians be still.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] I was told by a British general that thousands of tiny steel
prongs had been discovered in baled hay brought from America. They
were evidently put there by German sympathizers in the United States
with the object of killing the Allies' horses.

CHAPTER IV

THE ROAD TO TRIESTE

In order to appraise the Italian operations on the Carso at their true
value, it is necessary to go back to May, 1916, when the Archduke
Frederick launched his great offensive from the Trentino. Now it must
be kept constantly