hich
they were suddenly subjected. And finally he rushed his troops up
those roads in motor-cars and motor-trucks, afoot and on horse-back
and astride of donkeys and flung them against the Austrians. So sudden
and savage was the Italian onset that the Austrians did not dare to
spare a man or gun for their Eastern Front--and meanwhile the
Muscovite armies were pressing on toward the Dniester. It is no
exaggeration to assert that the success of Brussiloff's offensive in
Galicia was due in no small measure to the Italian counter-offensive
in the Trentino. That adventure cost Austria at least 100,000 dead and
wounded men.

But not for a moment did the Italians permit the Austrian offensive in
the Trentino to distract them from their real objectives: Gorizia,
the Carso, and Trieste. The "military experts," who from desks in
newspaper offices tell the public how campaigns ought to be conducted,
had announced confidently that Italy had so taxed her strength by her
efforts in the Trentino that, for many months at least, nothing need
be expected from her. But Italy showed the public that the "military
experts" didn't know what they were talking about, for in little more
than a month after the Italian guns had ceased to growl amid the
Tyrolean peaks and passes, they were raining a storm of steel upon the
Austrian positions on the Carso.

Imagine a vast limestone plateau, varying in height from 700 to 2,500
feet, which is as treeless and waterless as the deserts of Chihuahua,
as desolate and forbidding as the Dakota Bad Lands, with a surface as
torn and twisted and jagged as the lava beds of Utah, and with a
summer climate like that of Death Valley in July. That is the Carso.
This great table-land of rock, which begins at Gorizia, approaches
close to the shores of the Adriatic between Monfalcone and Trieste,
and runs southeastward into Istria, links the Alpine system with the
Balkan ranges. Its surface of naked, sun-flayed rock is broken here
and there with gigantic heaps of piled stone, with caves and caverns,
with sombre marshes which sometimes become gloomy and forbidding
lakes, and with peculiar crater-like depressions called _dolinas_,
formed by centuries of erosion. Such scanty vegetation as there is is
confined to these _dolinas_, which form the only oases in this barren
and thirsty land. The whole region is swept by the _Bora_, a wind
which is the enemy alike of plant and man. Save for the lizards that
bask upon its fur