, though
the Italian counter-attacks on the Bainsizza were carried out with such
dash that they captured several hundred Austrian prisoners.

[Sidenote: Danger that the Italian Army may be trapped.]

Now the enemy's plan stood out in all its formidable strength and
strategy. He had opened a gap in the Italian front; through this gap he
was pouring overwhelming forces. Already the rest of the Italian Second
Army and the Third Army on the Carso to the south of it were outflanked.
If the whole of that great force was not to have its line of
communications cut and be surrounded, it must be immediately and rapidly
withdrawn for a great distance. An immense sacrifice of Italian
territory was imperative if the Italian Army was to be saved from a trap
by the side of which the fall of Metz was the capture of an outpost.
During the afternoon of October 25 the general order of retreat was
given.

[Sidenote: Austrians use seventeen-inch howitzers.]

I went up again to visit the British batteries which were with the Third
Army on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, and from one of their
observatories watched the heavy shelling. The Austrians were using huge
seventeen-inch howitzers, and the explosions of their gigantic shells,
each weighing a ton, was like a small eruption. A solid block of piebald
smoke as big as a cathedral sprang into the air and it was a minute or
more before the last of it had drifted away.

[Sidenote: Monfalcone the most romantic point in the fighting line.]

And as the sun was setting I went down to Monfalcone, to a place which
could not be mentioned then, but which was at the same time probably the
oddest and the most romantic point of the world's fighting-line.
Monfalcone was for the Austrians a sort of combination of Birkenhead and
Bournemouth. There were important ship-building yards there, and it had
besides popularity as a seaside place. In the shipyard the Austrians had
left an eighteen-thousand-ton liner, of which the hull was complete and
the decks built in.

[Sidenote: Tools of constructive labor are dropped.]

To reach the ship you passed through a yard that was a rusty monument to
the futility of war. There were all the tools of constructive labor just
as they had been dropped when this nightmare of destructive passion
burst upon the world; weather-reddened traveling cranes rusted to the
tracks on which they will never move again; trucks overturned, a lathe
smashed by a shell that had torn