a mountain side and came to a top, we found its flanks tunnelled
with deep wicker-walled, broad-floored, well-drained trenches,
and its top honeycombed with runways for ammunition and with great
rooms for soldiers and holes for gun barrels. Mountain top after
mountain top has been made into a Gibraltar by the Italians. That
Gibraltar was 300 miles long, before they lost it to the Germans.
But they had few guns in their fortress. They showed us emplacement
after emplacement without a stick of artillery in it. They had told
the French and the English of their plight, and a few artillery
companies had been sent in; but only a fraction of the need. There
was no central council of the allies then. Every nation was running
its own little war, and Italy was left to fall, and now the four
thousand miles of Italian roads, and the 300 miles of Gibraltar
are German military strongholds that will have to be conquered with
our blood and iron. Probably no battle line in the world today is
more interesting than the Italian front was in the autumn of 1917.
The south face of the Alps often is green and beautiful, but generally
the northern faces of those mountains are bleak and rugged and
steep. The battle line ran a zig-zag course through the mountains,
now meeting in gulches, now scurrying away up to mesas, again
climbing to the top of the barren heights. We stood one sunny day
on a quiet sector of the Pasubio. We were with the Liguria brigade,
the 157-158th infantry. Through a peep-hole in the trench we looked
across a gulch to another mountainside and saw there the Austrian
trenches, not 200 yards away. Before them lay the ugly scar of
brown rusted barbed wire, and just below the wire, sprawled out
on the white limestone of the steep mountainside, lay fifty dead
Italian soldiers who had vainly charged into the machine guns up
that formidable slope. They had lain there for weeks. It was the
grisliest sight we had seen during our adventures.