With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement Part 15

Many of the others are for various reasons unprintable, though many are extremely witty and amusing. Even those which I have quoted were nominally forbidden by the High Command to be sung, but the prohibition was not very rigorously enforced. And General Cadorna, after all, had now pa.s.sed into history. Of his successor I never heard any evil sung, though I remember once hearing a great crowd of soldiers and civilians at Genoa shouting monotonously.

"Viva, viva il Generale Dia!"

The refrain of the _stornelli_ was onomatopoeic, and was intended to represent the sound of gunfire.

"Bim Bim Bom, Bim Bim Bom, Al rombo del cannon."

What a theatrical country Italy is! I remember being out in the streets of Tiarno one evening with a stream of song issuing from almost every house, and looking up at the full moon riding high over the towering peaks that locked in our valley and all but shut out the night sky. I could hardly believe that it was neither a stage setting nor a dream.

I remember another day, when I did a great climb above Bezzecca to carry out a front line reconnaissance, and arrived limp and perspiring to lunch at the Headquarters of an Italian Artillery Group, high, high up, looking out upon a glorious and astounding view. And in the afternoon I took my first ride on a _teleferica,_ or aerial railway, slung along a steel rope across the deeps, seated on a sort of large wooden tea tray, some six feet long and two and a half across, with a metal rim some six inches high running round the edge. I was quite prepared to be sick or at least giddy. But I was pleasantly disappointed. My journey took about a quarter of an hour; walking it would have taken about three hours of very stiff climbing. The motion is quite steady, except for a slight jolt as one pa.s.ses each standard, and, provided one sits still and doesn't shift one's centre of gravity from side to side, there is no wobbling of the tea tray. And looking down from time to time I saw tree tops far below me, and men and mules on mountain tracks as black specks walking.

There were various theories to account for our being sent to the Trentino. One was that an Austrian attack was feared there, another that an Italian attack was intended, but that the intention was afterwards abandoned, a third that the whole thing was a feint to puzzle the Austrians. But in any case we did not remain there long. By the beginning of August we were back on the Plateau. On the return journey, which was again by road all the way, we were given three days' rest at Desenzano and I was able to spend half a day in Verona.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

SIRMIONE AND SOLFERINO

"Leave is a privilege and not a right," according to a hack quotation from the King's Regulations. This quotation has done good service in the mouth of more than one Under Secretary of State for War, heading off tiresome questioners in the British House of Commons. Leave was a very rare privilege for the British Forces in Italy. In France, taking a rough average of all ranks and periods, British troops got leave once a year. In my Battery in Italy, the majority were without leave home for nineteen months. How much longer they would have had to wait, if the war had not conveniently come to an end in the nineteenth month of their Italian service, I do not know. Even in Italy, of course, the privilege was extended somewhat more freely to junior regimental officers and much more freely to Staff officers and Lieutenant-Colonels, in view of the danger of brain f.a.g and nervous strain following upon their greater mental exertions and their abnormal exposure to sh.e.l.l fire and the weather. The former cla.s.s went home about every eleventh, the latter about every third month.

The French Parliament fairly early in the war, with that gross lack of discrimination and of military understanding habitual to politicians, insisted on the granting of leave every three months to all ranks in all theatres of war. The Italian Parliament pedantically laid down a uniform period of six months. The British Parliament, with the sure political instinct of our race, preferred to leave the whole matter in the hands of the War Office. The interference in purely military affairs of unpractical sentimentalists was strongly discouraged at Westminster.

Why no leave to England could be granted except in special cases, was cogently explained from time to time during the summer in circulars written by Staff officers of high rank, who had frequent opportunities of informing themselves of the realities of the situation, while visiting London. These circulars were read out on parade and treated with the respect which they deserved. To allay possible, though quite unreasonable, unrest, it was determined to open a British Club, or Rest Camp, at Sirmione, which, as every reader of Tennyson knows, stands on the tip of a long promontory at the southern end of Lake Garda. Here a week's holiday was granted to a large proportion of the officers and a small proportion of the rank and file. Many officers went there more than once. Two large hotels were hired, which had been chiefly frequented before the war by corpulent and diseased Teutons, for whom a special course of medical treatment, including sulphur baths, used to be prescribed.

One of these hotels was now set apart for British officers, the other for men. A funny little person in red tabs was put in charge; there were various speculations as to his past activities, but all agreed that he had got into a good job now, and wasn't going to lose it, if tact could prevent it. This little man used to stand outside the hotel gates as each week's guests arrived from the steamer, and always had a cheery smile of welcome for every Field officer; to General officers he showed special attentions. He took his meals in the same room as the rest of us, but at what was known as "the Staff table," where he invited to join him any officers of high rank, who might be staying at the hotel, or, if there were none such available, certain of his private friends. The food supplied to ordinary people like myself was good, wholesome, reasonably plentiful and cheap. At "the Staff table" special delicacies were provided and additional courses, with no increase of charge. The profits, he used to say, were made entirely on the drinks and smokes.

A series of rules was drawn up, that none of us might be led into any avoidable temptation. All towns within reach,--Milan, Verona, Mantua, Brescia, Peschiera,--were placed out of bounds. So, too, were some of the larger villages on the sh.o.r.es of the Lake. The hours during which alcoholic liquor might be obtained, either in the Hotels or in the Cafes of Sirmione, were narrowly limited. Beer was strictly rationed.

Carefully regulated excursions on the Lake, by steamer or launch, were permitted and even encouraged. Likewise bathing.

I spent a week here, from August 14th to 21st, in gloriously fine, hot weather. Some said that the damp heat was relaxing and depressing, but I, in my second Italian summer, was getting acclimatised. The place was wonderfully beautiful. The end of the promontory is covered with olive trees, the ground thickly carpeted with wild mint and thyme, surrounded on three sides by the deep blue water of the Lake, along the sh.o.r.es of which lie little white villages, backed by groups of straight, dark cypresses, with mountain ranges rising in the background, range behind range, and overhead the hot Italian sun, shining from a cloudless sky.

Here, at the point, were the ruins of what are called, upon what evidence I know not, the Villa, the Baths and the Grotto of Catullus.

Here, too, was an Italian Anti-Aircraft Battery, and the Grotto of Catullus was filled with their ammunition.

The Austrians still held the upper end of the Lake, including the town of Riva. But only Italian motor boats now survived on the Lake, occasionally raiding Riva. The Austrian boats had all been sunk early in the war.

On the 15th I went round the lower end of the Lake in a steamer and, pa.s.sing along the sh.o.r.es of the beautiful Isola di Garda, on which stands the less beautiful Villa Borghese, landed at Maderno, famous for its lemon groves. Here a church was being used as a ration store. It had fine carving on the door. The French had established Artillery and Machine Gun Schools close to the Lake and several of their officers were on the steamer.

On the 16th I went with a young officer from a Yorkshire Battalion, a most agreeable companion, to Desenzano, which was out of bounds. We played billiards and lunched, and in the afternoon went to sleep on the gra.s.s in the shade beside the Lake. We were driven back in a carrozza along the promontory by an old Garibaldino, a Capuan by birth, who in 1860 at the age of eleven joined Garibaldi, when he crossed from Sicily to the mainland, and held older people's horses at the Battle of the Volturno. He served with the Fifth Garibaldini in the Trentino campaign of 1866 and knew intimately the country where I had lately been, the Val d'Ampola and Storo, Tiarno and Bezzecca. He then joined the Italian Regular Army, and in 1870 was a Corporal in the Pavia Brigade. He was present at the taking of Rome and claimed that, although an Infantryman, he helped to load one of the guns which breached the Porta Pia. If this claim be true, there must have been either a lack of gunners on this famous occasion, or a certain degree of enthusiastic confusion. Having entered Rome, he got very drunk and absented himself from his Regiment without leave for three days. As a punishment he was made to march on foot, carrying a full pack, from Rome to Padua. He showed us his old military pay-book, his medals and other souvenirs. Next year he will be seventy years old and will begin to draw a pension. Having returned to Sirmione, we arranged with him to drive us next day to the neighbouring battlefields of 1859, San Martino and Solferino. Much delighted, he a.s.sured me, quite without necessity, that next day he would put on his best clothes, would wash and shave, and give his horse an extra bit of grooming.

Accordingly next morning at ten o'clock we started off again in the carrozza. We visited first San Martino della Battaglia, only a few miles from the southern end of the Lake. This was the northern extremity of the battlefield of Solferino. It was here that the Sardinians and Piedmontese, forming the left wing of the Franco-Italian Army, attacked and drove back the Austrian right wing. A memorial tower has been erected here, 250 feet high, with great avenues of cypresses radiating outwards from it. The custodian is a handsome boy, who lost a leg at the taking of Gorizia two years ago. There is no stair-case within the tower; one goes up by a spiral inclined plane. At successive stages, as one ascends, are large and detailed paintings, running right round the inner circ.u.mference of the tower, representing the battles of the Italian Wars of Liberation from 1848 to 1870. As works of art they are not of the first cla.s.s, but they convey here and there a vivid sense of life and movement, an advance of the Bersaglieri with their c.o.c.ks'

feathers waving in the wind, Garibaldini in their red shirts rushing Bomba's gunners on the Volturno, Italian cavalry charging a Battalion of brown-coated Croats at Custozza, the defence of a fort in the Venetian lagoons against Austrian warships.

On a fine day the view from the top is very good, but that day it was hazy in the great heat. Close by is an Ossario, containing the skulls and bones of seven thousand dead collected in the neighbourhood, washed clean with white wine and set out in neat rows, the majority Italian. A good warning, one would think, against war, and more compact and less wasteful of s.p.a.ce than a conventional graveyard.

Thence we drove on to Solferino, a little remote village with a single street paved with cobble stones, seldom visited by foreign tourists. The plaster on the walls of the farmhouses hereabouts still bears many bullet marks. As we drove, the Garibaldino pointed out to us some of the positions where Napoleon III.'s Generals had sited their Batteries. We were the first British officers seen here during the war, and had an enthusiastic reception. I was surprised to find that none of our Regulars had come over from Sirmione, as a matter of professional interest and duty, to study the tactics of 1859 upon the ground.

We lunched well at a small _albergo_. There were four good-looking daughters of the house, who came and sat with us in turn and watched us eat. They had the naturalness and simple charm of dwellers in remote places. "Four good cows," said the Garibaldino, with the frank realism of the South, "but all the local proprietors are too old." After lunch my companion remained in the village, and I climbed the ridge from which the French drove the Austrians, a very strong natural position even now.

I went up La Rocca, at its south-eastern extremity, on which stands an old square tower, also converted into a battle memorial. Here again there are no steps within, but an ascending spiral plane. The slopes at this end of the ridge are thickly planted with young cypresses, and the place will grow in beauty year by year. Even now it is well wooded, with larger trees just below the tower. The village lies at the foot of the slope. Just outside it, off the road on slightly rising ground at the end of an avenue, is another and larger Ossario, containing twenty thousand skulls and sets of bones, French and Austrian. The building is full of banners and wreaths and memorial tablets, including one lately sent by the French troops now fighting on the Italian Front.

"Ceux de la grande guerre A ses glorieux anciens.

1859-1918."

A few skeletons have been preserved intact, including one said to have been an Austrian bandmaster, a giant eight feet tall. The nationality of some of the skulls can be determined by bullets, French or Austrian, found in the head and now attached by a string.

I stepped forth from this well-ordered tomb into the outer sunshine with a sense of personal oppression and of human ineffectiveness. How slowly and how clumsily do the feet of History slouch along! And yet, if Napoleon III. had kept faith with Cavour, the fighting here might have liberated Venetia without the necessity for another war a few years later. How quiet and silent lie these battlefields of yesterday! Even so, one day, will lie the pine woods round Asiago, sh.e.l.l-torn and tormented now, and populous with the soldiers of many nations, yet of a wondrous beauty in the full moonlight and the fresh night air. I shall be back up there in three days' time!

We drove back in the warm evening, by the road through Pozzolengo toward Peschiera, along which many of the defeated Austrians fled in 1859. The roadside was dusty, but along all the hedges the acacias still showed a most delicate and tender green.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

THE ASIAGO PLATEAU ONCE MORE

During August and September we were kept pretty busy on the Plateau.

Concentrations on enemy trenches and wire and special counter-battery shoots by day and counter-battery support of Infantry raids by night were continually required of us. We fired high explosive by day and chiefly gas sh.e.l.l at night. Our own Infantry and the French on our right raided the enemy's front and support lines very frequently, bringing back many prisoners. The French constantly penetrated and reconnoitred the enemy's defensive system on Mount Sisemol. Many of us were inclined to think that the casualties, sometimes heavy, which were incurred in these raids, and the great quant.i.ty of ammunition shot away, were largely wasted. We saw no sufficient return for them, beyond a certain amount of information obtained from prisoners, much of which was of small and doubtful value. But in view of what happened later, I think it must be agreed that these continual raids and bombardments did their share in gradually wearing down the morale and power of resistance of the Austrian Army.

There was a persistent rumour that the enemy was on the point of retiring to a line, on which he was known to be working hard, along the lower slopes of Monte Interrotto and Monte Catz on the far side of the Plateau. This line, we learned from prisoners, was commonly referred to as the _Winterstellung_ (winter position). It would have been stronger, defensively, than his existing line, and would have had the great advantage of being able largely to be supplied and munitioned during daylight, as there was much good cover and roads hidden in the pine woods leading down immediately behind it. It would have involved the moral disadvantage of evacuating the ruins of Asiago. But, with the snow down on the Plateau, every Austrian track and foot-mark would have been visible from our O.P.'s, and the Austrian situation, bad as it already was from this point of view, would have become quite intolerable. If, on the other hand, we had followed up an Austrian retreat to their _Winterstellung_ by the occupation of Asiago and the throwing forward of our line across the Plateau, the relative situation would have been reversed. Our Infantry and many of our Batteries would then be out in the open, in view from the Austrian O.P.'s, unable to light a fire by day, and only able to send up supplies by night; and our general situation would be so much the worse with heavy snow increasing our discomfort and the visibility of any work we might undertake and of our every movement.

For this reason, as has been explained in an earlier chapter, it was taken for granted that a small advance from our present excellent line would be worse than useless, and that only an advance at least to the crest of the first mountain range beyond the Plateau would be of any military value. The possibility of such an advance being attempted was evidently still in the minds of the Staff, for our forward or Battle Position at San Sisto had to be kept in constant readiness for occupation, and it was suggested by some that the occasion for a big attack would be the moment when the enemy was in the act of retiring voluntarily to his _Winterstellung_, necessarily a somewhat difficult and risky operation.

Meanwhile the enemy guns were not silent. They were indeed unpleasantly active, constantly sweeping the road just behind our Battery, putting down violent, though brief, concentrations on the cross roads at Pria dell' Acqua, less than a hundred yards to our right, and apparently also endeavouring to carry out occasional counter-battery shoots after our own pattern. The British Batteries in this sector suffered a number of casualties during this period, and one in particular, not my own, was frequently sh.e.l.led with great precision by twelve-inch howitzers, most disagreeable weapons, firing at extreme ranges from the cover of some distant valley. Many efforts were made to locate these particular guns, but I am not confident that any of them were successful. Among the victims in this Battery was Preece, a young officer who had served under me in a Training Battery in England. He was the only son of a widowed mother, and, had he lived, might have become a world-famous chemist. His grave, too, is in the Baerenthal Valley.

Our own officers' Mess had several narrow escapes, especially on one occasion when the impact of an enemy sh.e.l.l was broken by a trench cart and a box of tools, only seven or eight yards away. None of the tools were ever found again and portions of the trench cart were seen next morning hanging on the telephone wires beside the road. Only a few splinters came into the Mess and did no harm, all the occupants, myself included, warned by the sound of the approaching sh.e.l.l, having flung ourselves face downwards on the floor. Another frequent exercise of the enemy at this time was night bombing, which during the full moon became somewhat serious. But a big raid by our own airmen on the enemy aerodrome at Borgo in the Val Sugana put an end to this source of trouble.

I was able now and then to make short expeditions down the mountains in the Battery car to Thiene, and sometimes even to Vicenza, for the ostensible purpose of buying canteen and mess stores and drawing the Battery pay. Thiene is the ugliest and dullest little town in Italy. But Vicenza, with its exquisite Olympian theatre, and other fine Palladian architecture, varied by many smaller buildings which are beautiful examples of the Venetian Gothic style, with its busy and animated Piazza, centring round the ever-crowded Cafe Garibaldi, and with the wooded slope of the famous Monte Berico, rich with historic memorials, rising behind the town, never failed to lift my mind out of the dreary monotony of war into an atmosphere of cleaner and more enduring things.

I remember, too, the strange thrill I had one day, when, having pa.s.sed the sawmills and dumps of stores and sh.e.l.ls and the huddle of Headquarter offices at Granezza, I came out on the last edge of the mountain wall, into sudden full view of the great plain below, full of rivers and cities, and saw, for the first time from up here, the sunlight flashing on a strip of distant golden sea. It was the lagoons round Venice.

I spent also many interesting days about this time at our tree O.P. on Cima del Taglio. The Italians had an O.P. in a neighbouring tree, which they called Osservatorio Battisti. The British Field Artillery occupied a third tree, and the French a fourth. The pine trees on that summit were, literally, full of eyes. But the enemy never discovered any of us, though he sometimes dropped a few stray sh.e.l.ls in our neighbourhood. Our own O.P. was not generally manned at night, unless some prearranged operation was taking place, but the officer on duty had to remain within call and slept in a log hut near the foot of the tree, in telephonic communication with Battery and Brigade. The French and Italians also had huts close by, and I spent several evenings playing chess with them, or talking, or listening to the mandolin and the singing of Italian _stornelli_. One young Italian, in particular, I remember with some affection, a certain Lieutenant Prato, a mandolin player of great skill and a very charming personality.

One day in September, when the news from the French Front was getting better and better, I remember talking, on our tree top, to the Italian officer, who was at that time acting as _liaison_ officer to our Brigade, a member of a family well known in Milan. He knew every inch of those mountains, now in Austrian hands, along the old Italian frontier.

His Battery had fought there in the early part of the war. He knew, too, Gorizia and the Carso battlefields. And he was sick at heart, as every Italian always silently was, at the memory of the retreat of last autumn. And I remember saying that what was now happening in the Somme country would happen soon in Italy. There, I reminded him, was a stretch of country which we had once conquered, inch by inch, with terrible losses and infinite heroism and insufficient Artillery, just as Italy had conquered those positions on the Carso and on Monte Santo. And all those gains of ours had been wiped out in a few disastrous hours last March, as Italy's had been wiped out last October, and now we were advancing again over that same country and beyond it, far more rapidly and with far smaller losses than in those b.l.o.o.d.y days two years ago. And so, I prophesied to him, would it be on this Front too. The day was coming when Italy would win back all she had lost, and far more than she had ever won before, far more swiftly and cheaply than in her early brave offensives, and Austria, like Germany, would be broken in hopeless, irretrievable defeat. He said to me then that he hoped it might come true, but that he was less certain of the future than I. But, two months later, when I had proved to be a true prophet, he reminded me of that conversation of ours.

PART VI

THE LAST PHASE