With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement Part 2

Our rations at this time were a special Anglo-Italian blend; less meat, bacon, cheese and tea than in the British ration, but macaroni, rice, coffee, wine and lemons from the Italian. It was a good ration and no one suffered from eating a little less meat than at home. In order to check the spread of dysentery, it was ordered by the medical authorities that no meat was to be eaten at midday.

We were not doing a great deal of firing when I came, though we had always to be prepared to come suddenly and quickly into action, especially at night. Most of our prearranged daylight shoots were observed from an O.P. in a ruined house at S. Andrea, on the plain just outside Gorizia, where one had a fine view southwards of the Tamburo and of the whole boundary ridge of the Carso from Dosso Faiti to the Stoll.

Observation was beautifully easy on these high hills and in this clear air. What worlds away is this country with its wonderful cloudless sunshine from the dismal flat lands of the Western Front! Said one enthusiast of ours, "This is a gunner's heaven!" The Austrians fancied, I think, that we had our O.P. in Vertoiba, which is north of S. Andrea, for they sh.e.l.led this frequently, but S. Andrea seldom. They sh.e.l.led Vertoiba heavily, I remember, all one afternoon, while I was on duty at S. Andrea and while the Italian Staff were present in large numbers for two hours to watch our shooting. I remember thinking what a fine bag they would have got if they had lifted about four hundred yards! The Italian Staff were always most complimentary and enthusiastic over the work of our Batteries.

We had taken part in the Italian May offensive, the results of which had been claimed by the _Daily Mail,_ with characteristic good taste and sense of proportion, as a "great Anglo-Italian victory." Our part had been more justly described by General Cadorna, who in a special Order of the Day had said that "amid the roar of battle was clearly heard the voice of British guns," and in his summary of the results of this offensive, which lasted from May 12th to May 30th, after remarking that the number of Austrians taken prisoners was 23,681 men and 604 officers, and that, in addition, at least 100,000 Austrians had been put out of action, continued as follows, "Our brave Infantry fought indefatigably for eighteen days, without pause and without proper food supplies, on difficult ground, in almost mid-summer heat, impetuous in attack and tenacious in defence. Most effective at all times was the fraternal co-operation of the Artillery, Siege, Field or Mountain, one Field Battery not hesitating to push right up to the firing line. Excellent help, too, was lent by ten Batteries of medium calibre of the British Army and by the guns of the Italian Navy."

Cadorna had inspected our Batteries soon after their arrival in Italy, and we had been visited and officially welcomed on behalf of the Italian Government by the Minister Bissolati, perhaps the most vivid and vital personality in Italian politics, and a wise counsellor, whose advice has more than once been disastrously ignored.[1]

[Footnote 1: From the outbreak of war in August 1914, Bissolati strongly advocated Italian intervention on the side of the Allies. When Italy declared war, he enlisted in the ranks of the Alpini, although over military age, was decorated for valour and seriously wounded. He then became Minister for Military Supplies, and acted as a connecting link between the Cabinet at Rome and the High Command.]

Addressing at Pec detachments from a number of British Batteries on the 29th of May, Bissolati had said: "Officers and men of the British Force, I bring you the greetings of the Italian Government and the thanks of the Italian people. I greet you not only as an Italian Minister, but as a comrade in arms, for I consider it the greatest privilege of my life to have been in this war a soldier like yourselves. Our hearts beat with joy to see you here, because there is no Italian, however humble his station, who does not know how great is the debt of Italy to Britain for the brotherly help afforded her during the tragic vicissitudes of the glorious story of her Resurrection. We all remember how your fathers helped to create the Italian nation.... To-day we find ourselves fighting side by side in the same campaign, we to redeem this territory from the Austrian yoke, you to maintain the liberty of your national existence from the German menace, both of us, moreover, to set the whole world free from the peril of falling under the dominion of that race, hard in temper as a granite rock, which finds in the Austro-Hungarian Empire a willing ally in its rapes and aggressions. I am here, then, to thank you, not only as an Italian, but as a man, and I am filled with joy at the thought that the British, even as the Italians, are showing themselves to be, now as always, the champions of justice, and the defenders of liberty and right. The sacrifices which we are making together, the mingling of our blood upon the battlefield, will render even stronger the agelong, traditional friendship between our two nations.

"Viva l'Inghilterra! Viva l'Italia!"

CHAPTER V

PALMANOVA

During my first month in Italy I lived a nomadic life. I was only "attached" to a Battery, and really n.o.body's child. July 17th to 22nd I spent at Palmanova in charge of an Artillery fatigue party which was helping the Ordnance to load and unload ammunition, and from August 2nd to 10th I was in charge of another working party of gunners at Versa, a fly-bitten, dusty little village, which our medical authorities had stupidly selected as a site for a Hospital, though there were many suitable villas in more accessible and agreeable places not far away.

But in this first month I was lucky in being able to multiply and vary my impressions of the Eastern Veneto.

I rode down to Palmanova from Gradisca on a motor lorry. What a country!

The white houses, the white roads, the ma.s.ses of fresh green foliage, chiefly acacias, the tall dark cypresses, the cool blue water of the Isonzo, the blue-grey mountains in the distance, and on their summits the sunshine on the snow, which is hardly distinguishable from the low-lying cloud banks in an otherwise cloudless sky.

Italian troops, dusty columns marching along the road, throw up at me an occasional greeting as the lorry goes by. Long lines of transport pa.s.s continually. "Sempre Avanti Savoia!" "Sempre Avanti Italia!" I find my eyes wet with tears, for the beauty and the glory and the insidious danger of that intoxicating war-cry; for the blindness and the wickedness and the selfish greed that lurk behind it, exploiting the generous emotions of the young and brave; for the irony and bitter fatuity of _any_ war-cry in a world that should be purged of war.

And so I came to Palmanova to supervise the loading of sh.e.l.l, in the company of Captain Shield and another Ordnance officer. Shield had travelled much and mixed with Italians on the borders of Abyssinia. He told me that with no other European race were our relations in remote frontier lands more harmonious. They and we have, he said, a perfect code of written and unwritten rules to prevent all friction. He told me, too, of a young Englishman out there, quite an unimportant person, who had a bad attack of sun-stroke and whose life was in great danger. The only hope was to get him through quickly to the coast, and the shortest road lay through Italian territory. So application was made to the Italian authorities for a right of pa.s.sage, which they not only granted, but mapped out his route for him, for it was difficult country and unfamiliar to our people, and sent a guide, and had a mule with a load of ice waiting for him at every halting-place along the road, and so saved his life, treating him with as much consideration and tenderness as they could have been expected to show to a member of their own Royal Family.

Palmanova lies just within the old Italian frontier, a little white town surrounded by a moat, which in summer is quite dry, and by gra.s.sy ramparts shaped like a star. It was first fortified by the Venetian Republic four hundred years ago, and again by Napoleon. It can be entered only through one of three gates, approached by bridges across the moat, from the north, south-east and south,--the Udine Gate, the Gradisca Gate and the Maritime Gate. Each gate is double, so that you pa.s.s through a small square court, almost like a well, and at each gate you can see the remains of an old portcullis and drawbridge. Each is topped by two slender towers, and is wide enough to allow only one vehicle to pa.s.s at a time, and at each there is a guard of Carabinieri in their grey lantern-hats, to stop and examine all questionable traffic.

From the ramparts you can see the Carnic and the Julian Alps, sweeping round the Venetian plain in a great half circle. To the north the mountains seem to rise sheer out of green orchards and maize fields, but to the east there is a gradual slope of less fertile uplands, where the Austrians in the first days of war on this Front would not face the onrush of the Italians in the open, but fell back hurriedly to the more difficult country behind. At night all the inhabitants sit out on the ramparts, talking of the hot weather and the war, and watching the searchlights winking on the hills.

In the centre of the town is a large Piazza, planted round with myrtles which smell strong and sweet in the sun, and at midday an old woman sets up a stall here and sells the newspapers of Rome and Milan, Bologna and Venetia. In one corner of this Piazza is a restaurant, where one can play billiards and dine well and cheaply. A youth serves here who has been rejected for the Army because of defective eyesight. He speaks a little French and a little German and a very little English, and in moments of excitement words from all these languages come tumbling out together, mixed up with Italian. He has, I am sure, an Italian-English phrase book, which he consults hurriedly in the kitchen, for, whenever he sets a new course before one, he shoots out some carefully prepared and usually quite irrelevant sentence, and watches eagerly to see if one understands. In another corner of the Piazza stands a campanile with a peal of those absurd little jangling bells, which are among the most characteristic charms of Italy. Down a side street is the Albergo Rosa d'Oro, where for a week I was billeted. The padrone, a little round man, is always smiling. He thinks the war will last three years more and seems pleased at the prospect, for the town and the district round are full of soldiers, and he must be making great profits. But his wife, when one speaks of the war, says "it _must_ end soon; we must go on hoping that it will end soon."

The station, where my fatigue party worked, lies outside the town. When the Austrians provoked war in 1914, they had special trains waiting here to carry away the Italian troops who, they hoped, would go and fight for them against the Russians,--a poor fool's dream! In normal times it must be a quiet place with little traffic. But now there is continual movement, Infantry going up to the front line and often waiting for hours at the station, and other Infantry coming back to rest, goods trains of enormous length pa.s.sing through, motor lorries loading and discharging, driven very skilfully though sometimes very recklessly, horse and mule transport in great variety, both military and civilian, some of the horses wearing straw hats with two holes for the ears, and carts drawn by stolid, slow-moving oxen. With all this coming and going, and with a temperature of over a hundred degrees in the shade, the Albergo della Stazione does a great trade in iced drinks!

I made the acquaintance of two families in this town. At Signor Lazzari's any British officer was always welcome after dinner for music and talk and light refreshments. An Italian General was billeted there and two or three Italian officers of junior rank. A Corporal with a magnificent voice, an operatic singer before the war, came in to sing one night, and a Private from his Battalion played his accompaniment. In Italy, as in France, the art of conversation and a keen joy in it, are still alive, perhaps because Bridge is still almost unknown. Signor Lazzari's handsome and charming daughter was an admirable hostess.

At Signor Burini's I was also most hospitably received and drank some very excellent champagne. I used to talk to his three little girls in the evenings on the ramparts. Signor Burini's mother remembered Garibaldi's visit to Palmanova in 1867, the year after Venetia was liberated from the Austrian yoke and added to United Italy. She was speaking of this one evening to Shield and he said, "It rained very heavily that day, didn't it?" Whereat the old lady, much astonished and evidently suspecting him of some uncanny gift of second sight, replied that indeed it did. But the truth was that he had been reading an account of this historic occasion in a local guide book, which related that, just as Garibaldi came out on a balcony to address the crowd, a heavy thunderstorm broke and the Hero of the Two Worlds only said, "You had all better go home out of the rain."

It can still rain at Palmanova.

One day while I was there the temperature rose to 105 degrees in the shade, but in the evening a cool breeze stirred the dust and I sat outside the Albergo Rosa d'Oro, talking with various pa.s.sers-by. About nine o'clock bright lightning began to fill the sky, but, as yet, no rain. And then about eleven, just after I had gone to bed, came a tremendous drenching thunderstorm and a great whirlwind. And then, very suddenly, all became quiet again, save for the rain-water pouring off the roofs into the street below.

CHAPTER VI

AQUILEIA AND GRADO

On July 22nd, the day before I returned from Palmanova to my Battery, Shield and I and two lorryloads of men made an expedition in the afternoon to Aquileia and Grado. Aquileia, at the height of the old Roman power, was a great and important city, on the main road eastwards from the North Italian plain. It was destroyed and sacked by Attila and his Huns in the year 452, and again in 568 by Alboin and his Lombards.

It was the fugitives from Aquileia and the neighbouring towns, who, taking refuge in the lagoons along the coast, founded upon certain mudbanks in the fifth century the city which was destined to be Venice.

And it was at Grado in the year 466 that the foundations of Venetian const.i.tutional history were laid by the election of tribunes to govern the affairs of the community inhabiting the lagoons.

The two chief features of Aquileia to-day are a museum of Roman antiquities, which I had not time to visit, and a large church, with a bare interior, but with a magnificent eleventh century mosaic floor, one of the best examples of its kind in Italy. The interior of the church was decorated with flowers in sh.e.l.l cases, to signify its reconquest by the Italians, who intend to make here a great national memorial when the war is over. Beside the church, at its eastern end, stood a glorious group of very tall cypresses, one of the best groups I have ever seen, and opposite the western entrance was a charming little avenue of young cypresses, planted since the reconquest. We stayed for half an hour at Aquileia and then went on to Grado.

On the way Shield told me the story of how the British Batteries came to Italy. Our own War Office, as the habit of the tribe is, had wrapped the whole thing up in mystery, and the Batteries were christened "the British Mission" to a destination secret and unnamed. Pa.s.sing through the South of France and up the Arc Valley to the frontier, with the gunners sitting on their guns in open trucks in the sunshine, the trains were loudly cheered by the French who, in that part of the country, had seen few of the sights of war. Once in Italy the official attempts at mystification mystified n.o.body. The engine-drivers at Modane hoisted Union Jacks on their engines and kept them flying all the way.

Everyone knew who we were and where we were going, and at every station where the trains stopped there were official welcomes and immense crowds cheering like mad. At Turin our guns were wreathed in flowers and at Verona the station staff presented a bouquet to the General, on whose behalf Shield made a suitable reply in Italian.

Grado lies on several islands, in its own lagoons. The Austrians were developing it, in a haphazard way, as a watering-place before the war, and there are several large hotels and the beginnings of a Sea Front.

The ca.n.a.ls are filled with fishing boats with brown sails, which seldom put to sea now for fear of mines.

One approaches Grado by a steamer which starts from a little cl.u.s.ter of houses on the mainland known as Belvedere, and takes one down a long channel through a maze of 'wooded islands, one of which is now the Headquarters of an Italian Seaplane Squadron. The islands are thickly clothed with tamarisks and pollarded acacias and stone pines, and are reputed to be somewhat malarial. There is a long beach at Grado, where all the world bathes, and the water is deliciously warm, with a bottom of hard sand. Lying in the water, I could see right round the Gulf of Trieste as far as Capodistria, and straight opposite to me lay Trieste, the Unredeemed City of Italy's Desire, very clear against a background of hills. Through gla.s.ses I could even distinguish the trams running in her streets. I could easily fancy her scarcely a mile away across that sheet of blue sunlit sea. Thus must she often have appeared to Italians fighting and dying by sea and land to reach her, who remained ever just out of reach.

CHAPTER VII

A GRAMOPHONE AND A CHAPLAIN ON THE CARSO

The Battery moved up to its new position on the edge of the Carso on the night of July 25th. The guns were drawn by Italian tractors. It was a long business getting the guns out of their gun pits, as we had not much room for turning, and a still longer one getting them into the new pits, after unhooking the tractors, down a steep slope and round two right-angle turns. Owing to our nearness to the front line no lights could be used and the night was darker than usual. For hours the gun detachments were at work with drag ropes, lowering, guiding and hauling, and the monotonous cry, that every Siege Gunner knows so well, "On the ropes--together--heave!" went echoing round those rocks till 2 a.m. next morning.

This new position of ours was only three hundred yards from the Austrians, though we had between us and them the river Vippacco and a high hill, a spur of that on which the ruined monastery of S. Grado di Merna stood. The trenches here ran on either side of the Vippacco. An Italian Trench Mortar Battery had been here before us and, it was said, had been sh.e.l.led out. But our gun pits, blasted out of the hillside, were almost completely protected against hostile fire, except perhaps from guns on S. Marco, which might, with a combination of good luck and good shooting, have got us in enfilade. Only howitzers capable of employing high-angle fire could usefully occupy such a position, and, as it was, our sh.e.l.ls could not clear the crest except at pretty large elevations. It resulted that we could not hit any targets within a considerable distance of the Austrian front line, but this, we were told, did not matter. We were here, we were informed, "for a special purpose" and for action against distant targets only. There was an orchard on the flat just behind our guns, a little oasis of fertility in that barren land, and wooden crosses marking the graves of some of the Italian Trench Mortar Gunners, who had preceded us.

Italian Field Artillery were in position all around us, and were firing a good deal by night. For the first few nights, with their guns popping off all round, and with blasting operations in full swing, an almost continuous echo travelled round and round the stony hillsides and made me dream that I was sleeping beside a stormy sea breaking in endless waves on a rocky coast. Blasting was going on all day and all night in this neighbourhood. One of our officers was walking one morning on the back of the Carso, out of view of the enemy and antic.i.p.ating no danger, save the stray sh.e.l.l which is always and everywhere a possibility in the war zone, when suddenly the face of an Italian bobbed up from behind a rock with the warning, in English, "Now shoots the mine!" and disappeared again. The Englishman ran for his life and took shelter behind the same rock, and a few seconds later there was a heavy explosion, filling the air with flying fragments, unpleasantly jagged.

Our officers' Mess and sleeping huts were about two hundred yards from the guns and a little higher up the hill, just above one of the magnificent newly-made Italian war roads, along which supplies went up to Hills 123 and 126 and the Volconiac and Dosso Faiti. Just outside our huts and opening on to the road was a broad, natural terrace, with a fine view backwards over the plain. Several times, during our first week in this position, the Austrians sh.e.l.led a British Battery at Rupa about a mile in rear of us and an Italian Battery alongside it. It was very hot and dry and they had been given away by the huge clouds of dust raised by the blast of their guns firing. The Austrians sh.e.l.led them with twelve-inch and nine-four-fives, getting magnificent sh.e.l.l bursts, which some of us photographed, great columns of brown-black smoke, rising mountains high, in the shape of Prince of Wales' feathers, and hanging for about ten minutes in the still air. But very little damage was done, and after a short interval both Batteries opened fire again.

From this terrace of ours we had fine views of fighting in the air. On August 2nd we saw an Austrian plane brought down by two Italians, who dived down upon him from above, firing at him with machine guns as they swept past him. The Austrian, who was flying high, gradually seemed to lose his head and hesitate in what direction to fly, then he began to turn over and over, recovered for a moment, but finally lost all control and came down nose first into his own trenches, just across the river.

Another evening, about ten o'clock, a whole squadron of Austrian planes came over, flying in regular formation and signalling to one another with Morse lamps. They were going, it appeared, to bomb Gradisca. They were heavily sh.e.l.led by the "archies" as they came over us, and several fragments of sh.e.l.l fell on our terrace. The night sky was full of starry sh.e.l.l-bursts, and a dozen of our searchlights fussily got busy. Then suddenly all our artillery, as it seemed, began to go off, and for about five minutes there was a deafening burst of fire from guns of all calibres. And then all grew suddenly quiet again. Perhaps it was a raid, perhaps only the fear of one.

One day an Italian plane dropped some booklets into the Austrian trenches, and some were blown back into our own lines. They contained photographs of Austrian prisoners of war in Italian camps, very contented apparently, and explanations in German, Magyar and various Slav tongues, showing "men who yesterday were living from hour to hour in peril of death, now waiting happily and calmly in perfect safety for the war to end, when they shall return to their homes to embrace once more their wives and little children. Here you will be able to recognise many of your friends." A good propaganda to induce desertions and surrenders! The Italians generally had the mastery over the Austrians in the air. Their machines, and especially their Cap.r.o.nis, could always be distinguished from the Austrians' by the deeper hum of their engines.