Part 11
In the disordered crowd of men that lies at the foot of the slope is a commotion that defies the efforts of the officers. In vain do they, knowing what is about to occur, endeavour to form a regular line of attack up the ravine, as, from those who are still swarming down the other side, arises one hoarse, savage cry that dominates the crash of rifle-volleys. It is the battle-cry of a primitive people that spontaneously clutches its primitive weapon in this awakening of its oldest instincts, this plunge into the æon-old chaos where man thirsts for the blood of man. "Na Nos! Na Nos!" comes the cry from a thousand throats, reiterated endlessly by frenzied men whose faces are deathly white or inflamed with blood. "Na Nos! Na Nos!" from parched mouths, from dry, cracked lips the shout issues, overpowering the orders of the officers. The bloodshot eyes that protrude with wild hatred at the trench no longer see those officers. It is a savage horde merely, in which the modern military hierarchy is lost, obliterated by an intensely individual lust to slay as their ancestors slew. "Na Nos! Na Nos!" "With the knife! With the knife!" What matters it that the knife is at the end of a rifle? It is still a knife, the primordial weapon. With an angry roar, the mass, no longer to be restrained, rushes madly up the slope.
With an answering crash the rifle-fire from the trench leaps to a climax. The men up there are firing for their lives. In the horde upon the slope is an appalling massacre. Heedless of it, blind to it, the mass surges upward, happily forgetful of the cartridges in their own rifles, mindful only of the blade that gleams at the muzzle. They see a line of faces, white behind countless spurts of flame. With one fierce roar they hurl themselves upon them. Men in grey-blue spring up and dash away or turn and run at them bayonet to bayonet. The attacking line howls in the joy of butchery--"_Na Nos!_"
PER LA PIÙ GRANDE ITALIA!
The hot sun of a morning in early summer beat down upon the narrow street of a little North Italian town. Down the long, confined vista of colonnaded shopfronts, hung with striped awnings of warm hue, the air quivered above the cobbles, troubled the view of an arched, square-turreted gateway which barred the street. The sky above was a long strip of intense azure. Sharp to the left, near at hand, was the roughly-paved piazza, white-fronted Venetian-shuttered houses looking out to the large round basin, the weather-worn Triton, of the fountain where the pigeons, flashing in the sun, circled down to drink. A group of girls, bare-armed, black-haired, skirts turned up over vividly-coloured petticoats, water-jars underneath the gush from the Triton's mouth, or poised already upon the graceful head, stood laughing and chattering about the fountain. Their gaze was unanimously turned towards the large building, the words _Palazzo Municipale_ over its arcaded front, which occupied one side of the square. Carved on that front, beneath the clock, defaced but not entirely obliterated, might yet be made out the double-eagle of Austria--a memento of a tyranny that had fled before a passionate patriotism, to entrench itself, not far distant, high on the crag and glacier of the eagles' haunts, ready to swoop. But not to that did the merry, whispering girls dart their flirtatious glances. The two grey-uniformed Bersagliere sentries, strutting up and down before the building, superb under the drooping cocks' feathers of their grey-covered tilted hats, were for once immune. A handsome young officer, black-moustached, dark-eyed, who stood, one foot upon the running-board of a car that hummed ready to start, in conversation with another officer, was the point of interest. Both officers, clad in the grey field-service uniform, wore upon their arm the brassard which indicated that they were of the Staff. The officer on the point of departure wore the badges of captain; he who was giving him his final instructions was a _tenente colonello_ (lieutenant-colonel).
"You quite understand what the General wants, don't you, Ricci?" he said, using the familiar "_tu_," universal between Italian officers. "As soon as possible after the position is captured, a report on its possibilities for field artillery if we can advance to the covering ridge. The General thinks it will command the valley road up from the railway. You will see. Don't get buried under an avalanche!"
"Very good, colonel. I quite understand." He saluted--a quick movement of the hand horizontally below the peak of the képi, palm downwards, as though shading the sight, in the Italian fashion--and jumped into the car. He pushed to one side a heavy fur coat, settled himself. A moment later the car was humming out of the square, spinning down the long colonnaded street.
In front of him loomed the heavy mediæval gateway, square above its arch. Its ordinarily forbidding gloomy aspect was lost in a generous decoration of green boughs, a trophy of Italian flags, red, white and green, above a white-crossed shield, a great inscription--"Per la più grande Italia!"[2] The battle-cry of Italy's greatest modern poet--the cry that had rung beseeching, dominating, inspiring, through dithyramb after dithyramb of the wonderful passionate orations by which he had wakened the glowing soul of the people into flame, was blazoned here as everywhere in Italy. Under that gateway thousands of Italy's sons had marched to conflict with the _Tedeschi_, to the redemption of their brethren; thousands more would march. And those to come would shout as those who had gone had shouted: "_Per la più grande Italia! Evviva Italia!_" The captain, glancing up at it ere the car shot under the dark arch, carried the inscription marked upon his brain through the obscurity. Familiar enough, he reperceived its meaning with a thrill. What mattered the little individual life he was hurrying to risk? "_Per la più grande Italia!_"
The car sped along a road on the left side of a pleasant valley. In front, immediately claiming the eye, a range of Alpine peaks, dark rock-scars breaking their dazzling whiteness, exquisitely delicate and fine-drawn as perceived through the warm atmosphere, towered in lofty austerity into the rich unvarying blue of the sky. The road, thick with dust, climbed towards them in long loops and bold curves. Close upon its left, dark woodland descended, masking ever and anon the distant prospect behind a shoulder of the hills. To the right, across the green valley where the cattle stood hock-deep in flowers, village after village--yellow-ochre and burnt-red, its slant-roofed campanile high above the flat houses--clustered itself upon an eminence or nestled low down to the valley stream. Viewing the scene of quiet bucolic prosperity it was difficult to imagine that among the silent peaks in the background lurked the terrors of war; men embattled for mutual destruction.
Along the road creaked and squealed clumsy country-carts drawn by oxen with patient heads bowed to the yoke. They hoofed the dust with the unhurried motion of centuries of tradition in their toil, careless of the goad of the barefooted _contadina_ crying them to hasten, to turn aside to allow passage for impatiently hooting motor-lorries. In strange contrast of locomotion, column after column of lumbering mechanical transport rushed down from the mountains in a smother of dust and petrol-fumes. Column after column proceeding upward was overtaken and passed by the captain's car. Ever in front towered the range of glittering peaks, in unshakable, eternal calm. Yet from somewhere among their solitudes came a distant, faint roar that was not the roar of nature's thunder.
The road had climbed high. The valley was narrower. The orchards sloping to its stream were white with fruit-blossoms. The air was rarefied but still hot under the direct rays of the sun. The dark woods of oak gave place to darker woods of pine. The road swept round in sharp curves on low-parapeted stone bridges above a rushing torrent. Bare green slopes, strewn with grey boulders, opened between the woods. The car overtook a long marching column of Alpini crunching the dust under heavily nailed boots, pack high upon the shoulders, alpenstock as well as rifle, sweating profusely yet pressing upwards with quick step, the eagle's feather in their soft hats still jaunty. It was the rear battalion of a brigade whose units were successively overtaken and passed.
The road swung to the right round the head of the valley which here commenced in a sheer drop. As the car followed it there was a sudden spurt of flame, a drifting tawny smoke, in the dark depths to the right. A tremendous, shattering detonation that re-echoed endlessly down the valley ceased at last, leaving audible the eerie moaning of a great shell speeding upwards over the mountains, already far away. Another such flash and detonation followed the first. Looking over the side of the car, the captain perceived, deep down, the long barrel of a monster gun nosing upwards, men tiny about it. A second gun was depressed, a crane-slung shell hovering near its breech. Once more there was a crash--a series of distracted conflicting echoes that shattered the Alpine silence as thick glass is starred and fractured. In the sky above the valley an eagle beat the air with heavy, violent wings, startled into a vertical climb, and then glided swiftly with outstretched pinions downwards to its crag.
The road still ascended, left the valley, climbed tortuously a rocky spur, thinly grassed. The car took the gradient slowly, noisily, on second speed. In front, struggling on the brow of the spur, a column of "caterpillar" tractors drawing the component parts of a battery of heavy howitzers distributed on trucks rattled and detonated like machine-guns in full action. The battery personnel, harnessed to long ropes, hauled and strained at the leading piece in an effort to facilitate the passage of the steep crest. Before the war the boldest artilleryman would have scouted the possibility of such heavy ordnance at this height among the mountains. But the battery was only entering upon the area of its severest toil.
On the crest of the spur the road turned to the left, climbed at an easier angle. The view, hitherto much masked by closely overhanging slopes, opened out. To right and left the gaze plunged into blue depths, fell on miniature woods and thin white strips that were roads. Far away on either hand the mountain ranges lifted themselves, superb, into the blue sky. But directly in front the higher peaks were not seen. A sheer wall of dark rock barred the view as effectually as it seemed to bar further progress.
At the foot of the precipice was a stationary column of motor-lorries, tiny by comparison with the towering mountain. The road went straight up to it. The captain in the car bestirred himself, picked up his heavy fur coat. Far away and high above was a prolonged rumbling roar that seemed to re-echo from invisible walls in the upper atmosphere. Involuntarily the captain raised his eyes. The blue sky was untroubled.
Upon the face of the rock--which leaned back less precipitously than had appeared--swarmed hundreds of grey-uniformed engineers. They were laying a pathway of heavy timber, erecting huge sheers, arranging a complicated tackle of thick rope and large pulleys. Back along the road the first of the heavy pieces for which this hoisting apparatus was in preparation lumbered already into sight.
This tackle was not the only feature on the precipice. A little further along, at the centre of the line of lorries, a light cantilever steel standard was connected by drooping wire ropes to the summit. Suspended from those ropes by a running-gear of pulleys a little car was gliding steadily upwards, another coming down. It was the _Teleferica_--the famous wire-rope railway, that, many times multiplied, made modern war possible at these high altitudes.
Ammunition in boxes was being unloaded from the lorries, stacked on the roadside near the _Teleferica_. The downward-gliding car was seized by a group of waiting men, steadied, stopped, quickly loaded with the boxes.
The staff-captain's motor drew up. He descended, walked towards the _Teleferica_, exchanged a salute with the dapper little ammunition officer superintending the work.
"_Buon' giorno, signor capitano_," said the little lieutenant. "Are you going up to see the attack?"
The captain nodded.
"Ah! Some people have all the luck! I never see anything. My battery never has any casualties--and here am I left supernumerary. I might as well be mountaineering for my pleasure!" He drew a lugubrious grimace of comic, half-sincere self-pity.
The captain struggled into his heavy fur coat, apparently superfluous here in the fierce heat which glowed from the rock in the noonday sun.
"A glass of wine before you ascend, _capitano_!" said the lieutenant. "Come, I will take no denial!"
He led the way to a little wooden shack close under the lee of the precipice. Within, the walls were decorated with a number of scathingly satirical drawings of the _Tedeschi_; some extremely clever studies of the mountains in their different aspects of light--sunset and dawn, moonlight. The host, perceiving the captain's glance, made a deprecatory gesture.
"What I am reduced to, _signor capitano_! And I might be blowing the Austrians out of their eyries!" He was typical of that new Italy which, while it cannot cease to be artistic, holds all of small account that is not war against the Austrian. He filled the glasses, raised his own, half turned to a portrait of Gabriele d'Annunzio that shared with the King the honours of the wall. "_Per la più grande Italia!_"
"_Per la più grande Italia!_" Both officers drank the toast. "To-morrow morning she will be a little greater if the fates are kind," added the captain.
A few minutes later he was lying full-length in a narrow low-sided cage, suspended from a pulley on a thick wire-rope, and being hauled up, with much creaking and strident protest of the pulley-wheel and vicious jerking of the loose rope, to the summit of the cliff.
There he was again in a scene of activity. Broad-shouldered porters in frayed and much-worn Territorial uniforms were bearing away the ammunition boxes that had arrived at the summit, carrying them towards the next station of the _Teleferica_. The captain followed in their track.
The wire-rope railway ran in short sections from station to station. The gaps between the sections--stretches of comparatively level ground--were filled by the sturdy Alpine porters or, in the case of longer distances, by pack-mules. It was the line of communications to the sector of the front immediately ahead--a front that for the most part of 450 miles is thrust out amid the eternal snows of lofty mountains, along the edges of deep chasms, upon the knife-ridges of _arêtes_, across the Arctic desolation of glacier and _neve_. Over it was transported food and ammunition, light guns, clothing, equipment, all the necessaries for an army in action. By it descended the wounded and the sick, the unwanted stores.
Over section after section the staff-captain passed, ascending higher and ever higher towards his goal. About him rose the great peaks, their robes of snow dazzling white under the sun, splendidly superior to the ragged army of stunted pines that sought to climb them, last lost sentinels straggling half submerged in the snow. Up sheer rock-faces whence birds of prey darted frightened from their nests, over deep chasms where he looked down to a dark profundity of pines and rushing streams, over great empty fields of snow far away beneath him on which zigzagged long lines of tiny black figures insignificant in the immensity, bearing burdens, upward and ever upward to the regions where snow and ice reign in eternal winter, the _Teleferica_ bore him. And ever between the stations there were throngs of busy men, more and more thickly clad at each successive height, who marched under heavy loads.
Always there was a thunder rolling among the mountains. From apparently inaccessible crags dark against the blue, from bare snow ridges, from bleak white wastes where there seemed nothing to detain the eye, spurted little darts of flame, drifted faint smoke. Detonations came in sharp direct cracks, fantastically re-echoed; in a long rumbling angry mutter from the more distant guns. From steep mountain-sides, avalanches, loosened by the concussions, rushed downwards in a white smoke of flying snow, their thunders rivalling the persistent artillery.
The staff-captain dallied not. The bombardment which was to prepare the way for the attack had already commenced. He hurried over the intervening spaces between the wire-rope stations, ascended higher and ever higher in the little dangling cages.
It was afternoon when he reached the limit of the _Teleferica_--a little snow-covered hut on a desolate ledge. Here, sheeted down from the weather, stacks of supplies awaited further transportation. It was the depot of the quartermaster of the battalion holding the sector. An Alpino soldier, thickly clad, was in waiting to act as guide.
The staff-captain borrowed an alpenstock from the quartermaster and set out. In front of him stretched a great smooth slope of snow that ascended until, high above him, it cut--in sharp contrast--across the blue of the sky. Its whiteness was blinding--the captain fitted on a pair of darkened spectacles. Far across it, dark dots strung like beads on an invisible thread, a company of soldiers was marching in a long single file zigzagged over the snow, climbing to the crest. Nearer at hand to the right, vivid spurts of yellow flame shot out from mounds of snow aligned at a little distance from each other. The detonations of the battery came crisply to the ear, predominant over the rumble and roll and confused echoes of the general bombardment.
As the captain followed his guide up the vast empty slope he heard a long plaintive whining in the air, descending a scale of tones. It had not ceased when over to his right a great fountain of snow leaped skywards from the field--subsided leaving a smother of dirty smoke. The whine finished in an ugly rush, a muffled detonation. Another and another followed, in each case the visible effects of the shell's explosion preceding the noise of its arrival. The Austrian batteries were replying.
The echoing thunder of the bombardment continued all through the dreary fatiguing climb up the slope of snow. The higher peaks began to throw long blue shadows across its whiteness, their argent heads to be suffused with gold.
The ridge to which they climbed was not, after all, the summit. There was another, yet higher, whence splintered crags serrated the sky. They reached it, stood among rocky pinnacles.
"_Attenzione, signor capitano!_" said the guide. "It is dangerous to linger!"
Followed by the captain he swung himself round a jut of rock, dropped into a trench excavated deeply in the snow. As they dropped a couple of ugly "_phutts!_" just above their heads explained the warning.
The Alpino grinned.
"Tirolese!" he said. "We could have gone round by a safer way, _signor capitano_, but their snipers do not often hit if one is quick."
The deep trench, in cold blue shadow through the gilded surface of the snow, descended the ridge at a gentle angle to the summit. It emerged into another trench that ran roughly parallel to the ridge. This was filled with soldiers who, well below the high parapet, larked with one another, threw snowballs, wrestled and laughed. They were keeping themselves warm during their enforced wait. Every one of them was garbed in a thick white outer coat, with a hood. This was the main trench; these were the men who presently were going to attack.
On steps cut in the parapet stood sentries, peering towards the enemy. The captain ceded to an impulse of curiosity, interrupted his hurried progress towards the battalion advanced headquarters, mounted to the side of one of these sentries, looked out.
About him was a sea of mountains, their lower flanks in cold blue light, their snow-covered peaks orange against the azure sky. Immediately in front of him were the nearly submerged stakes, the snow-thickened upper wires, of wide entanglements. Beyond them stretched the confused, humped and fractured white surface of a high glacier. On the other side of it was again a snow ridge, and in front of that ridge could be discerned a belt of wire entanglements--the enemy's. In the midst of that entanglement, and all up the snow to the ridge, leaped fountain after fountain of white snow, momentarily brilliant against the sky, falling back into a persistent cloud of dark smoke. The noise of the explosions overwhelmed the roar of the guns behind. The preparatory bombardment was in full swing.
Warfare in the high Alps, with their difficult communications, is necessarily carried on by comparatively small bodies of men. The vast masses of the Western and Eastern fronts could not possibly be maintained among the crags and glaciers of the Italian frontier. Operations by single battalions have all the importance of a divisional attack elsewhere. In this case one battalion had been allotted the task of storming and retaining the enemy's position.
In the little low timber hut sunk beneath the snow-level which was the battalion headquarters, the captain found the colonel commanding the regiment in conference with the local commander and the company leaders. The atmosphere of the cramped interior was thick with the exhalations of the half-dozen men, warm with the heat of a petrol-stove. Capitano Ricci saluted the colonel, was received affably. A pair of keen eyes under level brows appraised him, smiled upon him. For his benefit the colonel recapitulated.
"The plan is briefly this. The artillery is cutting the wire and shelling the trenches immediately in front of us. The Austrians of course will assume that we are going to attack there. They will keep strong reserves at hand in the vicinity--as strong as they can, for we know that there is no very large force opposite. The artillery is making it difficult to bring up the reserves from the rear. All their communications are under fire. Now, we hope that the enemy will concentrate on the damaged trench in front of us. The attack is being made by four companies. One company will advance at 9 p.m., using every precaution not to be seen, and will cross the glacier at an angle to its right. It will fall upon the enemy's trench here"--he indicated a spot on the left of the enemy's position as marked on a plan spread over the table. "It should effect a surprise as the enemy will be far from expecting an attack on a part of the line which has not been bombarded at all. Directly that attack gets into the trench it will turn to the left and continue to press on as hard as possible. If it is progressing well it will send up a green rocket. If it is in difficulties it will send up a red rocket. The second company will advance to within about a hundred metres of the trench that has been bombarded. There it will halt. If matters go as I expect them to, the company on the right will send up a green rocket. Then the Austrians, realising that they have made a mistake, will rush up their men from the damaged sector and put up a resistance. The green light will be followed by a red one which will automatically indicate that the enemy's reserves are engaged. _Whenever that red light goes up_, whether preceded by a green one or not, the second company will rush the trench in front of it. I hope that it will find it thinly held. The third company will advance, with every precaution, at 9.30 p.m. in support of the second company. The fourth company I will retain as general reserve under my command. The men will be served with hot cocoa at 8.30 p.m. Is that quite clear, gentlemen?"