With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement Part 14

We joined in the second part of the gas bombardment in the early hours of the 15th of June, and, when this was nearly over, I got orders to fire at my leisure ten rounds of high explosive at "Archibald," which was our code name for a certain Austrian searchlight, which used to sweep round the country from the summit of Monte Mosciagh on the far side of the Plateau. So I fired the ten rounds, and the officer at one of the O.P.'s, whom I had previously warned of my intention, reported that Archibald had gone out after the fourth round, and that, judged by the flashes of their explosions, all the rounds had seemed pretty near.

It was now nearly half-past three, and, conscious that I had a high and rising temperature, I determined to lie down and get a few hours' sleep.

Some of the gas sh.e.l.l which had been intended for the first part of the bombardment, but had arrived about four hours too late, was still being unloaded from lorries on the road outside. But I asked a Corporal to look after this, and send the unloading party to bed as soon as they had finished.

I had just fallen asleep when the Corporal awakened me. Were the men, he asked, to go on unloading the sh.e.l.l? Still half asleep, I asked why not?

He said that the road was being sh.e.l.led. I pulled myself together and went to the door of the Command Post. Not only the road, but the whole Battery position and apparently the whole area for some distance round, was being bombarded very violently. So I ordered every one to take cover. It was just 3.45 a.m.

I thought for a moment that this was merely Austrian retaliation for our first use of gas and for the shots at Archibald. In fact, it was the beginning of the big Austrian offensive, which had long been prearranged. During the last few days the Austrians had brought up a large number of new guns to our sector, and had placed a number of them right out in the open. And owing to the thick fog our airmen had been able to see nothing. The bombardment continued with great fury for several hours, with guns of all calibres, but fortunately mostly small, with shrapnel, high explosive, and gas, chiefly lacrimatory, but mixed with a certain quant.i.ty of lethal. Luckily we had pretty good cover, mainly _caverne_ blasted in the rock. The Command Post itself was proof against anything less than a direct hit from a pretty heavy sh.e.l.l. It was also supposed to be gas proof, but was not. I collected about half a dozen men in it who had nowhere else to go, including two A.S.C. lorry drivers.

Early on, a young Bombardier was. .h.i.t rather badly in the leg just outside. We brought him into the Command Post, bandaged his wound and laid him on the camp bed, on which I had been hoping to get some sleep, and there left him till the sh.e.l.ling should abate and it should be reasonably safe to carry him to the dressing-station a quarter of a mile away. He lay there, I remember, looking like a little tired cherub, and another Bombardier sat beside him and tried to persuade him to go to sleep. They were very great friends, those two boys, both signallers, and inseparable both on and off duty. The one who was not wounded went out that same morning and spent hours repairing telephone lines under very heavy fire, for which act he won the Military Medal. The other, months later, when his wound was healed and he had returned to the Battery, also won the Military Medal for gallantry on the Piave.

The conduct of the two lorry drivers afforded a strong contrast in psychology. One, a man of middle age, was superbly cheerful. "They can't keep this up much longer," he said several times with a placid smile, "they haven't the stuff to do it." The other, though younger, was a bunch of visible nerves. A sh.e.l.l exploded just behind the Command Post and violently shook the whole structure and a storm of stones. .h.i.t the log framework. He collapsed on the floor, and was convinced for a couple of minutes that he had been hit, and for some time after that he was suffering from sh.e.l.l shock.

Such illusions come easily at such times. A gas sh.e.l.l made a direct hit on one of our smaller dug-outs. A Sergeant inside was badly ga.s.sed. They put him for the moment in a gas-proof shelter, higher up the hill, and several hours later I saw him being carried away on a stretcher, apparently lifeless. But he finally pulled through. A gunner who was with him in the dug-out came running into the Command Post crying out that he also was ga.s.sed. I made him lie flat on the floor, and told him to keep as quiet as he could. And then I watched his breathing. It was clear after a minute or two that, if he had had a breath of gas at all, it was only of the slightest. But, when I told him this, he was very unwilling to believe me. Another man was. .h.i.t just outside, and lay on the ground screaming like an animal in pain. Him, too, we carried into the Command Post, and, later, on a stretcher to the dressing station.

Meanwhile all the telephone lines had gone owing to the sh.e.l.ling, cutting us off from Brigade, other Batteries and O.P.'s. But intermittent communication was maintained by runners, and signallers were out, hour after hour, mending breaks in the line and showing their invariable gallantry. Till about six o'clock our orders were to lie low, to keep under cover and not to open fire. The rain of sh.e.l.ls continued without slackening. We were wonderfully lucky to get off as lightly as we did. It is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of war, how many sh.e.l.ls can fall in a position of no great size, and yet do very little damage. It was estimated, and I think quite soberly, that at least two thousand rounds were pumped into our Battery position that morning.

It was soon after six that we got orders, pa.s.sed along from the next Battery up the road, to open fire on our "counter-preparation target."

This was a sign that the advance of the Austrian Infantry had either begun, or was thought to be imminent. They attacked, in fact, about a quarter to seven on our sector. Their synchronising was faulty, as between the different sectors attacked. Some went forward earlier and others later than had been intended. They were all newly equipped and were carrying full packs and blankets on their backs. They had been told by their officers that this was to be the last great offensive of the war, that they were going to drive us headlong down the mountain side, that after two days they would be in Verona, and after ten days in Rome.

They were not told that they had British troops in front of them. They came forward bravely and with great determination, in five successive waves.

On the British left Divisional Front, to the west of us, they gained a large initial success, and pushed us back well behind our first line of guns. Here for some time the situation looked serious. But next day strong counter-attacks by British and Italian troops restored the line, our lost guns were retaken and the retreating Austrians suffered great slaughter and demoralisation.

On the British right Divisional Front, in support of which our Brigade was operating, the British 23rd Division fought a fight worthy of their high reputation. Forced back for a while from their front line trenches, after a prolonged and intense bombardment and by an overwhelming superiority of numbers, they never even fell back to their support line.

But, turning on the enemy who was advancing along and astride the San Sisto road, they drove him back and re-established their own front line within six hours of the first attack. It was here that a boy Colonel, a Sherwood Forester scarcely twenty-one years old, won the V.C. and fell severely wounded. When things looked black, he had organised the defence and the subsequent counter-attack, collecting together British Infantrymen of several Battalions, together with British Artillerymen and Italian Machine-Gunners and Engineers, welding them into a coherent force and making swift, yet well thought out, dispositions which did much to save the situation.

On the right of the British, the French Infantry, though furiously a.s.saulted, never, I believe, budged an inch. On the right of the French, the Italians were momentarily driven from Col Valbella, Col del Rosso and Col d'Echele, which they had won in January, but retook all three a few days later.

But we in the Battery knew nothing of all this at the time. We knew only that we had to open fire on our counter-preparation target. The gunpit of our No. 1 gun near the cross-roads was in low-lying ground, now so full of gas that one could hardly see one's hand before one's face.

Fortunately we could achieve the rate of fire required by using three guns only, so we left No. 1 out of action for the time. The enemy's bombardment, as far as we were concerned, was beginning to slacken a little, but was still heavy. The Major, out on the road with a signaller mending wire, was. .h.i.t in the face with shrapnel. It turned out, happily, not a serious wound, but at the time it looked less hopeful. He went down the mountains in the same Field Ambulance with the young Colonel of the Sherwood Foresters, of whom I have already spoken.

There was an abandoned Field Ambulance in the road, half in the ditch, with the engine still running. The driver had found the sh.e.l.ling too hot to stay. There was no one inside it, but we got a couple of stretchers from it. And we had need of them. No. 4 gun, my own gun, which was nearest to the road, suffered most severely. Seven of the detachment on this gun were hit, not all at once but, what is apt to be much more demoralising, at intervals of a few minutes. A Bombardier was in charge of the gun that day, no senior N.C.O.'s being available. He showed a very wonderful coolness and courage. Sh.e.l.ls were bursting all round the gunpit, and sometimes in the gunpit itself. But the rate of fire never slackened. Every now and again the cry was heard "another casualty on No. 4!" and stretcher bearers would start down the road from the Command Post. But, each time, almost before they had started, came the deep report of another round fired. No casualties and no sh.e.l.ling could silence her. At one time this Bombardier had only two other men to help him work the gun. And both of them were as undismayed as he. He won the Military Medal for his gallantry that day, and I was very proud of him and of No. 4.

The Brigade Chaplain appeared in the course of the morning and gave a hand in carrying the wounded away on stretchers. It was outside his official work and I give him all credit and respect for the help he gave us. But one N.C.O. in the Battery, with the plain speaking that comes naturally in the face of common danger, said to him, "Well, Sir, we never thought much of you before, either as a man or as a preacher, but we're glad to see you here to-day doing your bit."

The Austrian gunners had a fine sense of discrimination in their targets. The wooden hut, in which I and two of my brother officers used to sleep, had been hit two or three times that day, and much of our kit had been destroyed. So had both volumes of Morley's _Rousseau_, which were on a shelf over my bed, leaving behind only a few torn and scattered pages. Much damage had also been done to a collection of Pompeian photographs of great historical interest. But Baedeker's _Northern Italy_, which lay alongside, had not been touched!

The G.o.d of Battles also discriminates delicately. He takes the best and leaves the worst behind. There died that day, struck by a sh.e.l.l at the foot of our tree O.P. on Cima del Taglio, one of the finest personalities in the Battery, a signalling Bombardier who had worked for some years on a railway in America and, just before the war, as a railway clerk in the Midlands. He was the father of a young family, thoughtful and capable, and loyal without subservience to those of higher military rank, in so far as he judged them to be worthy of his loyalty. I remember one night at the beginning of the year, when we were keeping watch together among the snows at Col d'Astiago, with the sky cold and clear and full of stars, and when he and I talked in complete understanding and agreement of the waste of war and the deeper purposes of life and the need to build up a better world. Now he is buried in the beautiful Baerenthal Valley, along which runs the road from Pria dell'

Acqua to San Sisto and Asiago.

As that day ended, which the Italians always afterwards spoke of as "il giorno quindici" (the fifteenth day), the firing on both sides in our sector slackened, though our guns were seldom silent for more than an hour at a time, and the Austrians still carried out sudden bursts of vicious fire in our neighbourhood. But that night, and the next day and the next, we began to get through information of what had been happening all along the line. And when, a week later, the whole tale could be told, it was evident that no great offensive on any Front during this war, prepared with so great elaboration and carried out with so great resources, had ever quite so blankly failed, as the great Austrian offensive from the Astico to the Sea. And the effect upon the self-confidence and morale of the Italian Army and of the Allied contingents was correspondingly great. For, to speak frankly, this offensive had been awaited with much apprehension and anxiety, with the memory of Caporetto not yet faded and in view of the success of the German offensive in France.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

IN THE TRENTINO

The Austrian offensive on the mountain sector, from the Astico to Monte Grappa, had been obviously and decisively broken by the 18th of June.

But there was still danger on the plain, particularly in the Montello sector, where the Austrians were established in strong force west of the Piave. A flying Brigade of British Heavy Artillery was hurriedly formed and sent down the mountains. Of this Brigade my own Battery formed part.

Our general function was to reinforce the Italian Artillery in what was at the moment the most critical sector of the whole Front, our particular function to destroy by sh.e.l.l fire the Piave bridges behind the Austrian troops. But when we arrived we found that the emergency had already pa.s.sed. The bridges had already been destroyed by airmen and Italian Artillery, and the Austrian forces had either been driven back across or into the river by Italian counter-attacks, or had been cut off and compelled to surrender. We, therefore, came back to the Plateau without firing a round.

But we did not remain there long. The idea of a mobile Artillery of manoeuvre was much talked of at this time, and early in July a Brigade consisting of three British Siege Batteries, my own included, was moved westwards up into the Trentino. We travelled all the way by road, through Verona up to Brescia, "the eagle that looks over Lombardy," and thence beside Lake Idro, up the Val Chiese, past Storo into the Val D'Ampola.

All this last stretch of country is famous in Italian history as the scene of Garibaldi's campaign of 1866, which, had it not been interrupted by the course of events elsewhere, would probably have hastened the liberation of Trento by more than half a century, and greatly modified the problems of Italian policy in recent years. The story is well known of the recall of Garibaldi, which reached him at the moment of victory at Bezzecca, and of his famous reply, a model of laconic self-discipline, in the one word "Ubbidisco"--"I obey." The little town of Bezzecca lay this July behind the Italian lines, but in full view and easy range of the Austrians. A company of Arditi was billeted here, with whom I lunched one day, returning from a front line reconnaissance. The Piazza had been renamed by the Italians "Piazza Ubbidisco," and under cover of darkness they set up one night on the mountain side just above the town a memorial stone to Garibaldi and his volunteers of 1866, a provocative target for Austrian gunners.

No other British troops, except these three Batteries of ours, ever fought in the Trentino. It was a proud distinction and a very memorable experience. The natural scenery was superb, a series of great mountain ranges, uneven lines of jagged peaks, enclosing deep cut valleys, the lower slopes of the mountains densely wooded, the higher levels bare precipitous rock. The Austrian front line ran along one ridge of peaks and ours along another; between ran a deep valley, all No Man's Land, into which patrols used to climb down at night, often with the aid of ropes. One mountain ma.s.s, a continuation of Cima d'Oro, was partly in our possession and partly in theirs, and up there by night among the rocks patrols grappled for the mastery, poised high above the world, and in these struggles men sometimes slipped, or were thrown, to crash to death thousands of feet below in the Val di Ledro.

This country was Austrian before the war, though inhabited wholly by Italians, and Italian troops had conquered it with extraordinary feats of endurance and daring in their first great onrush all along their old frontiers in the spring of 1915. But now a big advance here by either side, in the face of carefully prepared opposition, seemed almost inconceivable, except as the result of some wide turning movement, hinging on some point many miles away.

The special military problems presented by warfare in such country were numerous and difficult. Our guns had to be dragged into position up a rough mountain track, which at some points was too narrow and at others too weak to allow the pa.s.sage of a six-inch howitzer without much preliminary blasting and building up. Our first gun to go up took twenty-four hours of continuous labour between the time of starting up the track and the time of arriving in position, a distance of only about two miles of zig-zag. No tractor or other power engine could be used here. The only force available was that of men hauling on drag ropes, and a party of sixty Italian gunners reinforced our men.

What may be called the problems of pure gunnery were still more difficult. British Heavy guns had never fired under such conditions before and, for the benefit of such of my readers as may be practical Artillerymen, it may be interesting to remark that for one of our targets the angle of sight, properly so called, worked out at more than twenty degrees, while the map-range elevation was only about fifteen.

The devising of an accurate formula for correction of elevation for a large "_dislivello_," as the Italians shortly call it, which in English means a large "difference of level" between a gun and its target, is one of the most intricate problems of theoretical gunnery, or, for that matter, of theoretical mechanics, involving, among other factors, the various shapes and sizes of projectiles, their comparative steadiness during flight, the resistance of the air, and the effect of other atmospheric conditions and of the force of gravity.

There was a splendid opportunity for systematically testing various rival formulae in the Trentino, but it was allowed to slip. Among gunners, as among other cla.s.ses, and especially among Regular Army gunners, the so-called practical man sees little value in scientific experiments, which do not produce large, obvious and quick returns. We fired many hundred rounds in the Trentino and I have no doubt that they were tolerably effective. But most of them were fired at night, with no observation possible, and we were often restricted in our registrations by daylight to four rounds a section per target, from which no really reliable conclusions could be drawn.[1]

[Footnote 1: We could get no help from Italian range tables, which were not merely for different guns and ammunition, but were drawn up on different principles from our own.]

We were billeted in the village of Tiarno di Sotto, where the Mayor under the Austrian regime, an Italian by race, was still carrying on his duties. "But I shall have to disappear, if the Austrians ever come back," he said with a smile. It was a tremendous climb from our billets to get anywhere, the least tremendous being to our Battery position, straight up the nearest mountain side. A very active and energetic man could get up in a quarter of an hour. It used to take me twenty minutes.

The weather, moreover, was hot, though considerably cooler than on the plains.

Some Czecho-Slovaks were billeted in the next house to ours, but, owing to lack of a common language, we were unfortunately unable to talk to them. They were well-built fellows, and gave one an impression of great tenacity and intelligence. And I know that they were fine fighters. But they had not the gaiety of the Italians, partly perhaps because they were exiles in a strange land, and must so remain till the day of final victory, which might then have seemed still infinitely remote. An amusing incident happened one evening. Four officers had deserted from the Austrian lines and surrendered to the Czecho-Slovaks; it was one of their military functions to induce surrenders. Two of these officers were themselves Czecho-Slovaks, the third a Jugo-Slav and the fourth an Italian from Istria. They were very hungry and were in the midst of a good meal, in the presence of a Czecho-Slovak guard, when a Corporal and two gunners from our Battery, pa.s.sing outside the house and hearing some language being spoken within, which they recognised to be neither English not Italian, rightly thought it their duty to enter and investigate the matter. The deserters were astonished to see these unfamiliar looking persons, speaking a strange tongue and wearing a uniform which they had never seen before. But they were still more astonished to learn that they were British. They seemed hardly to be aware that the British were at war with Austria, much less that any British troops had been within hundreds of miles of them. The incident closed in much mirth and friendliness.

In the village were also billeted many Italian troops, who used to fill the night with song, long after most of us had gone to bed:--

"'Addio, mia bell', addio!'

Cantava nel partir la gioventu,"

which is never very far from the lips of any Italian soldier, and those endless _stornelli_, which to an invariable tune they multiply from day to day.

"II General Cadorna Mangiava la bifstecca; Ai poveri soldati Si dava castagna secca,"[1]

[Footnote 1: "General Cadorna used to eat beefsteak. To the poor soldiers they gave dried chestnuts."]

or

"Il Re dal fronte Giulio Ha scritto alla Regina, 'Arrivato a Trieste Ti mander una cartolina,'"[1]

[Footnote 1: "The King has written to the Queen from the Julian Front 'when I get to Trieste, I will send you a picture post card.'"]

with its sardonic variant or sequel,

"Il General Cadorna Ha scritto alla Regina 'Se vuoi veder Trieste, Compra una cartolina.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: "General Cadorna has written to the Queen, 'if you want to see Trieste, buy a picture post card.'"]