XXI
THE SPECTACULAR ITALIAN FRONT
ONE of the most important battle fronts in Europe is the Italian. It has, however, been regarded, for the most part, with a lagging interest until, last August, the tremendously successful offensive on Monte San Gabriele and the Carso Plateau was carried out. Then the world sat up and took notice.
Italy had been quietly working along with incredible industry against her age-long foe, Austria, and had broken suddenly loose with a big push that netted her chunks of important territory and a full army corps of prisoners. People began at once to say:
"Shouldn't be surprised if, after all, here is a vital point to thrust at the central confederacy. I'd like to see this Italian front."
I freely confess that this was my own attitude of mind. So I immediately applied for *fn*
*The writer sees no reason to alter these chapters concerning the Italian front in spite of recent events. There can be no doubt that a great opportunity has here been lost through lack of team play on the part of the Allies. permission to visit the battle lines about Trieste.
Such permission was not difficult to obtain; for Italy is justly proud of her achievements and is rightly anxious that the world should know of them. So long has she prepared and labored in silence that, now she has begun to reap the fruits of her labors, she feels she ought to get the due credit for them. She is altogether right.
Everybody that knows Italy loves Italy; and she has had the sympathy of the cultivated world since the days of Metternich. Her heroes and patriots, her Garibaldis and her Cavours, have commanded the heart beats of all westerners outside of the Teutonic tribes for more than a century. Our Byrons, and Brownings, and Shelleys have shared the sorrows of Italy; and all who have the faintest tinge of their spirit are rejoicing to-day in Italian successes against her particular type of Huns.
Italy stands to come out of this war far greater than she went in. She resisted the Teuton attempts at blackmail, in the beginning of the conflict. She never once hesitated. Those who think she did, do not know her spirit.
Fancy Italians fighting side by side with Austrians! It is enough simply to mention the two names in the same breath to know at once where they would align themselves. I remember thinking, five or six years ago, that Italy was making an effort, second-class power that she was, to pose as a first-class military nation, much to the taxation and suffering of her poverty stricken common people.
Time has but proven that I was wrong and she was right. Somebody in Italy was long headed enough to see what was coming, and to prepare for it. Now she will emerge, as she deserves to do, with her frontiers secured forever, let us hope, against the Vandal, with a people richer and stronger, more independent and happier, than they have been for more than a century.
We in America have been accustomed to think of Italians in terms of the Sicilian banana venders and organ grinders. If, by chance, we have "toured" the sunny land we may think a bit in terms of picture galleries and old crumbling palaces, painted walls and campaniles.
It is only when we have come into personal contact with her soldiers, officers, inventors, writers, administrators, that we begin really to know her. It is easy to forget that this is the land which produced such brains and builders as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Giotto, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Bellini, Savonarola and a host of others.
The same kind of brains is there to-day, and is being turned toward construction of a diffent kind—the construction of a state. And, believe me, the foundations are being laid as firmly as the foundation of St. Peter's.
To say that one was astonished at the administrative and inventive genius of Italy in these hours of struggle is only to confess one's own ignorance or thoughtlessness. One ought to have known beforehand what to expect. Only, it is possible for others of us, besides the Germans, to make the mistake of believing that our neighbors are decadent or lacking in virility.
Because the Italian is, like his landscape, gentle, sunny, kindly, musical, easy going, is no indication that he cannot set great wheels to whirling when the need comes. You have but to see the swarming millions of soldiers back of her front and watch the smooth working of her machinery of supply and the incalculable industry of her road building, to awake to the fact that here is a noble and puissant people, rousing itself like a strong man.
Four million of men under arms! Almost as many as England and France hold on the western front. And not a man of them idle. The common soldiers in other armies may-suffer from ennui—never the Italian!
The character of her leaders, too, deserves some thought. The courtliest and the kindliest officers in Europe, they are, at the same time, among the most efficient. General Cardona more nearly applies the methods of Napoleon to this modern war than any other general.
It is worth remembering, too, that he is the only chieftain in any army who began the war in supreme command and has retained it till now, and is likely to retain it to the end.
Then there is the king. Victor Immanuel challenges comparison with Albert of the Belgians. I saw him, close up to the lines, driving back to headquarters, white as a miller, from the dust.
"What do you think of your king?" I asked one and another.
"Our king is one of the best," they replied, modestly. "He is like a president—he knows how far he can go, and no further. As it is, he goes into the front trenches, is all the time at the front. Rome never sees him.
"He talks with the common soldiers. He moves among them and asks, 'How goes it? How fare you?' We are well content with our king."
The king's cousin, the Duke of Aosta, is in command of one of the armies under Cardona. We visited that army; and we visited the headquarters of a string of batteries, one of which the duke's son commands. We had tea with the other officers, but the young nobleman was not present.
"He is with his battery," smiled the brigadier in command.
We could see that he was well pleased with his youthful captain, of royal blood; and we turned an ear of sharpened attention to the brisk cracking of the seventy-fives out to the left
The people, too, seem united as nearly as any nation ever was that went to war, in support of their leaders. Oh, there are some dissatisfied Socialists, some confirmed pacifists, some corrupted of German gold, as in all the nations in this war, not forgetting our own; but the observer sees little sign in Italy to-day of aught but a determined, industrious and cheerful prosecution of daily life and of the war.
There is little or no evidence of the battle fatigue of France. There are not so many maimed and stranded, in sight as there are in England. Everybody has more work than in normal times, more money and apparently more food.
There is but one necessity of life that seems seriously short, and that is fuel. Coal costs more per pound than bread. "What is bread per kilo?" I asked a government official.
"It is selling at sixty," he replied.
"And coal?"
"Oh!" he cried, throwing up his hands; for every Italian is a born orator, or actor, or comedian; they are all Salvinis. "Coal is anything! It is eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty! I had a friend who, last week, heard of a quantity of coal and went to buy it. A hundred and twenty was the price demanded. After long bargaining he got it at a hundred."
Almost twice the price of bread. Fancy running locomotives and factory engines with bread—no, not bread, but cake! Where would industrial Italy be without her Alpine water power? I walked through a humming factory in Milan, and suddenly it occurred to me to ask where they got their fuel to drive all these wheels and shaftings.
"Oh, it's electric, of course; water power!" was the answer.
"Of course," thought I. "If they were dependent upon coal all these wheels would stop."
Furthermore, Italy must import not only her fuel, but her raw materials. She cannot furnish us with all the airplanes we would like to buy from her unless we send her the lumber and the steel to make them with. That is what is the matter with her depreciated lire to-day.
She imports all the time, and cannot sufficiently export. This state of affairs will right itself after a while, let us hope. Just as the presence of the Americans in France has actually sent up the price of real estate in Paris because we have needed so many hotels and other buildings and grounds for our uses; just as American money pouring into French small trades has brought a renewed prosperity to France; so, in time, will the American demand for supplies aid Italy to rehabilitate her coinage.
There is still another reason why one cannot wisely fail to visit the Italian front, and that is because it is the most dramatic, the most spectacular battle line in Europe. When you have seen the Flanders front you have seen it all, you might say, west of Switzerland.
The desolated villages are all alike. The smoking trenches, the rooting, grunting, hoggish shells, the mud, the dugouts, the camouflage, the crowded roads—it is all alike. True, about Verdun and Alsace there is some broken variation of topography; and at various other memorable portions of the line there are outstanding bits, but in the main, when you have seen a part you find it but a sample of the whole.
In Italy it is not so. The Alps lift the whole line up and hang it in festoons over their shoulders. You can look down upon the enemy's guns, watch their fire, trace their projectiles, hear and see them fall and explode. You can stand behind your own guns and see the effect of your fire on a spot four miles away which, through the clear air, seems only half a mile.
You can see a whole battlefield tilted up on edge, hung like a picture on the wall. You can walk from peak to peak, or ride, and examine the field from different angles. You can look down beneath at the gorges where wind the silver mountain rivers, with their pontoons yet bloody from recent daring conquests. You can look face to face upon mountain precipices, up which Alpine have scaled like mountain goats, rifles strapped on shoulders and knives in teeth, in the fashion of the old days of chivalry.
Here, too, you can estimate the strength of a position, forty or fifty miles long, from a single vantage point. You can look at the enemy's line and his reserve country and supplies, and his slippery foothold; then you can see your own, and look behind you at the crawling millions shoving forward, pushing, edging, inching toward a goal.
One is overpowered by the thought that here, on the Italian front, is, after all, the weak spot in the central empires' defenses. Here concentration of allied artillery and airplanes would turn the trick, smash through, break quickly like a mountain torrent out of the mountains, upon the plateaus, run away to Vienna and cut the central confederacy in two. This may be an amateur's estimate, but it is backed up by much good expert opinion.
The Italians have men enough; they need only guns and munitions. There must be reasons, in the jealous councils of the powers, otherwise this wedge would surely have been driven. Maybe America can lend a hand, if not in driving it, at least in promoting a more unified spirit among the Allies.