XXIII
THE INDEFATIGABLE ITALIAN
THE most remarkable achievement of the Italian army is not the driving back of the Austrians from mountain top to mountain top, from gorge to gorge, off the summits of sheer cliffs, across foaming rivers and rocky plateaus—though all that is remarkable enough in all conscience. The most daring and indefatigable thing they have done is the building of good wide roads over all this impassable terrain. Talk about hairpin curves, they are hair raising and hair curling, those curves. My ears bubbled constantly with the increasing altitude, and my flesh crept as the skillful drivers rimmed the cliffs with our tires; and we could look down fifty feet of rock to where we had been a minute before, and up fifty more to where we would be in another minute.
These roads are all new; for the Austrians had not troubled to build them, having never dreamed that the Italians would attempt the impossible, and push them off these heights. Originally, there was one rough highway, for example, leading down to the Biansizza Plateau, and a straggling goat path or two. In eleven days, the swarming Italians constructed a beautiful wide highway, winding down in the fantastic curves of a cotton string dropped and festooned at random, apparently, over the heads and shoulders of the Alps. If Napoleon can wake up in paradise—or wherever he is—and look upon these achievements, he must feel like the man from Johnstown comparing notes with Noah. If you could see these roads, you would at once understand the remark made in a former chapter, that the Italian soldier is never idle. When not in the trenches, he rests by building roads; when he has no other definite and immediate task, he builds roads; when convalescent, he builds roads; and when he wakes up at night and can't go back to sleep, he just steps out and builds roads.
Think, too, of the heritage left to this country, when the war is done—a whole circulating system, sending life blood and development into mountain fastnesses that have been locked up since the glacial period from all but the tread of goatherds and a few daring vine dressers. Do not imagine, either, that the country is barren, desert, lifeless. The most beautiful silva clothes the hills. I noted beeches, elms, oaks, maples, chestnuts, cedars of various kinds; there were buttercups, blue harebells, life everlasting, and many dainty-wild flowers new and strange to me; I saw fields of hay so nearly perpendicular that I am sure the farmer must have used telegraph climbing irons when cutting the crop. The haystacks were stuck on to the hillsides with gigantic hatpins to keep them from sliding down; and an Italian told me he had seen a cow which slipped and rolled out of the farm into the gorge below and became mincemeat at once. Nevertheless, these mountain sides can be and will be lumbered and farmed. The roads are now there to make development possible; war leaves some good things in its wake.
Yonder is the bald face of Monte Nero, or the black mountain, overlooking Tolmino, lying in the valley at its foot. The Austrians still hold Tolmino, and we can look straight down into it from above; but they no longer hold Monte Nero. It seemed impossible that the Italians would ever try to scale it; but one night a battalion of Alpine, climbing all the night, the last few hundred yards barefooted, came at dawn upon the Austrian trenches, lightly and sleepily held; and the garrison surrendered at discretion. It was a feat more unimaginable than anything Wolfe ever dreamed of at Quebec. I stood and gazed at that black mountain, while they told me the tale, and felt like the farmer looking at the camel and saying incredulously: "There ain't any such thing."
We rode into Canale, all shot to pieces, but still the semblance of a beautiful mountain city, forever ice bathed by the blue Isonzo. We crossed on the very pontoon bridge thrown across under machine gun fire by the indomitable Italians. We saw the ford, lower down, which was too gun-swept to attempt; and we saw the lower pontoon bridge, the first that the conquering army succeeded in getting across. This spot was well guarded with Austrian machine guns; and at first it seemed impossible ever to put a bridge over, but a young colonel of engineers, who had been manager of a porcelain factory in Milan before the war, thought out a way. One night he massed his searchlights in the side of a cliff overlooking the Isonzo, and focused them all night upon the Austrian machine gun positions. The gunners were blinded by the glare, and the Italian engineers—genii, they are aptly termed, in their own language—slid their pontoons down into the river and built their bridge; while the Alpine did the rest.
We scaled the face of the Carso, winding back and forth on the new roads; and, reaching the summit of the cliff, looked away over the great plateau to where Italian shells were bursting black in the front lines of the enemy. The face of this cliff was stormed eleven times by the persevering infantry of Italy before a foothold was finally achieved. One particularly sheer precipice of rock I noted, which to me looked impregnable; but the Austrians had been driven away from it, for they showed me a little gash at last, running up through scrub cedar and oak, where the climbers had wound their way by night to fall at dawn upon the Austrian flank. Italy certainly deserves every foot she has gained, for she has done it at an immense cost of sweat and blood.
Then we went to the seashore and saw the ship that had been taken by cavalry. True, she never had been launched, but she was really a ship, the only ship in history captured by a troop of horse. She lay in the dry-dock where she had been built and was just ready for her wedding with the sea. Now she is like a bride dead on her marriage morning, her veil yellowing around her. She is a mass of rusty iron, even yet beaten at times by spiteful shells.
We looked down into Trieste, on a perfectly clear, cloudless day, and saw the city, the Italian objective, lying fair in the afternoon sun; while, between us and her, frowned Hermada. That doughty fortress was receiving blows on the head even then. More blows will rain upon it. Italy has men enough. If only the rest of us could fill those men's hands with guns and munitions, she could smash her way through to Vienna and cut the central Confederacy in two. Why it is not done is beyond me. Nobody visits this front who does not see that here is the place to strike a blow below the belt at Pan-Germanism. Here is the middle of that broad zone which Germany hoped to stretch from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf. Cut it in two at this, its most vulnerable spot, and Pan-Germanism falls like a house of baby blocks. Says one, this mountain fighting is impossible for any but Alpine; and there are only a few regiments of these, Italian and Hungarian. But Italy has already fought her way out of the mountains. She is already on the Carso, which is open plateau. Says another: Transportation is the difficulty. The powers would pour in supplies if they could get them there. Well, they got them somehow to the Dardanelles. Italians have already overcome difficulties of transportation, beside which the difficulty of our supplying her pales into nothing.
Says still another, Italy does not wish to go to Vienna. She aims at Trieste, and nothing more. Besides, the other powers are jealous of Italy. They cannot unite upon a campaign on this front. Now you are entering upon the secret domain of high international politics and intrigue, which has been the curse of the world, and where I cannot follow you. For myself, it looks to me as if the time and the place are ripe for a bit of Uncle Sam's shirt sleeve diplomacy; it even appears to me that, having no ax to grind, no private ends to serve, one of the most valuable functions our nation can fulfill, without assumption or immodesty on our part, is to attempt some unification in the plans of the Allies, some mitigation of international jealousies. Our first move should be to declare war on Austria, then, with Italy and England, the rest might be arranged. Still, all this is not in the province of the reporter; and I beg everybody's pardon, especially that of the high diplomats.
Let us go back to reporting. We pause in front of a field hospital. It is under a cliff, within easy shell reach of the enemy. Indeed, it is frequently shelled; and they show us how they have hollowed out a hospital in the rock, behind this one, to which, upon need, they can move. At present it is unoccupied, these galleries in the living rock, the stony heart of Mother Nature; but they are ready, provided with beds, and even electric lights, ready to receive the refugees who already hang between life and death. I pass into the ward. Only the worst cases are retained at this advanced post, those who must be operated on at once, to save life. They are the stillest and the sickest looking bunch of men I ever saw. Some look dead. Some are dead. Yonder in the corner lies one with the sheet pulled over his head. He was an Austrian prisoner, but they did all for him that they would have done for an Italian. There is a dead soldier of Italy in the middle of the room. He has just died, but the others are all too ill to pay any heed. Some lie with open mouth and half-open eyes; flies crawl over their lips and faces and even between their parched lips. Yonder is one just off the table, a bloody bandage about his head. An orderly slaps him, not very gently, upon the cheek to awaken him, but he will not awaken. He mutters thickly and drowses on. I don't know why they should disturb him, but I suppose it is wise; chloroform is used here, and perhaps that is the reason they disturb him; or perhaps these brain cases need this method of procedure.
The worst of the cases here, however, are abdominal. There is a man shot through the intestines, operated upon three days ago, and doing well. He smiles, in a sickly way, as we approach him, and tries to nod his head. Evidently his fever is still high. There is another from whom a yard and a half of intestine was cut away twelve days ago. He will get well, and he knows it; you can tell by the sort of pathetic triumph in his eye; but he is too weak to speak; his smile, however, is a bit more assured. We go out into the air. I was more depressed than ever before in a hospital ward.
We pass into the operating room. The black-bearded surgeon is scrubbing his hands with yellow soap and iodine. He comes to the door to meet us, and smiles most affably. How I love these Italians! He cannot shake hands. He cannot talk English; but no matter. A great man's heart shines in his eyes. On the table lies a soldier, just brought in. He was shot within the hour, with a rifle. The ball went through his abdomen, and out at the back. He lies there, and I see the clean round wound. He is making no moan; but his stomach rises and falls with suppressed excitement and quick breathing. The surgeon covers his own face with his gauze mask, and his assistant places the chloroform mask over the patient's face. I should like to pause and watch the operation; but they call me away to look at the X-ray machine, the sterilizing apparatus and the other up-to-date appointments.
I learn that about thirty-five per cent of these abdominal cases are now saved by this surgeon. I have heard of forty per cent saved by the British; and one French surgeon claims to save fifty. It is difficult, however, to convince me that any of them can outdo these Italians. I hear that this surgeon is dissatisfied with his ward, wants things more beautiful and bright. I learn, also, that the Frenchman who claims fifty per cent drapes the walls of his ward in red, puts flowers about and Japanese lanterns, and insists on smiles, laughter and jests from all his attendants, declaring that half the battle is fought in the emotions. Is he not right?
Under this same hill, cheek by jowl with this Italian post, is a British Red Cross station. They are unloading an ambulance at its door now. Two, three, four patients are carried in. The last one is holding his shattered, bandaged, bloody leg up off the stretcher with his own hands, bending upward with head and shoulders as he does it. God, what pain he is in! But only his face betrays it, no moan. I am somewhat benumbed with sights of blood and wounds; I have seen so much of it, through the months, but my latent emotions are stirred at the sight of these Englishmen here. Unfit, for one reason or another, to bear arms in their own trenches, they came way off here into distant mountains to lend a hand to brothers in arms.
What is the strange chemical quality of this English blood that it drives men out from home and native land, away from love and hedge row, park and country house, to the ends of all the earth in peace and war? They go to farm and colonize, to lead the backward nations, to build and mine, to explore, to fight, to hunt, to roam. This queer chemical, it seems to me, is destiny, the power of empire building, the genius of the management of men. It is a thing not understood by the Teuton, not possessed by the Gaul, wholly baffling and strange to the Latin. It is the lonely, heroic quality of the pioneer, that settled and subdued our own country, that opened Africa, that leads jeweled India docilely by the necklace, that holds the Nile in the soft, strong hand of a dominion of which the Egyptian is scarcely aware. I stand and gaze at these English stretcher bearers, and say to myself: "Hello, brothers! After all, none of these other races are quite like you. We are sprung from the same stock, you and my country. I understand the strange compulsion that brings you here. A thousand years of health to you and yours! A thousand years of brotherhood between yours and mine!"
ENVOI
There are certain things that it is well to keep in mind in these war times. Our philosophy must not come tumbling down about our ears.
No one of us but would rather go out into France and risk his life, or lose it, than to have his boy do so. This is true of any father who is a real father; and if it is true of an earthly father in his feeling toward his son is it not doubly true of our heavenly Father in his love for his children? Let nothing persuade us that God is a cruel, heartless, or even indifferent God just because there is a war on in the world—or pestilence, or famine.
There would have been just as much suffering without this war as with it, there would have been just as many deaths for as Shakespeare said:
"All that live must die
Passing through nature to eternity."
There would have been just as many widows, just as many orphans; there would have been just as much physical pain—I rather think more—only it would have stretched over a longer period of time, twenty of thirty years instead of being condensed into four or five or six short ones.
This does not solve the problem of evil. We shall never solve it until we pass behind the veil and see eye to eye and face to face. God could have made a perfect world, an Eden of a world, with nothing in it but innocent flowers and song birds and innocent Adams and Eves who wouldn't know the difference between right and wrong; but he could not have made that kind of world and at the same time given you and me the right to choose, to shape our conduct for ourselves. And as for me, I wouldn't care to be an innocent little flower or bird or Adam or Eve with no sense of responsibility and no freedom of choice. I would rather be a man, shape my conduct for myself, make mistakes, sin, fall, hurt myself and cry, and then get up and go on to struggle, to fight, and to win out in some sort of battle. I wouldn't be an innocent.
This does not solve the problem of evil, we shall never solve it until we pass over to the other side; but be assured that behind the war-clouds which lower so heavily over us, and will grow heavier before we are through, sits God within the shadow keeping watch above his own. And there is not a mother's heart torn and bleeding for her boy, not a father the chambers of whose soul are empty, echoing, yearning and void, there is not a soldier who falls like a sparrow to the ground, without our heavenly Father.