With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement

by Baron Hugh Dalton Dalton

CHAPTER VIII

A FRONT LINE RECONNAISSANCE

Every day, in our Group, some officer carried out a Front Line Reconnaissance. This officer was chosen in rotation from the Group Headquarters and the various Batteries. Colonel Raven, our Group Commander, often carried out these Reconnaissances himself. Of all British officers at this time serving in Italy, he had, I think, the greatest understanding of the Italians. He had travelled in Italy in peace-time and had studied Italian history. He fully appreciated the difficulties against which the Italian Army had to contend, and its military achievements in spite of them. He enjoyed social intercourse with Italians, and his invariable and slightly elaborate courtesy was, in an Englishman, remarkable. For, as Mazzini once said, an Englishman's friendship, when once secured, holds very firm, but it is manifested more by deeds than by words. But Colonel Raven had the gift of sympathetic imagination, and he had also in full measure the Allied spirit.

The purpose of these Reconnaissances was twofold: first, to report on matters of military importance, any notable activity by the enemy, the direction and nature of hostile fire upon our trenches, the effects of our own fire, when not otherwise ascertainable, the precise position on the map, especially after any action, of our own and of the enemy's lines, including saps, advanced posts and the like; second, to maintain a real contact and spirit of comradeship with the Italian Infantry and to seek to give them confidence in the efficiency and promptitude of British Artillery support. Under the first head, valuable information was frequently brought back, and under the second I believe that, so far at least as our Group was concerned, the personal relations between the Artillery and the Infantry were exceptionally good. Hardly ever did we receive complaints that our guns were firing short, though such complaints are often made, and often quite groundlessly, when the Infantry lack confidence in the Artillery behind them.

At one time thin-skinned persons among us used to complain that Italians who passed them on the roads used to call out "imboscato!" Imboscato is a term very frankly used in the Italian army, generally though not necessarily as a term of reproach. It corresponds with the French "embusqué," one who shelters in a wood, for which we in English have no precise equivalent. It is used by an Italian to indicate one who runs, or is thought to run, less risk of death than the speaker. It is chiefly used of men in the non-combatant services or in posts well behind the fighting front, including the Higher Staff and especially the junior ranks attendant on them. It is used also in jest by Italian patrols going out at night into No Man's Land, of their comrades, whom they leave behind in the front line trenches. Personally I was never called an imboscato, nor were any of my brother gunners, except once or twice when riding in side-cars or motors miles in rear of our guns. And to Infantry marching along dusty roads under an Italian sun there is something very irritating in a motor car dashing past, with its occupants reclining in easy positions, its siren hideously shrieking, and blinding dust-clouds rising in its wake.

German propaganda was insidiously active in Italy throughout the war, and spread many lying stories with the object of discrediting the British. Among these was one, the details of which do not matter now, concerning the fact that only British Artillery, and no British Infantry, had at that time been sent to Italy. Our Reconnaissances, involving our visible and daily presence among the gallant succession of Italian Brigades, who held the blood-stained line on the Carso and across the valley of the Vippacco, were the most fitting reply which we could make to German propaganda.

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I made my first Front Line Reconnaissance on July 27th, two days after we had moved forward to our new Battery position. That day I visited the trenches on the Volconiac, starting in the early afternoon and getting back at nightfall. I took with me as a guide a young Italian gunner, a Neapolitan by birth, who had been a waiter in an Italian restaurant in New York before the war. He had been in the Austrian offensive of 1916 in the Trentino, where all the guns of his Battery had been lost and nearly all his comrades killed or captured.

From the Battery position we followed the road behind Hill 123, up a glorious valley, whose sides were thickly wooded with pines, gradually thinning under the destruction wrought by Austrian shell fire and the Italian military need for timber. The only other vegetation here was a little coarse grass. On the lee side of Hill 123, sheltered from Austrian fire, was a whole village of wooden huts, admirably constructed, capable of housing several Battalions. At the head of the valley, the road, a good example of the war work of the Italian Engineers, turned sharply up the hillside, securing tolerable gradients by means of constant zigzags—tolerable that is to say for men on foot and for pack mules, for wheeled transport could not proceed beyond this point. It was a steep climb and I perspired most visibly right through my thin tunic. Three-quarters of the way up we stopped and got a drink of water from the Infantrymen in charge of the water barrels. There are no springs or streams on the Volconiac or on Dosso Faiti. All water has to be pumped up from below through pipes, and at the point where we rested, water barrels were being continually filled from the pipes and then hauled on by hand, on sleighs, for the remainder of the ascent. Water was also carried up from this point by individual soldiers in the fiaschi, or glass bottles encased in plaited straw, in which Italian wine is sold.

Just below the crest we entered the trenches, which were held at this time by the Florence Brigade. The construction of these trenches was very interesting. They were all blasted in the rock, and many drilling machines were at work as I passed along them, increasing the number of caverne, or dug-outs, and deepening those already in existence. Here and there, where the trenches were rather shallow, they were built up with loose rocks and sandbags filled with stones.

One of my objects was to get a view of the Austrian trenches and barbed wire on the Tamburo, in order to observe from closer quarters than was possible from any of our O.P.'s the effects of our recent bombardments, and to verify or disprove a report that certain new defensive works were being constructed by the enemy at night. Our own trenches here were on a higher level than the enemy's, and the bottom of the valley between the Tamburo and this part of the Volconiac was in No Man's Land, as was a relatively short slope on the Tamburo and a relatively long slope on the Volconiac. The latter slope was very steep, but thickly clothed with pines, most of which were now shattered by shell fire into mere dead stumps. Even these stumps, however, made it difficult to get an uninterrupted view of the Tamburo, and I had to go some miles along the trenches, gazing through numerous peepholes, before I reached a point from which I could satisfy myself that our bombardments had been effective and that the reported new works were indeed real. Having got this information, I smoked a pipe and talked with an Italian company commander in a rocky dug-out, and then started to return.

Things were quiet on this sector of the Front that afternoon, though Italian Field Guns were bursting shrapnel from time to time over the Tamburo. As I went along the trenches I was several times greeted by Italians who had been in America, "Hullo, John! How are you? How d'you like this dam country?" This type brings back with it across the Atlantic the frank, almost brutal, familiarity of a new and democratic civilisation. It contrasts oddly with the quieter ways of those Italians who have lived all their lives in Italy, amid one of the oldest and most mature civilisations of the world.

On our way down the hill we passed a seemingly endless string of pack mules coming up, laden with food and ammunition. Always at evening this wonderful system of supply was visibly working, triumphing over tremendous natural difficulties. We passed, too, a party of about fifty men hauling up on long ropes a heavy drilling engine, the sort of labour of which British fatigue parties have, luckily for themselves, no experience. Mists came down from the mountains as we descended, and rainstorms threatened, but did not break.