THE ARTIFICIAL VOLCANO
An incident of the Italian Campaign in the Dolomites
Related by Capitano Z——, of the Royal Italian Engineers
No more spectacular feat has been accomplished in the present war than the taking of the Col di Lana, a great peak whose summit, towering above the Upper Cordevole Valley and commanding the main highway through the Dolomites, was for many months held by the Austrians. How the steel-clad crest of the Col was wrested from the enemy is here set forth in detail. The narrator's name is suppressed at his own request in his reminiscences in the Wide World Magazine.
I—STORY OF THE ROYAL ENGINEERS
It was Christmas Eve, 1915, and we officers of the Royal Italian Engineers were huddled together in a trench, doing our best, at that chilly elevation of some seven thousand eight hundred feet, to keep ourselves warm. Not a word had been spoken for fully a quarter of an hour. We were all intent, in the semi-darkness of our subterranean refuge, on the smoking of our pipes, turning over and over in our minds meanwhile the problem which had faced us for months past.
Entrusted with the task, amidst that wilderness of mountains known as the Dolomite Alps, of driving back the Austrians, we had been fighting our way forward week after week, month after month. You say that you have never done any climbing in the Dolomites? Then you can have but a faint idea of how formidable our work was.
Imagine, since you have never been there, a seemingly endless succession of ranges and peaks which have assumed the most extraordinary and fantastic forms. The mountains are broken up into every imaginable shape. Here and there they rise at a bound in the form of slender peaks; elsewhere they assume the form of gigantic steps or pyramids or indented crests, sometimes like a saw, at others like a trident.
Through this land of towering, snow-clad summits, mighty gorges, rugged precipices, and apparently bottomless abysses, into which the unwary scout might at any moment find himself precipitated, we soldiers and engineers of the Italian army had steadily fought our way. No one, gazing on these summits held by our enemies, would ever have thought it possible to dislodge them. And yet, one by one, they fell into our hands—with the single exception of the Col di Lana, a supreme peak and pass in the Upper Cordevole Valley which, at the altitude I have named, commands the great highway through the Dolomites.
On this topmost peak the Austrians had found a last refuge. Daily—almost hourly, indeed—they sent down upon us an avalanche of boulders and hand-grenades. In spite of this we managed on one occasion to gain a foothold, but only for a short time. A withering fire from artillery and machine-guns, placed on the encircling heights, forced us back to the security of our own trenches, some fifty yards below; and there we had been, at the time my story opens, for many weeks, faced with the eternal problem—how to dislodge the enemy from the steel-clad crest of the mountain. Suddenly the meditative silence into which we had fallen was broken by Don Gelasio Caetani, a young engineer who is the son of the Duca di Sermoneta and an English lady. Well known for his patriotism and professional ability, we knew that anything he might have to say would be well worth listening to, so at the sound of his voice we all looked up.
"Ho un idéa!" ("An idea occurs to me!") he said, slowly and impressively. "I was day-dreaming of my native Naples and Vesuvius," he added. "To a Neapolitan, Vesuvius is everything. He regards it as possessing almost a personality, endowed with life and thought. He watches it, year after year, as I have done, and notes the changes its form has undergone through successive eruptions. The thought of Vesuvius gave me my idea. What do you say, amici, if we try and convert the Col di Lana into an artificial volcano?"
Had Don Gelasio been other than what we knew he was—a man noted for extreme fertility of invention and resource—we might have been inclined to laugh at him. But we were all too well aware of his seriousness of mind to treat his idea as an idle fancy, and as one man we voiced a request for an explanation of the ways and means towards the proposed end.
Don Gelasio's pencil and notebook were out in a trice and, crowding round him, we were soon buried in the study of a sectional drawing of the Col di Lana, with the respective positions of the invading and invaded forces and the distance of one from the other accurately marked. Lines and figures and calculations, as he explained the scheme in detail, quickly covered the sides of the sketch, showing theoretically and mathematically, whatever practice might prove, that the scheme was feasible.
"It will be a long task," I ventured to remark, when he had come to the end of his explanations and seemed to be waiting for our observations; "but if it takes four months I'm your man. How long do you estimate this tunnelling will take?"
"Not far short of the time you've named. If we can do it quicker by putting a few extra men on to the job, all the better; but I calculate there are three thousand feet of solid rock to be bored before we can bring off our little surprise on the enemy. Well, my friend, then I take it the scheme is agreed upon? We will begin to-morrow—Christmas Day; 'the better the day the better the deed.'"
At an early hour on Christmas morning Don Gelasio Caetani and our corps of engineers, numbering in all twenty-five, set to work to imitate Nature—to make the long preliminary preparations for supplying the bowels of the earth under the Col di Lana with a power similar to the pent-up forces of an eruption.
II—PLANTING DEATH ON THE IRON-CRESTED PEAK
As soon as the bold and dangerous plan became known there was no lack of volunteers. We had no difficulty in forming a band of experienced miners, who worked in two shifts, never stopping day or night. A powerful perforator (drill) was got to work under most ingenious conditions—in deference to the higher military authorities I cannot be more precise—lest its strident voice should give away the secret of the fate which awaited the enemy forces on the iron-crested peak.
During the month of January we made excellent progress with our tunnel into the heart of the mountains, and were able to form some idea of how long we should be over the work. Roughly speaking, we found we were able to bore about seven hundred feet a month. During February we put on speed, and did considerably over that length—not bad work when you consider that each of our galleria was sufficiently big to allow two men to pass each other comfortably, and that we were working all the time in bitter winter weather. But, in spite of our hardships, all went as merry as a marriage bell until we reached the early days of March. Up to then the Austrians had suspected nothing. They showed by what they said during the occasional truces, which were not uncommon between the rival trenches, that they considered themselves in perfect safety. We often heard ironical voices chanting such taunts as this:—
"Perhaps you may take Trento,
Perhaps you may take Trieste,
But the Col di Lana—never!"
And the chorus of arrogant, cock-sure Austrian soldiers would vociferate:—
"But the Col di Lana—never!"
When March came in, however, we discovered that the enemy were becoming suspicious. The steady burrowing noise of our drills and the thud of our pickaxes awoke them, as we drew nearer and nearer to their positions, to the reality of the situation. Soon we became aware that they had started excavating a counter-mine. Don Gelasio brought the news to the day-squad with words of encouragement:—
"Go ahead, boys!" he said. "Put on speed as much as you can. It's now a matter of a race for life."
We were now boring slightly upwards, to get as near as possible to the summit of the Col di Lana, and the turn matters had taken necessitated an earlier date for the eruption of our artificial volcano than we had contemplated. So, after we had been working with feverish haste for another three weeks, our chief held a council of war and announced that the fateful day was near.
"To-morrow or the day after we must place the explosive," he said. "We shall need ten tons of gelatine and dynamite. I'm having the extreme end of the galleria, which cannot be far away now from the enemy's positions, blocked with a shield of thick armoured steel, in order to turn the force of the explosion upward, and at the same time save the remaining portion of the main tunnel from destruction. I'm counting on that as an open pathway when the moment comes for rushing the enemy trenches—or all that will be left of them. Ah! in spite of all their tardy attempts to counter-mine us, they little suspect on what a volcano they are sitting!"
For the dangerous task of leading the way through the tunnel, directly after the explosion, forty of our bravest alpini came forward, being promised a fortnight's leave if the attempt succeeded.
At last everything was ready and the hour fixed—half-past eleven on a Tuesday night—for the firing of the mine. How the time hung on our hands all that afternoon and evening!
All the while we wondered what progress the enemy had made with his boring, asking ourselves whether we should forestall him or not. More anxious hours I never passed in my life.
What a relief it was when the hour struck for testing the efficiency of our work. I can still see Don Gelasio Caetani as he stood at the wheel of his little electric generator, ready to give the couple of turns which would set free the destructive spark. We surrounded him in his little dugout, waiting with bated breath, for the sound of the explosion.
III—"A HELLISH ROAR BURST FORTH"
At last Caetani spun the wheel. Heavens! what a din ensued! The mountain seemed to be shaken to its very base. A hellish roar burst forth and rolled like thunder over the vast wastes of the Dolomites, and a terrific blast of air smote upon us even in our shelter.
Out we rushed, to find that the gallant forty, marshalled at the entrance to the main gallery, had been struck full in the face by a mighty ice-cold blast, due to the displacement of air, and that for a few moments they were held up by a series of after-explosions, caused by the ignition of the mines which the hapless Austrians had prepared.
One of the men, describing the explosion to me the next day, said:—
"A huge tongue of flame, followed by a mighty column of smoke, shot into the air, blowing the entire top of the mountain into the sky. Ah! capitano, it resembled nothing so much as the eruption of a volcano; and if it is true, as I am told, that Don Gelasio spoke of imitating Vesuvius, he could not have chosen a happier image or succeeded better."
But let me tell you the sequel.
At length the men were able to bound forward in the darkness towards the enemy trenches. Just at that moment the moon suddenly beamed forth behind the clouds, revealing the shattered summit of the Col, heaps of mutilated bodies, and groups of dumfounded, trembling survivors, with arms upraised in token of surrender. All this time our artillery was raining a shower of shells on the mountain saddle between the Col di Lana and Monte Sief, with the double object of preventing the flight of the enemy and their reinforcement. But they were all glad to give in, being thoroughly unnerved and dazed, and well aware of the fact that both telegraphic and telephonic communication with their main forces had been completely destroyed by the explosion.
It seems that at the fateful hour they happened to have an extra force on the Col, a company sent specially from Sief to relieve the soldiery in the trenches; hence the large number of victims. Considerably over two hundred must have been blown to atoms or killed by falling débris.
But we had no time that night to bother about the dead and wounded. Our whole attention was directed towards the prisoners, a first batch of whom, including four officers, was soon being taken down the mountain by ten of our brave volunteers. A second batch of five officers and a hundred and ten men followed soon afterwards. In addition we took possession of a shattered mountain gun, cleverly mounted in a cavern and half-a-dozen equally useless mitrailleuses. Five others, with two hundred rifles, were intact. Stores of food sufficient to have lasted the entire garrison for another month completed our booty.
So ended the affair of the Col di Lana, which will ever be linked in the Italian annals of the war with the name of Don Gelasio Caetani, to whom is due a good deal of the credit of the great advance which, immediately afterwards, we made along the main highway through the Dolomites.