CHAPTER XXXVIII
ACROSS THE RIVER
Next day I went over the river and right on, one of the two F.O.O.'s (forward observation officers) from my Brigade who were to establish and maintain contact with the advancing Infantry. Three signallers and a runner came with me, carrying rifles, bayonets and ammunition, a day's rations and much signalling gear. The other officer had his own party. We soon subdivided our work and separated.
The twenty-four hours of my duty do not lend themselves to a sustained description. I passed and identified from the map one of the targets of my Battery in the preliminary bombardment, an Austrian Battery position, which we had bombarded for many hours with gas and high explosive alternately. Our shooting had been accurate and deadly. The position was a mass of shell holes. One of the guns had been blown up, a second badly damaged. A third had been pulled out of its pit and half way up a bank by a team of horses. The enemy had made a desperate effort to get it away. But horses and men and fragments of men lay dead around it. It was a well prepared position, and well concealed by trees. But Italian airmen had spotted it, and marked it down with precision on the map, marked it down for destruction. The enemy had done much work here. There were fine, deep dug-outs, well timbered and weatherproof, comfortable dwelling places in quiet times and strong enough to resist shell splinters and even direct hits by guns of small calibre. But we had got a direct hit on one dug-out and killed half a dozen occupants. And the others had not been proof against our gas. They were full of corpses, mostly victims of gas. Some were wearing their gas masks, but our gas had gone through them. Some had apparently been gassed outside, some with masks on and some without, and had crawled, dying, into the dug-outs in the vain hope of finding protection there. However hardened one may grow, by usage, to the common facts of war, few can look on such a sight as this, without feeling a queer thrill of very mixed emotion. My men looked with solemn faces at the work they had helped to do. One said, "poor chaps, they were pretty well done in!" And then we turned and went on.
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It was a very rapidly moving warfare that day. One Infantry Brigade Headquarters, with whom I kept in intermittent touch, occupied four successive positions, miles apart, in the course of twelve hours. About noon I came to a ruined village, Tezze. I went on to reconnoitre it with one signaller. In a half wrecked house we heard the voices of Italian peasant women and saw through an open door an ugly, little, dirty child, probably about a year old, crawling among rubbish and refuse. The village was only just ours. On the far side of it men of the Manchester Regiment were lining a ditch, under cover of a hedge, waiting the order to charge. They warned me to go no further along the road which, they said, was under enemy machine gun fire. Every few minutes enemy shells whistled over our heads and burst in the fields and houses behind us. A wet wind blew down the road. There was no fixed, clearly marked line. Everything was in movement and rather uncertain….
Enemy guns, captured with their ammunition, swung round and firing at the enemy, big guns and little guns….
On the British left the Como Brigade were advancing rapidly in spite of pretty strong opposition. For a while our left flank had been perilously in the air, but the danger was past now….
All the roads were thick with Austrian equipment thrown away in the confusion of departure, rifles, steel helmets (grotesquely shaped, like high-crowned bowler hats), ammunition, coats, packs (handsomely got up, with furry exteriors), mail bags, maps, office stores, tin despatch boxes, photographs of blonde girls, bayonets, hand bombs, … everything dead thrust into the ditches, both men and horses, the latter smelling earlier and stronger than the former. (The more I look at dead bodies, the more childish and improbable does the old idea of personal immortality appear to me!) …
At one cross-roads a huge pool of blood, mingling with and overwhelming the mud. Here a whole transport team of heavy grey horses with wagons had been hit and blown up. Close by, in a ditch, two British wounded lay on stretchers, covered with blankets. One, only lightly wounded, gave us information and directions. The other was very near to death. His face was growing pale already, as only the faces of the dead are pale. He was shifting feebly and ineffectually, with the vain instinct to escape from pain. He was past speech, but he looked at us out of wide open half-frightened eyes that seemed to question the world despairingly, like an animal, broken helplessly in a trap….