Six months on the Italian front

by Julius M. Price

You had the impression of gazing on the scene of an earthquake, so little semblance to anything recognizable was there in sight. Here and there a black and gaping hole on the hillside indicated the entrance to one of the famous Carso caves, which are so characteristic a feature of the region.

What was left of the Austrian trenches after the Italian artillery had done with them was sufficient to convey an idea of the awful time their occupants must have passed through; you had the idea that any human beings who survived after being in such an inferno deserved peace and quietude to the end of their days.

In many cases these trenches were only a few yards apart, so the courage necessary to take them by direct assault must have been extraordinary. One could see the dead lying in between them. The peculiar rock formation of the whole area precludes any making of actual trenches except with enormous labour; to obviate this shallow furrows are formed and protected with stone parapets, finished with sand-bags (or rather bags of small stones, as, of course, there is no sand here).

The condition of these parapets and “trenches” after continual pounding with high explosives may be left to the imagination. A gruesome detail must be mentioned: so difficult is it to excavate the ground here that the dead are not being “buried” but simply covered over with stones.

Many grim and barbarous devices for causing death in the most horrible and unexpected form were discovered in the Austrian trenches here on the Doberdo plateau, and the mere sight of them was often sufficient to rouse the Italian soldiers to a pitch of frenzy.

One is apt to forget at times that the Austrian is by nature quite as callous and inhuman a creature as the Hun, but here one had ample reminder of what he is capable of when he realises that he is up against a better man than himself.

It is of historic interest in this connection to recount a few of the new infamies these apt disciples of the Hun have introduced: the poisoned cigarettes and shaving brushes left in the trenches; the bombs under dead bodies; explosive bullets; baccilli of typhoid dropped from aeroplanes; and the iron-topped bludgeons.

The latter instrument of torture, for it is nothing less, is quite one of the latest devices of Austrian “Kultur” for putting a wounded adversary to death. The iron head is studded with jagged nails, and has a long spike let into the end. No South Sea cannibal ever devised a more awful weapon.

I was lucky enough to get one and brought it back to London, where it makes a fitting pendant in my studio to another barbaric “souvenir” of the war, one of the Hun “proclamations” put on the walls in Rheims before the battle of the Marne.

However, to revert to Doberdo. We stood for some little while at the end of the village endeavouring to grasp the import of the various strategic points we could discern from here, when all of a sudden the Austrian batteries started a furious bombardment in our direction with apparently no object whatever, except perhaps that our car had been seen, and they hoped to stop any further movement on the road.