Six months on the Italian front

by Julius M. Price

We were in about as exposed a position as could probably have been found on any front, but for the moment there was an ominous lull which portended no good, and so it turned out. The respite was not to last long; the Asiago plateau is far too important a sector of the front to be left long in quietude.

The little town must have been a delightful place before the war, and even now, destroyed though it mostly is, there are a few picturesque corners which the bombardment has spared. There were comparatively very few soldiers about, and the deserted, ruined streets looked unutterably sad; but right in the centre, on an open piece of waste ground, sheltered by some tall houses and a roughly made “screen” of odd pieces of corrugated iron, a regiment was waiting for nightfall to proceed to the trenches outside the town.

I had a good look through an aperture in the screen: the men were noticeably subdued in their demeanour, as well they might be, considering that at any moment they might be under a hail of projectiles and with no means of escaping it.

They had evidently been on the road for some time, as they all looked grimy with dust and dirt and tired out, judging from the way most of them were lying about sleeping. It was an extremely sad spectacle, and I had no inclination to make a sketch of it, novel though it was.

We enquired our way to the quarters of the Divisional Commandant, as my companion had a letter to deliver to him, and an officer we met sent some one with us to show us the house, as outwardly there was no indication of its being occupied. The number of deep dug-outs protected with sand-bags one saw everywhere was sufficient proof of the awful time the men stationed here went through. As we went along we were constantly meeting stretcher-bearers bringing along wounded men. At the corners of streets men were sheltering close up to the walls as though expecting at any moment something to happen.

The Commandant’s “office” was in a house that had suffered badly: there were gaping cracks in the walls, and it looked as if any explosion near it would bring it down with a run.

There were quite a number of staff clerks at work in the ground-floor rooms, and the telephone bells were ringing incessantly.

We were received by the Commandant with much cordiality, and the position of affairs in the immediate vicinity explained to us very lucidly by means of a big military chart fastened to a table in one of the rooms, but he expressed regret at our having come just on that particular day as a big attack by the artillery was timed to commence at eleven o’clock (it was then 10.45), and he feared we should not be able to get back so soon as we wished.

As though in defiant response to his statement, there was at that moment a loud report from an Austrian battery, and a big shell screeched by overhead.

There was still a quarter of an hour to spare before the Italian guns were to start off, so the Commandant suggested our going upstairs to the third floor to have a peep at the Italian and Austrian trenches through a shell-hole in the roof. The house was quite new and built in flats, which had evidently been occupied by fairly well-to-do people.