The tremendous range of the modern rifle, single arm, or rapid-fire gun, and the development of more powerful explosives for ammunition have wrought this change. The bullet will travel a longer distance at a horizontal position than in the old days when ordinary black powder and a smooth-bore gun were used, and so at hundreds of yards distance the soldiers can aim direct to kill, without making elevation allowances.
The machine gun has made it possible for the men to fire from four to five shots for every one that was fired in the Franco-Prussian War and probably ten for every one that was fired in the Civil War. The only time the soldiers exposed themselves on the army frontiers were when they were storming trenches, and this was not attempted until the trench had suffered bombardment so it was made untenable.
DIFFICULT MOUNTAIN FIGHTING.
Probably nothing in the warfare of nations has been more colorful and replete with surprises than the campaign waged by the Italian soldiers on the Alpine passes between Italy and the Austrian strongholds, and in the discussion of modern warfare, a brief description of some of the work of these intrepid mountain fighters is interesting.
Much of this fighting has been the most difficult known in the annals of modern warfare, save, perhaps, that done by the famous Younghusband British Expedition to Thibet. And that, by comparison, was a very small matter.
The mere height—altitude—at which the Italian warfare against the Austrians was carried on has been sufficient to entail enormous difficulties and a great additional strain, due actually to difficult breathing in a rarefied atmosphere.
The warfare in the clouds which has characterized the struggle along the Isonzo front has been conducted at an altitude seldom less than 8,000 and often rising to 12,000 feet, which is well within the realm of eternal snow.
Naturally, therefore, most of the fighting was done in bitter cold. To this fact add the other that the Italian soldiers who carried it on were almost exclusively men who had not been accustomed to the cold. They had been drawn from among dwellers in a semitropical climate, and one gets an idea of the immense accomplishments of this army which struggled in the skies.
The average American knows the Italian as immensely industrious, but perhaps is disinclined to credit him with great constructive ability or engineering genius. He would change his estimate of him if he could see him fight and study his battlefield. The Italian warfare of the mountain peak and gorges has been a warfare of construction, even more than it has been a warfare of destruction, and has been rendered possible only by the exercise of engineering genius comparable with that which sent our world-beating American railways through the famous Rocky Mountain passes!