A cloud of poisonous gas released by Italian troops from tanks concealed in the thicket.
On July 23, 1915, the archduke ordered another attack upon the Italian positions near the sea on the edge of the Carso tableland. This was really an effort to recapture Monfalcone; but it failed, although the Italians did not dare risk pursuit over the rough ground. Later two Austrian divisions, advancing from San Michele and San Martino against Sagrado were repulsed with heavy losses.
By July 25, 1915, the Italians were able to attack and capture some of the intrenchments on the slopes of San Martino and to storm Sei Busi. This hill of Sei Busi witnessed some of the most sanguinary fighting of the whole series of engagements. On a single day it was won, lost and won again by the Italians, both sides bringing up strong reenforcements and concentrating against the summit all the artillery within range. Over the crest of San Michele which dominated a large part of the tableland the battle surged for many days.
On July 27, 1915, the Italians, attacking with bombs and bayonets were able to occupy the summit, but could not establish themselves there in the face of the enemy's bombardment. The lower slopes they were able to hold behind their sandbag intrenchments, but the crest, swept by the enemy's heavy artillery and offering no shelter, was absolutely untenable. In all this fighting artillery played the major rôle. The Italians charged that Archduke Eugene, realizing that any infantry advance against this terrific gunfire was a certain sacrifice of men, placed in his van regiments of men from the Italian-speaking provinces and from Old Serbia and Croatia. In this position these troops were exposed to fire from their own batteries with the knowledge that any attempt at treachery meant annihilation by their own guns in the rear. No figures as to the number of men from the "unredeemed" provinces forced to fight against their kinsmen on the frontier are obtainable. Italian writers, however, maintain that during the first months of the war Austrian infantrymen of Latin and Slav origin were sacrificed by the hundred thousand around Gorizia and Trento.
Like other great drives of the Allies on the French front, the Italian offensive on the chain of forts guarding Gorizia failed to break the enemy's resistance. The fighting, however, seasoned the untried troops of General Cadorna and won them praise even from the veterans of General Boroevics and from Boroevics himself. "I cannot refrain from saying," declared the Austrian General in an interview published in a Hungarian newspaper, "that the bravery of the Italian regiments was almost incredible, for even if certain regiments lost all their officers, this did not deter them from advancing with the greatest contempt for death."[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER LXVIII
FIGHTING IN THE ALPS—ITALIAN SUCCESSES
Leaving the situation on the Isonzo where it rested at the close of July, 1915, in a condition virtually of stalemate, we return to the still more picturesque struggle in the Alps. While the Italian Third Army in massed assault was making its unsuccessful fight for possession of Gorizia with Trieste as its ultimate objective, warfare was in progress in a hundred places in the Julian, Carnic, Dolomite, Trentino and Tyrolean mountains. Although along this part of the frontier the Italians inflicted no vital harm upon the enemy during the first two months of the war, they were successful in a multitude of minor enterprises, each of which furnishes its stirring tale of hand-to-hand fighting, individual heroism and novel expedients in a country singularly adapted to some of the methods of primeval warfare. Being on the defensive, the Austrians frequently made use of the primitive ambush of mountain tribes. Loose, heavy bowlders were lashed to the edge of a precipice and masked with pine branches. Then when the enemy passed along the mountain path beneath, the wires holding the rocks in place were cut, releasing a deadly avalanche upon the advancing foe.
Any description of the fighting on this Alpine front becomes by necessity a catalogue of apparently isolated operations, for the nature of the ground negatived any great battle in force such as that along the Isonzo River. In the Julian Alps the Italian mountaineers gained a lucky success early in June. General Rohr, the Austrian commander, had set two companies to guard a rampart of rock between Tolmino and Monte Nero. The position was so strong that a few hundred men with Maxims and quick-firers could have held it against an army corps. Its strength, in fact, was so apparent that the Austrians took their duties too lightly. Leaving only a few sentries on watch, both companies enjoyed plenty of sleep at night. But one night the Italian Alpinists climbed silently over the mountain, killed the enemy's sentries with knives before they could make an outcry and coming upon the two companies from the rear captured them with scarcely a struggle.
The peak of Monte Nero, a stump-shaped mountain 7,370 feet high at the headwaters of the Isonzo, proved important to the Italians, for it gave them a fire-control station from which 12-inch shells were dropped into the forts of Tolmino and the southern forts of Tarvis. North of Monte Nero, where the boundary turns to the west, is the important pass of Predil, the gateway to Tarvis, guarded on the southeast by the fortress of Flitsch and on the west by Malborghetto. These two positions were the strongest points in a great ring of fortified heights protecting the pass and the highway and railroad running through an angle of the Julian Alps into the heart of Austria. The forts of Malborghetto projected into Italian territory and its chief works, Fort Hensel, a great white oblong of armored concrete, was visible miles away in the Italian mountains. Against this system of fortifications the Italians brought their heaviest howitzers and demonstrated, as satisfactorily as the Germans had shown months earlier at Liege, that the strongest forts were no match for modern artillery. Fort Hensel and the other permanent forts were shattered and the ground around them was pitted with great craters from explosions of the 12-inch shells.