"The food supply is most efficiently organized. A young London Italian private, speaking English perfectly, whom I met by chance, told me, and I have since verified the information, that the men holding this long line of the Alps receive a special food, particularly during the seven months' winter. Besides the excellent soup which forms the staple diet of the Italian as of the French soldiers, the men receive a daily ration of two pounds of bread, half a pound of meat, half a pint of red wine, macaroni of various kinds, rice, cheese, dried and fresh fruit, chocolate, and thrice weekly small quantities of cognac and Marsala.
"Members of the Alpine Club know that in the high Dolomites water is in summer often as precious as on the Carso. Snow serves this purpose in winter. Then three months' reserve supplies of oil fuel, alcohol, and medicine must be stored in the catacomb mountain positions, lest, as happened to an officer whom I met, the garrisons should be cut off by snow for weeks and months at a time."
Mr. Hilaire Belloc vividly pictures some mountain positions and observation posts in the high Dolomites as follows:
"There stands in the Dolomites a great group of precipitous rock rising to a height of over 9,000 feet above the sea and perhaps 6,000 feet above the surrounding valleys, one summit of which is called the Cristallo. It is the only point within the Italian lines from which direct and permanent observations can be had of the railway line running through the Pusterthal. In the mass of this mountain, up to heights of over 8,000 feet, in crannies of the rock, up steep couloirs and chimneys of snow, the batteries have been placed and hidden quite secure from the fire of the enemy, commanding by the advantage of the observation posts the enemy's line with their direct fire. One such observation post I visited.
"A company of men divided into two half companies held, the one half the base of the precipitous rock upon a sward of high valley, the other the summit itself, perhaps 3,000 feet higher; end the communication from one to the other was a double wire swung through the air above the chasm, up and down which traveled shallow cradles of steel carrying men and food, munitions, and instruments. Such a device alone made possible the establishment of these posts in such incredible places, and the perilous journey along the wire rope swung from precipice to precipice and over intervening gulfs was the only condition of their continued survival. The post itself clung to the extreme summit of the mountain as a bird's nest clings to the cranny of rock in which it is built; while huts, devised to the exact and difficult contours of the last crags and hidden as best they might be from direct observation and fire from the enemy below, stood here perched in places the reaching of which during the old days of peace was thought a triumph of skill by the mountaineers. And all this ingenuity, effort, and strain stood, it must be remembered, under the conditions of war. The snow in the neighborhood of this aerie was pitted with the shell that had been aimed so often and had failed to reach this spot, and the men thus perilously clinging to an extreme peak of bare rock up in the skies were clinging there subject to all the perils of war added to the common perils of the feat they had accomplished.
"Marvelous as it was, I saw here but one example of I know not how many of the same kind with which the Italians have made secure the whole mountain wall from the Brenta to the Isonzo and from Lake Garda to the Orther and the Swiss frontier. Every little gap in that wall is held. You find small posts of men, that must have their food and water daily brought to them thus, slung by the wire; you find them crouched upon the little dip where a collar of deep snow between bare rocks marks some almost impassable passage of the hills that must yet be held. You see a gun of 6 inches or even of 8 inches emplaced where, had you been climbing for your pleasure, you would hardly have dared to pitch the smallest tent. You hear the story of how the piece was hoisted there by machinery first established upon the rock; of the blasting for emplacement; of the accidents after which it was finally emplaced; of the ingenious thought which has allowed for the chance of recoil or of displacement; you have perhaps a month's journeying from point to point of this sort over a matter of 250 miles."
A special correspondent of the London "Times" describes the fighting around Monte Pasubio in the Trentino, which has already been mentioned in the preceding pages, as follows:
"When the tide of the Austrian invasion rolled back at the end of June, 1916, its margin became fixed on the crest of the Pasubio, an enormous and irregular group of mountains, of which the Italians remained in possession of the highest peak, but all the northern summits and the top of the whole central ridge called the Cosmagnon Alps remained to the enemy. It was from this ridge that they dominated the Vallarsa, and their first-line trenches were on its edge. Fifteen yards below them the Italians had burrowed in somehow and had hung on until now.
"With the oncoming of winter, however, and the avalanches their hanging on became altogether too problematic. For weeks the weather prevented action through some meteorological phenomenon. When it is fair below in the plain Pasubio is crowned with dense fogs, and vice versa. Finally, the summits revealed themselves clear against the sky. The careful preparation had passed unobserved of the enemy, and during the night of the 8th inst., with increased intensity at dawn of the 9th inst., the artillery attacked on the whole line for several miles.
"Bombs were employed in great number, and are found to be even more effective here than on the Carso, the friable rock breaking into millions of fragments under the explosion.