"A mad, swearing mob, they were," he says, "on us as thick as ants. I suppose they were swearing. Anyhow, we couldn't understand their lingo, and they didn't say much after we had let them have five rounds of rapid fire." You ask another what he said when the Bulgars stormed the trench. "Said?" is the reply, "said? I never said anything. I was too busy pumping hell into them to say anything. But my pal was shouting hard enough for me and him as well." Get men with that spirit and neither Bulgar nor German shall best them.
It is hard to explain how the Tenth Division, encompassed as it was, won through, and perhaps the most satisfactory thing to do is to fall back on the explanation of a Munster Fanger, whose only grumble is that he was kept twelve hours in those terrible forty-eight hours' fighting without food.
"They beat us with numbers. We couldn't hope to hold up against the crowd they sent against us, a daft, clumsy gang of men. We gave 'em hell, but their numbers beat us. But two days wasn't much of a time to give theirselves to make us see we were beaten, and so we got away with them still coming after us. You'd got to be there to see what happened." It sounds very much like an anti-climax, but it is really what happened. The Tenth Division escaped because it hadn't time to know that by all the rules it was beaten.
THE ARTIFICIAL VOLCANO
An incident of the Italian Campaign in the Dolomites
Related by Capitano Z——, of the Royal Italian Engineers
No more spectacular feat has been accomplished in the present war than the taking of the Col di Lana, a great peak whose summit, towering above the Upper Cordevole Valley and commanding the main highway through the Dolomites, was for many months held by the Austrians. How the steel-clad crest of the Col was wrested from the enemy is here set forth in detail. The narrator's name is suppressed at his own request in his reminiscences in the Wide World Magazine.
I—STORY OF THE ROYAL ENGINEERS
It was Christmas Eve, 1915, and we officers of the Royal Italian Engineers were huddled together in a trench, doing our best, at that chilly elevation of some seven thousand eight hundred feet, to keep ourselves warm. Not a word had been spoken for fully a quarter of an hour. We were all intent, in the semi-darkness of our subterranean refuge, on the smoking of our pipes, turning over and over in our minds meanwhile the problem which had faced us for months past.