"And I'm going to have a damn good dinner to-night whatever happens," he announced. "Goodness knows when we shall eat or sleep again. So the fowls and the rabbits we had in the battery are being killed this afternoon."
English and French artillery dependent on Italian transport.
There were Austrian shells falling on the hill by group headquarters, but none fell on that dense-packed road along which military traffic of every kind and shape crawled and stuck and crawled on again. The tension grew greater at our headquarters. The guns needed tractors to move them, and motor-lorries were required to carry the battery stores. For the English artillery contingent had no transport of its own, the arrangement having been that this should be supplied by the Italians. The French artillery contingent with the Italian Army, on the other hand, was independent in this respect.
The organization with regard to the transport of guns is different in the Italian and the British armies. The British system is that every gun shall have its motor or horse-haulage permanently assigned to it, so that it is always mobile at a moment's notice. In the Italian army the mechanical transport service provides haulage for all units when required, and as it is only in extraordinarily exceptional circumstances that every single thing in the army needs moving at once, they are able to effect considerable economies over the British method, which constantly keeps large numbers of lorries and tractors and cars, together with their drivers and mechanics, idle, since the units to which they are attached are not at the moment in need of transport.
Doubtful if all the British guns can be moved.
By the time it was dark on Saturday evening the likelihood of all the British guns getting away seemed doubtful, and the Italian artillery colonel who supervised their employment as corps artillery came to our group headquarters to say that preparations must be made for blowing the last of them up, and that in any case each tractor must tow more than one gun and come back for others directly it had got its first tows behind the Isonzo.
Enormous conflagration of military stores.
And now the darkening landscape suddenly began to spring out into brilliant points of light, as everywhere behind the Italian front, supply-depots, military stores, and vast collections of wooden sheds were set in a blaze. Gorizia was the site of a special conflagration, and the enemy gun-fire was steadily increasing, till sometimes the barrage rose to a single prolonged roar, and you could not have got a knife edge between the bursts.
By 7.30 p.m. six of our guns were across the river and the rest were now firing like field artillery, with no other batteries between them and the enemy. They kept up this protection of the retreat of the infantry so long, in fact, that the last round of all, at about 10 p.m., was fired just before the gun was hitched to the tractor, and there was yet another gun that had its breech mechanism smashed for fear it might have to be left behind.
Abandoned ammunition is exploded.