"But out of this failure there came a new idea. Why not let my strong man simply support the weight of the gun on his shoulder—acting as a sort of ambulant gun-carriage, so to speak—while a line of men pulled him along with a rope?
We rigged up a harness to equalize the pull on the broad back, and, with the aid of sixteen ordinary men, the feat was accomplished without a hitch. I am sorry to say, however, that poor Samson was laid up for a spell with racked muscles.
"The gun—with the necessary parts and munition—was taken up in the night, and at daybreak it was set up and ready for action. It fired just forty shots before the Austrian 'heavies' blew it—and all but one or two of its brave crew—to pieces with a rain of high-explosive. But the troublesome Austrian battery was put so completely out of action that the enemy never thought it worth while to re-emplace it.
Italians mine and Austrians countermine.
The final explosion.
"That is just a sample of the fantastic things we were doing all of the three months that we drove the tunnel under the summit of the Col di Lana. The last few weeks were further enlivened by the knowledge that the Austrians were countermining against us. Once they drove so near that we could feel the jar of their drills, but they exploded their mine just a few metres short of where it would have upset us for good and for all. All the time work went on until, on the 17th of April, the mine was finished, charged, and 'tamped.' That night, while every gun we could bring to bear rained shell upon the Austrian position, it was exploded. A crater 150 feet in diameter and sixty feet deep engulfed the ridge the enemy had occupied, and this our waiting Alpini rushed and firmly held. Austrian counterattacks were easily repulsed, and the Col di Lana was at last completely in Italian hands."
Copyright, World's Work, June, 1917.
During the late spring and summer of 1916, there was waged in France that great series of battles participated in by both British and French armies known as the battles of the Somme. Next to the defense of Verdun, they formed the most important military operations on the western front during that year. These battles are described in the narrative which follows.
