The Austrians kept the Italians under deadly fire, especially aiming at their second lines, to prevent the arrival of reinforcements. This bombardment has small effect in the mountains, as, owing to the limited number of men one can employ at one time, these are able to protect themselves in dugouts excavated in the solid rock.
Snow, which is still lying on the mountains, is heaped up into immense mounds by the bombardment. Italian troops, clothed in white overalls to prevent their being seen against the whiteness, slowly advanced to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand fighting.
Despite the rain, the work accomplished by the English and Italian aviators was above praise. Flying low over the enemy troops, they brought confusion and terror into their midst, intrepidly engaging the Austrians in aerial combats, and bringing down in twelve hours many enemy planes, while also collecting invaluable military information. The English and French contingents co-operated with the Italians in perfect accord and a splendid spirit of camaraderie.
Except for lack of secrecy, the Austrians organized this supreme effort of theirs better than might have been expected. It was well planned and resolutely delivered. The credit due the Italians is all the greater for repulsing it completely in many places, containing it in others, and nowhere allowing it to break through.
The sector on which the enemy gained most ground is on the Piave. There the Austrians made three principal crossings of the river and established three bridgeheads or salients into the original Italian line.
To make this possible they blinded the Italian artillery and airplanes by using great quantities of smoke shells which covered the river and the Italian trenches on its bank with a dense black fog. Thus hidden, the Austrian patrols hurried across the water in boats and on rafts under no more than a random fire from the defense.
Having reached the western bank they pulled pontoon bridges across and pushed reinforcements rapidly forward. The most notable of these crossings was the enemy's penetration in the Montello sector, the position which the British forces held all last Winter.
This sector is the hinge between the mountain and the Piave sectors; it stands at the angle where the Piave leaves the mountains and enters the Venetian Plain. It is an isolated hog's back, 700 feet high in the middle and seven and a half miles long, running almost east and west, with the foot of its northern and eastern slopes washed by the river, its surface undulating, dotted with farms and little woods—an unusual feature—crossed from north to south by no fewer than twenty-four roads. The value of Montello to the enemy would have been that it would dominate from the flank and rear all the Italian positions defending the line of the Piave in the dead flat plain to the south.
The British, after reconquering the advanced positions, momentarily abandoned on June 15 with a view of strengthening the line, not only resisted all Austrian attempts, but counterattacked in a fashion that caused an Italian superior officer to remark: "They are slamming the gates of Italy in the face of the invader."
In a dispatch on June 19 Mr. West recorded the fact that the enemy, while maintaining pressure on the mountain front and Montello district, was redoubling his efforts on the Piave especially west of San Dona. The dispatch continues: