The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me

by William Allen White

"It has lain this way for three thousand years, bearing crops year after year!" explained our host.

"Signor," said a friend of our host, "they tell me that this land yields seven per cent net."

"Yes," replied our host. "I was talking to a man in the agricultural department about it the other day; it really nets seven per cent."

"What's this land worth an acre?" This question came from me, who has the Kansas man's seven devil lust to put a price on land.

"Well—I don't—" Our host looked at his Italian friends. They gazed, puzzled and bewildered, and consulted one another. The discussion developed a curious situation. No one knew the price of that land. With us, out in the Middle West, a boy learns the probable price of the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he learns the points of the compass. Finally our host explained: "The truth of the matter is that this land never has been sold in the memory of living men. Probably most of it has remained in its present ownership for from three hundred to five hundred years. No one sells land in Italy."

And that revealed much; there was the whole program of the agrarian Socialist. The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages, the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet losing money by it—all these things were the meat of the answer, which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of the land. Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden, vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; no capital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up the tenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world where labour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it was a disheartening problem.

Then in due course we left Rome and went to the Italian army on the front, and there we saw another side of the shield. From Udine in Northern Italy we journeyed into the mountains where the Italian army at that time was holding the mountain tops against the Austrians. Wherever we ascended we saw white ribbons of roads twining up the green soft mountain sides that face Italy. These roads have been made since the war. Nearly four thousand miles of them furnish approaches to the Alpine heights. They are hard-surfaced, low-graded, wide highways gouged into the mountain side. Two automobiles may pass at full speed anywhere on these roads. And all night they were alive with wagon trains bearing supplies to the front. Women help the men mend the roads. We saw few Austrian prisoners at work on the Italian roads; possibly because we were too near the front line trenches to see prisoners who are kept thirty kilos back of the line, and possibly because they have better work for the Austrians—work that old men and women cannot do. Whenever we threaded our way up a mountain side and came to a top, we found its flanks tunnelled with deep wicker-walled, broad-floored, well-drained trenches, and its top honeycombed with runways for ammunition and with great rooms for soldiers and holes for gun barrels. Mountain top after mountain top has been made into a Gibraltar by the Italians. That Gibraltar was 300 miles long, before they lost it to the Germans. But they had few guns in their fortress. They showed us emplacement after emplacement without a stick of artillery in it. They had told the French and the English of their plight, and a few artillery companies had been sent in; but only a fraction of the need. There was no central council of the allies then. Every nation was running its own little war, and Italy was left to fall, and now the four thousand miles of Italian roads, and the 300 miles of Gibraltar are German military strongholds that will have to be conquered with our blood and iron. Probably no battle line in the world today is more interesting than the Italian front was in the autumn of 1917. The south face of the Alps often is green and beautiful, but generally the northern faces of those mountains are bleak and rugged and steep. The battle line ran a zig-zag course through the mountains, now meeting in gulches, now scurrying away up to mesas, again climbing to the top of the barren heights. We stood one sunny day on a quiet sector of the Pasubio. We were with the Liguria brigade, the 157-158th infantry. Through a peep-hole in the trench we looked across a gulch to another mountainside and saw there the Austrian trenches, not 200 yards away. Before them lay the ugly scar of brown rusted barbed wire, and just below the wire, sprawled out on the white limestone of the steep mountainside, lay fifty dead Italian soldiers who had vainly charged into the machine guns up that formidable slope. They had lain there for weeks. It was the grisliest sight we had seen during our adventures.

Medill and Henry went to another lookout, leaving me with the Italian soldiers in the trench. Their luncheon came up, a fine rich soup, with bread cubes in it, some potatoes and vegetables. It looked palatable and was good. There was enough, but not plenty. As we sat in the trench waiting for Henry and Medill, one of the heroes beside me, after thinking it all out carefully, burst forth with this:

"I livea in Pittsburgh."

It was plain to his comrades that he had put his meaning through to me. They clearly were impressed by his prowess. This cheered him up. He went on to further linguistic feats.