Scenes from Italy's war . f its capture. When the Italian war broke out, Sabotino was astronghold of nature and of art. On the side towardsthe Isonzo gorge, of which we saw much at a later date,it fell in wooded precipices straight down into the on the side which in 1915 faced the Italian out-posts, the mountain presented a glacis of limestone rocksloping away to east and south from its triangular sum-mit. Athwart this immense natural glacis the Austrianshad, during the months of Italian neutrality, blasted outin the limestone surface a deep trench, which the Italianscalled par excel
Scenes from Italy's war . f its capture. When the Italian war broke out, Sabotino was astronghold of nature and of art. On the side towardsthe Isonzo gorge, of which we saw much at a later date,it fell in wooded precipices straight down into the on the side which in 1915 faced the Italian out-posts, the mountain presented a glacis of limestone rocksloping away to east and south from its triangular sum-mit. Athwart this immense natural glacis the Austrianshad, during the months of Italian neutrality, blasted outin the limestone surface a deep trench, which the Italianscalled par excellence the trincerone. They had also hol-lowed out for themselves great chambers in the rock,where thousands of men could shelter during the pre-liminary bombardments of twenty-four or forty-eighthours duration, which in those early days of the waralways preceded attack. Against these previously pre-pared defences the Italians on the open glacis of the The shaded line is thatof the Italian front fromJune 1915 to Aug. Map III.—The Isonzo Front, June 1915 toAugust 1916. UNDER SABOTINO. 49 mountain had to push forward such trenches as theycould improvise, scraping them out in the intersticesof the rocks, or piling loose stones into walls like theroughest of those on our own northern moors. It wasa contest on unequal terms. These operations on the face of the mountain weused to watch from the vineyards behind our house atQuisca, two miles from Sabotino as the crow flies acrossa deep valley of chestnut woods. The Austrians werealways invisible, deep in their trincerone and its com-municating passages. But we could see the Italian out-posts crouching behind their stone walls, and on theoccasions when anybody moved in the open—that is,on the days of Italian attack at sunset—^we could seeevery figure with absolute distinctness till night obscuredthe scene. In the other direction we looked from our perch atQuisca over as fair a view as there was in any zone ofwar : fruit-lad
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Keywords: ., boo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectworldwar19141918
