第10章 THE ISONZO FRONT(2)

I went on through the wood to a shady observation post high in a tree, into which I clambered with my guide.I was able from this position to get a very good idea of the lie of the Italian eastern front.I was in the delta of the Isonzo.Directly in front of me were some marshes and the extreme tip of the Adriatic Sea, at the head of which was Monfalcone, now in Italian hands.

Behind Monfalcone ran the red ridge of the Carso, of which the Italians had just captured the eastern half.Behind this again rose the mountains to the east of the Isonzo which the Austrians still held.The Isonzo came towards me from out of the mountains, in a great westward curve.Fifteen or sixteen miles away where it emerged from the mountains lay the pleasant and prosperous town of Goritzia, and at the westward point of the great curve was Sagrado with its broken bridge.The battle of Goritzia was really not fought at Goritzia at all.What happened was the brilliant and bloody storming of Mounts Podgora and Sabotino on the western side of the river above Goritzia, and simultaneously a crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and a magnificent rush up the plateau and across the plateau of the Carso.Goritzia itself was not organised for defence, and the Austrians were so surprised by the rapid storm of the mountains to the north-west of it and of the Carso to the south-east, that they made no fight in the town itself.

As a consequence when I visited it I found it very little injured--compared, that is, with such other towns as have been fought through.Here and there the front of a house has been knocked in by an Austrian shell, or a lamp-post prostrated.But the road bridge had suffered a good deal; its iron parapet was twisted about by shell bursts and interwoven with young trees and big boughs designed to screen the passer-by from the observation of the Austrian gunners upon Monte Santo.Here and there were huge holes through which one could look down upon the blue trickles of water in the stony river bed far below.The driver of our automobile displayed what seemed to me an extreme confidence in the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was justified.At Sagrado the bridge had been much more completely demolished; no effort had been made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one crossed by a sort of timber switchback that followed the ups and downs of the ruins.

It is not in these places that one must look for the real destruction of modern war.The real fight on the left of Goritzia went through the village of Lucinico up the hill of Podgora.Lucinico is nothing more than a heap of grey stones;except for a bit of the church wall and the gable end of a house one cannot even speak of it as ruins.But in one place among the rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand piano.