June 29, 1916 
LAND & W A T E R 
for the purpose of the " break through " was very much 
more heavily gunned. 
The number of field pieces proper to 18 divisions 
remained upon the original' establishment and model, 
but the heavy pieces were greatly increased in number. 
Each division had its 4 in. howitzers tripled in number. 
Instead of 12, 36 such heavy pieces were now ])rcscnt. 
This gjves an addition to this arm alone of 432 heavy 
pieces. The corps howitzers, that is the big 6 in. 
howitzers, were also tripled, and to the original 56 was 
added a new 112, making a total of not less than 168 
of these large calibre weapons. 
On the top of that each corps had a perfectly new 
group of 36 guns of 80 milimetres callibre (which I believe 
to be a new weapon ?) and which gives for the whole seven 
corps, therefore, 252 such pieces. Finally attached to 
the expedition as a whole, and I imagine under a separate 
command, were the monsters — not less than 40 12-inch. 
howitzers. 
That ends the list of pieces movable by road. . 
But beyond these again the Austrians had encumbered 
themselves with the two very large types which can only 
be moved by railway ; four 15 in. howitzers (380 milli- 
metres) and four of those enormous 420's (16.I inches), 
the value of which is still so much in doubt. 
In mere number of guns and howitzers, therefore, the 
Austrians had, even if they had added nothing excep- 
tional to their plans, very nearly 2,500 guns — to be 
accurate 2,422. 
So far as the congestion of material is concerned, the 
really striking thing about this number is that nearly 
half were heavy pieces. Every soldier and every student 
of war will know what it means for an army in movement 
(even with ample communication and many diverse 
roads and railways behind it) to have actually as many 
heavy pieces with it as its field guns ! 
But this is not all ; the gigantic pieces, 12 inches and 
over, were all but 50 in number, and it is their munition 
which really clogs all movements. 
The head of shell behind the larger guns amounted at 
the end of the process of accumulation to 1,000 rounds 
each behind the batteries, with we know not what vast 
reserve upon the railway behind. 
Now the point to seize with regard to this tremendous 
concentration of material and men is that the Austrians 
in the Trentino arc bottled up in a fashion unknown to any 
other theatre in the whole vast sweep of the campaign. 
The whole of this huge affair hangs, to use ah ex- 
expression literally accurate for the map " by a thread." 
Its wounded must be evacuated, its drafts brought up, 
its further munitionment delivered, along only two lines 
of railway, one from the north and one from the east, 
following closely restricted valleys in a wild mountain 
land, the one coming from the valley of the Drave, the 
other over the Brenner Pass. There is worse than this, ' 
the two lines meet at Boren, and thence all the way to 
Trent you have nothing but the one line of railway (a 
double line it is true and very well constructed), running 
through the most diftlcult gorges and everywhere through 
a valley closely restricted. 
From Trent as a base, the operation spread out 
like a fan. It had for its success to be possible at all to 
reach the first of the main lines of Italian communication 
to the Isonzo front — the line through Vincenza and 
Verona. Unless it reached that line it had far better 
not have set out at all. 
But it had not only to reach this line of communication ; 
it had to reach it quickly. Like all these great operations, 
speed was of the essence of its success. But this was 
particularly true of this operation in the Trentino, 
because of the exiguity of communications behind it. 
It so happens that the approach from the mountains 
to the plain (along the edge of which plain runs the main 
line of communications) is not in a gradual slope but, as 
we have seen in previous articles, is caught up into a 
sort of basin defended by an outer rim from the plain, 
along which rim the Italians stood holding the Austrians 
firmly meanwhile at the two wings. 
We have seen how the Austrians failed, especially in 
the last fortnight, to force that rim. They seem to have 
reached their furthest points about 7th June (at which 
moment they had already brought into action 14 out of 
their 18 divisions). 
The succeeding week was one of gradual but distinct 
reaction, and since then the local Itahan counler-oftensives 
have everywhere succeeded. To-day the enemy is in 
full retreat. ■ 
Put all this together and what does it mean ? 
It means that the Austrians staked everything upon 
the Trentino effort and its rapid success just as the 
Germans staked everything upon the Verdun effort. 
It means next I think that the Austrians tried to con- 
tinue their attack in the Trentino for just the same 
reasons that the Germans a few weeks ago, when they 
found that they had definitely lost the battle of Verdun, 
thought themselves without the choice of an alternative 
and so have still attacked, beaten though they are. 
Something might turn up in both cases ! If they stop 
what else is there for them to do ? 
But in the case of the Austrians in the Trentino the 
game is already up. The counter-offensive against 
them began as early as June 4th in Volhynia. They arc 
retreating. They must withdraw all this mountainous 
munitionment and these scores of heavy, hundreds of 
medium, and thousands of lighter guns. They cannot 
even withdraw any considerable number of men from 
such a region and through such a bottle neck save at the 
.expenditure of some weeks ! 
Meanwhile, the whole plan depended upon the defensive 
line against the Russians standing firm. Even if the 
blow through the Trentino had succeeded — which it did 
not — it would have been essential for the eastern front 
to have remained inviolable, but we know what happened 
there, the eastern front broke at the first Russian 
challenge ; it suffered a disaster which, measured in 
terms of time and men, is the most severe suffered by 
any force since the beginning of hostilities. In a little 
more than a fortnight nearly half of the original effectives 
between the marshes and the Rounianian frontier had 
disappeared. The equivalent of something like five army 
corps was lost to the Austrians for ever in prisoners alone, 
and certainly not less than the equivalent of 15 divisions 
had disappeared if we are to reckon the killed as well as 
the wounded who had not fallen into Russian hands. In 
that one blow alone Austria lost almost as many men as 
she had foohshly bottled up beyond Trent. 
German Control of the Offensive 
I have seen in the papers a statement that the Higher 
Command at Berlin had disapproved of this Austdan 
plan, even in its inception. 
There is no proof -one way or the other, though one 
would naturally regard newspaper statements of this 
sort as falsehoods upon general principles, from what one 
knows of the spread of sensational rumours during time 
of war. But apart from such general principles there 
are excehent reasons for not believing that the Austrian 
blunder was committed against the advice of Berlin 
and for regarding it as a typical blunder of the German 
General Staff, much more than as an Austrian folly. I 
will tabulate my reasons for this conclusion : 
(r) The Austrian Army has been under the complete 
control of Berlin from the time of the early Austrian 
disasters and particularly since the threat to Hungary 
18 months ago. German officers were to be found every- 
where and German units intermixed with Austrian units 
wherever this was thought advisable. 
(2) The construction of the Austrian defensive works 
between the marshes and the Roumanian frontier was 
entirely upon a (ierman model, and was part of all that 
scheme of which the Germans had openly said (and 
certainly convinced themselves) that it was impregnable 
if garnished with the minimum number of men — about 
3,000 to the mile. 
(3) The concentration of the guns in the Trentino 
and of their vast munitionment, of specially collected 
imits of a particular value ; the tactical type of attack — 
even down to the " infiltration " and the sending out of 
small bodies to " feel " the effect of a bombardment— 
the deliberate running of tremendous losses in order to 
push through by a rapid stroke — all these were exactly 
upon the German model, and might be compared point 
by point with the actions in front of Verdun, which were 
already three mgnths old in experience when the blow 
against Italy was launched. 
(4) The admixture of political with strategic motive is 
quite typically German. It may be also typically 
