July 27, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
should believe the enemy to be more exhausted than he 
is, but it is of great advantage that opinion should at least 
not believe him to be less exhausted, and there has 
now been for some months — or was until the present 
great British offensive began^ — a complete misconception 
on the matter in very influential quarters in this country. 
A Study of the Italian Front — 11. 
We have seen that the Italian front in this war had, 
from the point of view of the whole great campaign , one 
essential task attached to it. That task was the holding 
of as many Austrian divisions as possible upon the front 
between the Adriatic and the Swiss frontier. But this 
task has not only to be stated to be understood. It was 
one of extraordinary difficulty and one in which the 
corresponding success which the Italians haye achieved 
has been the more remarkable from its almost impossible 
geographical conditions. 
When the old artificial frontier was drawn between the 
Austrian dominions and the new Italian State, it was 
drawn neither according to the true boundaries of nation- 
ality nor according to the geographical or strategic con- 
ditions which would have secured either party and given 
a basis for a durable peace. Everywhere this boundary 
included towns and villages wholly Italian in charac- 
ter. It also included many which if not wholly 
Italian were preponderantly Italian, and everywhere that 
frontier secured the strategic initiative to Austria. 
It was clearly drawn^ with the object of permitting 
Austrian armies, which were supposed to be certainly 
superior, and an Austrian Power which it was taken for 
granted would be immensely stronger than the new- 
Italy, to attack at will. 
In the first place this frontier ran west of the Lower 
Isonzo (a purely Italian river covering the great Port of 
Trieste, which is essentially an Italian town), striking the 
mountains somewhat west of Gorizia, a town in the main • 
Italian. 
It was claimed that Austria must have her outlet upon 
the Adriatic, and that the Port of Trieste alone gave her 
a full opportunity of this kind, and it was even claimed 
that the mixture of nationalities at this point (the Slav 
speaking populations come down close to the seaports and 
fragments of them are to be discovered even west of the 
Isonzo) gave all that district naturally to the Hapsburgs 
whose role it is to combine and adjudicate between the 
confused peoples of such mixed districts. 
Anyone actually seeing and testing the countryside 
for himself will not attach any very great weight to this 
argument. One has always heard, for instance, that 
Cormons was a town partly Italian, but with a Slav 
admixture. It is nothing of the kind. It is an entirely 
Italian town. There are villages outside it with Slav 
names ; Podgora is only the Slav translation of Piedmont 
or " The Foot of the Hills." The same is true of Gorizia, 
though there is here a larger foreign admixture. The 
town is essentially an Italian town. 
But more important than the debate upon the exact 
proportion of non Italian blood, speech or custom upon 
this short frontier between the Alps and the Adriatic was 
the retention by the Austrians of the defensive Hne of the 
Carso. 
The Carso Plateau co\'ers Trieste, and for the purposes 
of modern war a defensive established upon its low 
Western crest is as strong a line as you could find. The 
limestone formation pitted with a number of natural 
craters is one in which it is difficult in the extreme to 
establish trenches and correspondingly advantageous to 
the Power which can in time of peace draw up artificial 
defences thereon at leisure. The low western slope of 
the Carso down on to the Isonzo Rixer is an open bare 
glacis with little or no dead ground, and almost as well 
adapted for defence as though it had been specially de- 
signed for the same by human engineering. It was 
upon this line of the Carso that the Austrians retired in 
the first days of the war. They hold it still, and were they 
not preoccupied elsewhere they couW apparently hold it 
indefinitely by the niax^sing there of numbers always 
equal to anything the Itahan offensive could bring 
against them. ' 
Leaving this region and going westward you find, of 
course, a series of valleys coming down from the crest or 
watershed of the Alpine system and discharging torrents 
towards the Venetian Plain. Every one of these valleys, 
which was provided with a pass at its head where guns 
could cross, every one of these gates into the Italian territory, 
was given to the Austrians by the artificial i rentier traced 
a couple of centuries ago. 
There is first of all a group of valleys called the Carviia 
which combine to feed the main torrent of the Taglia- 
mento. It is up the easternmost of these that the imter- 
national railway goes. The frontier corresponds here in 
the main to the natural boundary, the crest of thig moun- 
tains. But the essential point, the only easy pass by 
TRlESrE^ 
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