lO 
LAND & WATER 
August 24, 191 6 
TRENT 
country could provide nothing and the, single line of 
railway would bring up nothing sufficient for the vast 
force during the days when it should be still conlincd to 
the mountains. In point of fact, he spent five months 
in accumulation of food and material, and in massing 
a prodigious quantity of guns. I have given their num- 
ber ; far more than two thousand, of which about one- 
half were heavv pieces, from 4-inch upwards, while a 
considerable proportion— more than 5 per cent, of the 
^vhole— were the very heavy pieces that only move 
by rail. The infantry, which" the enemy massed for his 
cifort, counted not less than eighteen divisions. This 
phrase is meaningless to the reader unless we repeat the 
rough calculation which gives it value. It means that of 
the whole available forces of Austria at the moment 
nearly one-half were present against the Italians before 
the middle of May, leaving only the larger moiety to hold, 
with which was believed to be a strict minimum, the front 
in Volhynia and Galicia a thousand miles away, against 
the Russians ; while of this nearly one-half of the avail- 
able Austrians gradually massed against Italy, more than a 
half again, indeed mo;e" than nine-sixteenths were here in 
front of Trent. The reader can put the thing graphically 
in some rough sketch, such as that which follows, in 
^ C 
V 
o 
Trent ino Tront 
which it will be seen how very high was the com- 
parative densitv of the body about to be launched towards 
Vincenza and Verona, the Italian Plain, and the main 
line of the Italian communications. It was more than 
half of all the A"stro-Hungarian troops in the south. 
Of ct)urse, the whole of these 18 divisions had not 
anything like enough room to deploy. The idea was to 
attack with about a third of them and, as the losses 
would be heavv, to keep on pushing up all that remained 
behind as a reserve, to relieve those units which had 
suffered most as the fighting proceeded. 
At a guess, I slunild say that the time allowed for 
between the first laimching of the effort and the reaching 
of good fields of, supply below the moxmtains, a distance 
of twenty miles was, at the most, a fortnight, and that 
after the expiration of such a space of time the difficulty 
of feeding, munitioning, evacuating the wounded from, 
and in general maintaining a quarter of a million com- 
batants with, sav, 180,000 bayonets in such a land 
would, if the Plain had not been reached, prove too great 
for f urthcr effort. 
It was exactly with the middle of May. the 14th of that 
month, that the finst shots of thC intensive bombardment 
were fired. The weight of m<-tal was indelinitelv superior 
to anything the Italians could bring against it and the 
number of men whose advance was to follow this bom- 
bardment was superior in the proportion of about three 
to one to the troops ready to receive them. 
At this point it may be asked why the .\ustrian attack 
was thus able to exhibit such a character of surprise ? 
The answer is manifold. 
In the tirst i)lacc, every great massed attack in this 
war has been able to show some element of surprise. 
The enemy can never completely discover one's plans. 
For instance, the French attack" south of the Sommc 
was undoubtedly a surprise for the Germans during the 
last great offensive in Picardy. The strength of the 
(ierman attack at \X'rdun was a surprise for the French, 
and so on. No one dares concentrate (and therefore 
denude other parts of the front), as though he were 
absolutely sure that the enemy were going to attack in. 
one point and only in that point. A Commander always- 
has to wait and see how the attack develops before he 
can risk a very heavy counter-concentration. 
Next, 'you have the very fact that the Austrian concen- 
tjation was conducted by only one railway and one road. 
It is a paradox, but a truth that this condition which 
hampered him in his concentration at the same time 
hampered the observation possible on the Italian side. 
The slight indications whereby alone one can discover 
an enemy's movement are nuiltiplied by a large network 
of roads and railways and diminished by the exiguity of 
such a system. Again, the highly mountainous character 
of the country and of communication through the single 
gorge of the Adi^c interfered, especially during the 
early months of the year, w ith a full observation. It 
was a country in which air work (and no other obsei"va- 
tion was possible) is only intermittently at one's service 
during the winter months. 
The first Austrian deluge of shell broke the Italian 
advanced lines in such fashion that thej' were compelled 
to retire in the centre to the proximity of the frontier 
ridge. On the two wings the Italian forces held their 
own, because it was immediately conceived by the Italian 
Higher Command that the critical points where resistance 
was all-important were the valleys of the Brenta and the 
Adige. Upon the first the Italians yielded but a few 
hundred yards, falling just behind the town of Borgo. 
Upon the second they yielded by some three miles. 
Not only were the two great avenues thus securely 
held, but the intermediate opportunity for rapid supply 
and victualling to the Austrian ad\ance, the Rovereto- 
Schio road, was blocked chiefly by thcs»tenacious offence 
of the Pasubio mountain, dominating all the region. 
The Austrian offensive after its first burst comprised 
four main efforts. 
(i) The effort to turn the Pasubio by forcing the 
Posina Ridge, and so cutting the Rovereto road. 
(2) The effort to seize the pass between the Rovereto 
Road and the Adige Valley road and railway behind the 
mountain summit called the Coru Zugna. 
(3) The attempt to get right through by the centre across 
the Plateau of. Asiago, through the depressions in the 
rim of that plateau, especially the Cengio gap, and so 
down immediately on to the Plains. 
(4) The effort to turn the Italian positions on the 
Brenta by getting round on to the Lower .Brenta, 
especially towards Valstagna, to which point a pre- 
cipitous ravine leads down from the Plateau of Asiago. 
All four efforts failed. The Posina Ridge, a sharp, 
