August 24, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
II 
bare bank, 2,000 feet in height, (i) was never earried. 
The Pass behind the Com Zugna (2) was never carried. 
The approach to the Lower Brenta (4) was held np at 
the very Up or opening of the dark ravine leading down to 
Valstagna. But the third mode (3) came nearest to 
success. The Austrians fought their way across the 
Plateau of Asiago to the rim of that basin ; poured 
through the cut in the rim below the Cengio, and were, 
so far as this one column was concerned, within a mile 
or two of the plain when tlie tide turned. 
The tide turned in the week between June 4th and 
June nth, after the Austrian effort had lasted three 
weeks — too long for its original plan in so wild a country 
without good communications and without supplies. 
It is sometimes said that the Russian offensive a thousand 
miles away, which opened on Jime 4th, was the cause of 
the Austrian retirement. I do not believe it. A great 
machine launched and at work is not halted and reversed 
thus in a few hours. It is probable that the mere news 
of the first Russian successes did not reach the Trentino 
until the 5th, and certainly no dispositions could have 
been taken for even the beginnings of a retirement for 
three or four days. What is true is that the ItaUan and 
Russian plans were well co-ordinated, and that the 
Russian pressure fell just at the moment when the Austrian 
retirement in the Trentino was in full swing, so that 
the Austrians were suffering their worst losses at the 
very moment when the drafts they could spare were 
present upon neither tlie one front nor the other. 
The real reason that tfie Austrians were checked as 
from June 4th, and by June nth could no longer count 
upon victory in the Trentino, was the rapidity with which 
the Italian Higher Command had massed its men. 
It was exactly the same feature which enabled the 
counter-stroke of Gorizia to be delivered two months 
later. I was myself present upon tlie Italian main line 
of communication, not indeed during the beginnings of 
this concentration, but before the enti o-f it. . Nothing 
was more .remarkable than the smoothness with which 
everything worked, and this in its turn was very largely 
due to the spontaneous co-operation of the civil popula- 
tion. That spontaneous character of effort which you 
get in Italy, just as you get it in France, is an immense 
asset on the Allied side in the West against the mechanical 
organisation of the enemy. Had such a sudden swinging 
back of troops been made upon the enemy's side, we 
should have had, I know not what mass of regulations 
and what swarms of officials herding the civilian popula- 
tion here and there to permit of the movement of troops. 
There would have been any amount of " efficiency " 
and " organisation " with a corresponding creaking and 
blocking of the machine. The Italian people of the 
Plain took the whole thing fiuidly, because they took it 
intelligently, and because the millioned intelligence of a 
civilised people takes the place of and does far more than 
the bullied ordering of a more brutish people. 
The great Italian armed mass swung from east to west 
with the least conceivable disturbance of the civil life of 
Verona and Vincenza, and of the Plain through which 
the railway runs ; and the spectator was reminded in some 
sort of the way in which during the Battle of the Marne 
great masses of men were swung by railway behind the 
actual line of the fighting and even through the streets 
of Paris, though the enemy was at the gates of Paris. 
The whole thing was a great lesson in the connection of 
dignity, freedom and the military spirit. It was a world 
asunder from the scenes men have M'itnessed behind the 
German lines in occupied Poland and Flanders. 
By the middle of June, exactly a month after the first 
stroke had been delivered, the Trentino offensive was 
ready to ebb. In the last week of the month it was in 
full retreat. The enemy was back upon the frontier 
ridge and his effort was at an end. 
E5.sentially this defeat of the Trentino adventure was 
a combination of Austrian jniscalculation, or rather 
Prussian miscalculation (for the whole thing was ordered 
in detail from Berlin and overlooked, even down to the 
brigades, by Prussian officers), and of an unexpectedly 
rapid and smooth Italian concentration. It would be 
an error to imagine the Austrian retirement as taking 
place under the pressure of an Italian advance. What 
happened was that it was checked by the Italian concen- 
tration, checked for so long that its necessary dependence 
upon accuniulated stores forbade its remaining in the 
plateau of Asiago and hence compelled it to retreat on 
its own initiative. 
The consequences of that retreat were very great. Like 
nearly all the principal military events of tlie latter part 
of the war, those consequences developed below the 
surface as it were, and were not readily appreciated. 
Yet it is true to say that on account of the Trentino 
adventure you have the present position in Galicia and 
be3'ond the Isonzo. This is not because the Austrians 
lost heavily. Their total losses will certainly turn out 
to be far under the estimated 100,000 men when we 
know the real figures. It is rather because the Trentino 
was one of those gambles in which there is no hedging. 
The enemy deliberately bottled up eighteen divisions 
at the end of one double line of railway and of a single 
road in a countrj' which could not provision him at all. 
Of these eighteen divisions at the end of the adventure 
he only had four left as a local strategic reserve ; all the 
rest had turn and turn about come into action upon that 
narrow front. He was able to send immediately against 
the Russians no more than four divisions. Rearguard, 
actions against the Italian concentration kept the equiva- 
lent of six to eight divisions constantly in the front hue, and 
he must have had half as much again immediately behind 
him. In general the Trentino and its failure meant that 
he could barely add one-eighth, he certainly could not 
add one-fifth to ■ his effectives on the Eastern front ; 
these, therefore, had to be supplemented by cpiite nine 
German divisions between the Prijjet and Roimiania. 
This, in its turn, meant that the German strategic reserve, 
already dwindhng, ceased to exist, and that German 
losses which had been calculated by the German General 
Staff to remain at a defensive minimum throughout the 
■Rummer upon the Russian front, had now to share the 
tremendous rate of losses which the Austrian front was 
suffering between the I^ripet and Roumania. 
We have had example after example of this, and one 
ver^' striking one last week. The five divisions 
which attempted to stop the advance of the Russian 
7th Army, under Letchitsky, were composed, as to nearly 
half their effectives, of Germans. These Germans had 
joined the Austrians after the first tremendous blows 
delivered in the Bukovina. The Germans came in full 
strength to hold Austrian divisions which were already 
largely depleted. Therefore, though the Germans were 
nominally only two divisions out of live, their actual 
effectives were probably quite half of the whole. Once they 
had arrived they received the swinging blow which lost 
Kolomea, then the blow which lost the main road north of 
it, and the blows which liave cleared both banks of the 
Dniester, turned Bothmer's right flank and compelled his 
retreat. The mass of the losses here liave been German. The 
troops which tried to stop the Russians on the Koropiecs 
in its lower reaches were almost entirely German, and it is 
evidence of what they have suffered that one whole 
regiment — the third reserve — was entirely wiped out. 
Every man in it was killed, wounded or taken prisonef. 
But this sort of thing has been going on everywhere 
between the Marshes and the Carpathians. It is a 
concentration of German troops that has suffered so 
heavily on the Sereth and on the Stokhod, and in general 
the purely German plan which produced the Trentino 
fiasco is responsible for a quite unexpected drain upon 
German numbers in the place and at the time where 
Prussia least expected and could lea;it afford them. 
The failure of the Trentino adventure has had yet 
another result, for on it directly depends the breakdown 
of the enemy front in the open Country between Gorizia 
and the Carso, and the contemporary carrying of the 
Carso escarpment. They could not reinforce tliis line. 
The Italian superiority in number held them thoroughly 
on the Trentino front after they had failed, and at the 
same time was able to swing masses eastward again and 
strike unexpectedly upon the Isonzo, in the first third of 
this month, with the results we now see. All the present 
ill-posture of the enemy in the south and the east depends 
upon the Trentino blunder exactly as their ill-posture in 
the west depends upon the Verdim blunder. These 
operations were twin operations proceeding from the 
same brains and based upon the same mechanical strategy 
of which Prussia is the author. They have between them 
destroyed the enemy's initiative, and have reduced liini 
to his present position everywhere. 
H. Belloc 
