LAND & WATER 
Italy's Great Record 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
September 6, 1917 
The writer of this article made a complete tour of the Italian 
FrotU la^t winter, and he has just now returned from another 
tour of the same Front under present conditions. I hrce 
weeks ago he tias the gimt of Italian officers tn the trencnes 
before Mount Hcrmada. 
▲ "NIONG the several factors strongly contributing 
/\ to tlK success of th- latest and most bnlliant of the 
/ \ Itahan blows upon her Isonzo .r J ihan Vront 
J. ^tliere is no doubt that one of the m J .t important 
was its comparative unexpectedness, the fact that it was 
delivered at a point where the enemy had least counted upon 
receiving it. This does not imply that the <.t1ensive itself 
was unexpected (on the contrary, Austria in spite of her 
infcrior aerial serN'ice in this theatre, could not but ha c 
known that it was preparing during all of the three months 
which elapsed between its inception and the dying down ot 
the Italian attacks of Mav). but only that the opemng blow 
came a good deal farther north than the enemy must have 
believed that he had good reason for expecting it. 
I am not I am sure, revealing anything remotely approach- 
ing a militarx- secret, in writing that the Itahan f.eni-ral Statl 
appear to be" faiflv well agreed that the chances of striking 
a telling blow against the enemv are much better upon the 
Isonzo Front than upon any other part of the lin?, which 
serpentines among the peaks and valleys of the High Alps. 
To the tvro, looking at a map and paying no heed to roaas 
and contours, there appears to be a dazzling chance to cut 
off the enemv in the Trentino bastion by moving from the 
east or west," or from both (Urections at once, on Bolzano. 
But it is iust this matter of roads and contours— the lack ot 
one and the superabundance of the other ^that makes the 
scheme (or the dream, as many Italian officers are wont to 
call it), practically prohibitive. 
The plan is no new one. General Garibaldi was interruptert 
in a campaign that had the taking of Bolzano and Trento as 
its objective when Italv made peace with Austria in i8bb, 
and the fantastically brilliant victories of Colonel " Peppino 
Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator, in taking the (ol di 
Lana and the Costa Bello in the present war were directed 
toward the same end. The terrible losses of frontal attacks 
against Alpine peaks, or the almost equally terrible. slowness 
of the tunnelling and mining method of forcing the enemy 
from some strategic pinnacle by blowing him up and off it 
with a hundred tons or so of gelatine, convinced the Italian 
General Staff that a really telling blow against the enemy m 
the High Alps would be prohibitively costly. The conse- 
quence has been the gradual settling of the whole Alpine 
Front into a state of what might be called " active defence, 
and the steady concentration of pressure on the somewhat 
less mountainous region along the upper and beyond the 
lower Isonzo. Indeed, in a sense, Italy's entire Alpine 
campaign may be said to have been defensive in that the 
heavy offensives for such positions as the Col di Lana, the 
Castelleto and the Marmolada have been prompted primarily 
by a desire to throw the Austrians from dominating points, 
to establish a line that could be more easily held. 
" Strange as it may sound." said an officer whom I met at 
Italian headquarters, " the principal safeguard against attack 
on our whole Alpine Front has been the strength of our 
armies on the Isonzo. General Cadorna realised this from 
the outset, and acted upon it with decision on the only occa- 
sion that the enemy seriously threatened to invade us, I 
refer to the Austrian attempt to break through in the 
Trentino, a year ago last spring, and in connection with it I 
recall a very amusing incident which, now that it is ancient 
history, there should Ix; no harm in telling. 
" It was just after General Cadorna. partly by the effective 
use of such troops as were available on the Trentino and 
partly by rushing a new army to the field in motor-lorries 
(an achievement rivalling that of Gallieni-in bringing the 
army of Paris into action at the Mame in taxicabs), had 
definitely stemmed the tide of tjie enemy's advance. Most 
of the war correspondents then in Italy were on hand to 
follow the dramatic operations, and it was while a number 
of these were waiting one afternoon for a promised interview 
with the Commander-in-Chief that the incident to which 1 
have referred occurred. 
" Cadorna was pacing up and down the courtyard in earnest 
conversation with a certain General X who had called 
to congratulate him upon his great achievement. The 
visitor, as it chanced, was somewhat hard of hearing, so that 
occasional words of General Cadorna's, as he raised his voice 
now and then to make himself understood, were all that 
reached the ears of the waiting correspondents. 
■'It was just as X was about to depart that Cadorna 
was seen to strike the palm of his left hand with the clenched 
fist of his right, and, in characteristic manner, to snap out ti 
dozen words or so in what was plainly some i)ithy conclusive 
asseveration. The visitor leaned closer in an attitude which 
indicated he had hot fully understood what had been said. 
Again Cadorna smote his palm and spoke so loudly that the 
words ' Trentino ' and " Isonzo ' were distinctly audible to 
the correspondents thirty yards away. But still the meaning 
was not clear to General X^^— , and, hand to ear, he leaned 
still closer to the steel-trap of Cadorna's clenched jaw. If 
there was anyone in that part of \'icenza who failed to hear 
every word the Commandi r-in-Chief said when he spoke the 
third time, I have vet to find him. There was no copy in it 
for the correspondents, but much food for thought and argu- 
ment. That night, and for many nights, there was hot debate 
at Press Headquarters as to what Cadorna had meant when 
he told General X that he was ' going to complete the ' 
defence of the Trentino upon the Isonzo.' 
The Carso Offensive 
"Dawning comprehension came as the preparations for the 
Carso offensive of the summsr of iqi6 took shape, and with 
the taking of Gorizia in August of that year the meaning was 
clear. F'rom that time to this the Austrian has been kept so 
busy on the Isonzo that he has never been able to gather 
himself together for an offensive on the Trentino or anywhere 
else. And as he will be kept busier and busier as time goes 
by," concluded the officer with a laugh, " we are reasonably 
safe in the belief that the war will be fought out on the Front 
to which our sujjeriority in men originally enabled us to pin 
it down, and where our superiority in the air, and in artillery 
will enable us to fight it out and win." 
There has been much not especially edifying discussion 
by military correspondents in all of the Allied countries, 
Italy included, as to what were Cadorna's objectives in 
attacking on the Isonzo Front, these having been variously 
stated as everything between a march around the Adriatic 
to Durazzo, via Trieste and Pola, on the one hand, and an 
advance upon Menna on the other. Broadly stated, the 
Italian Commander-in-Chief's objectives arc precisely similar 
to those of Petain, Haig or Hindenburg — namely, to capture 
or kill as many of the enemy as possible, and, more or less 
incidentally, to occupy as much of the enemy's country as 
possible. Unfortunately, all of the country to which there 
is fair chance of the Italians penetrating this year is too far 
from the heart of Austria to make the blow a vital one. 
That is to say the occupation of Trieste and the region round 
the head of the Adriatic would not deprive Austria of any- 
thing without which the war could not be carried on, anything 
that would necessarily force that Empire to throw up the 
sponge. Or at least this would be the case if Austria was in 
the enjoyment of anything approaching the vigour with 
which she entered the war. Greatly weakened and dis- 
heartened as she is there is of course always the chance 
that the taking of such a place as Trieste, signalling a scries 
of retreats and defeats too great to be disguised by official 
euphemism, might prove the last straw. Certainly the fall 
of Trieste to-day would hit Austria far harder than would 
have been the case a year ago. 
The point, I hardly need say, for which a victorious Italian 
army wotild have tlie most interest in driving for direct is 
Laibach, the Austrian strategic centre, rather than Trieste, 
this for a reason similar to the one which would impel a man 
in a hurry to gather a load of apples to cut off a limb of the 
tree and scoop up the fruit from the ground rather than 
climb a ladder to pick it. With Laibach in Italian hands 
all the region to the south of it, including Trieste, would fall 
of its own weight. Unfortunately, the road to Laibach, 
though by no means beset with such difficulties as those the 
Italians have already travelled to Monte Santo and Gabrielb, 
is rough and mountainous, and it is by no means improbable 
that, once the Hermada is taken, the advance along the 
more open littoral may out-distance that farther inland. In 
that event, the fall of Trieste would probably precede that of 
Laibach, hastening that of the latter by opening up a way to 
it from the south. 
What are the chances of the fall of Trieste in the course of 
the present campaign, and what would be the probable conse- 
quence of it ? The first part of the question raises at once 
the problem of the Hermada. There has been no word in 
newspaper war strategy parlance that has been more loosely 
