LAND & WATER 
iNovemoer 22, 1917 
the south-west, and lastly, lagoons, the end of the Venetian 
system of lagoons. The enemy can do nothing here until he 
turns the Piave line. 
His effort to establish bridgeheads above the mam 
Treviso railway line has occupied public attention this week 
seriously, esf)ecially as it has been the occasion of brilhant 
counter-work by our Allies. But we must take neither the 
effort nor the counter-work at too high a value until the main 
bombardment begins. All these are mere preliminaries. 
However, let us look at the details of these attempted bridge- 
heads. 
The efforts were made in that part of the middle Piave 
where the Central road and railway cross at the point called 
"Ponte di Piave "—that is the Piave bridge. The river is 
here a broad channel of gravel banks with streams in between, 
varying in depth from a mere trickle in summer to a full torrent 
after heavy rain. These gravel banks form a great mass of 
islands in the stream at its normal level. Profiting by these 
islands and by the lowness of the river Austrian troops crossed 
(mainly by wading) at two points, one at Fagare just north of 
the railway, and the other four miles up stream at Folina. It 
was on the morning of Saturday last, before daybreak, that 
these crossings were effected. Two batteries of Italian guns 
were overwhelmed after a very stout defence at Fagare, and 
altogether four Austrian battalions — or something less than 
4,000 men — crossed the river and established themselves upon 
the further bank. These units Ijelortged to the 29th division 
recently arrived from the Russian front. At daybreak, 
apparently, or shortly afterwards, the Austrian force which 
had thus established itself on tiie west bank of the Piave, was 
counter-attacked by the 54th Italian division, which took 
several hundred prisoners, and, without destroying the bridge- 
head, pushed it back to within very narrow limits. 
The second crossing made at Folina was less successful. 
A single enemy battalion crossed here, but all its members 
who reached the further bank were either killed or taken 
prisoner. 
We now turn in detail to the mountain sector, wiiich is 
what really concerns us. We note the general characteristic 
of the fighting here to have been a very stubborn resistance 
against what is clearly a rapidly increasing enem.y pressure. 
There is no material whatsoever for forecasting the future 
events that may take place in this region. We cannot contrast 
the forces engaged in numbers, in material, or in moral. All 
we know is that the communications of our Allies up from the 
plain are very much better than those of the enemy, who is 
seeking to come down on to the plain, and short of that the 
onl\j j:ommentary that can be made upon the fighting is geo- 
graphical. 
We have already seen that if the enemy succeeds in debouch- 
ing upon the Italian plain, he has a really great and almost 
decisive victory within his g'-asp. 
Now the descent from the Alps on to the Italian plain here 
is not, as one often finds in a mountain range, a gradual lower- 
ing series of foothills which melts into the flats. On the con- 
trary there is what I have called a wall— a sort of i rim' ol 
buttress running all the way along from the Piave to thi. 
Adige, and the heights of the crests upon this wall sufficiently 
indicate its character. You have, for instance, the Grapa. 
about 1,800 metres (nearly 5,500 feet), the Caina of 
over 3,000 feet; the Sumio of nearly 4,000 feet; and the 
lower heights connecting them are in the same scale. When 
you look up at this wall from the Italian plain you see every- 
where a very steep high bank, which contains behind it to the 
north pockets and saucers of a land of which it .is 
the rim. 
This wall is cut by one main avenue of approach to the 
plains. It is the valley or trench of the Brenta river. It has 
a railway all along it and two good roads on either bank. It 
is the oiily way by which any considerable force in the moun- 
tains can" break through to the plains. To master that way 
and to come down along it is the whole effort of the enemy at 
the present moment. It corresponds, in this battle of the 
Piave, exactly to what the Caporetto Road was in the last 
and disastrous battle of the Isonzo 
Now to master a road of this sort the first thing one has to 
do is to make certain of the heights above it upon either side, 
and that is what the enemy is fighting to obtain all the way 
from Asiago to the Piave. 
There are a large number of crests, more or less united 
by ridges in the difficult and complicated land of this mountain 
sector, and it is upon the ability of the Italians to hold these 
crests that the issue will depend. 
Last week they were in possession of Sisemol and Castel 
Gombcrto, the former under 5,000, the second under 6,000 
feet above the sea. Thev neld Lombara, rather more than 
4,000 feet high, the very" important height of Prassolan, not 
quite 5,000 feet high, and the Toniatico, on the Piave end 
of the line, a few hundred feet higher. Sisemol and Castel - 
Gomberto are the most important of these ; so long as they 
are held the enemy cannot get down into the steep, rugged 
and wild Val Frenzela, the second way down into the Brenta 
Valley. The Italians lost, however, the crest of the Lombara 
and Prassolan, so that the enemy were able to go a little 
further down the Brenta Valley and to occupy Cismon, a 
village in the midst of that valley about 12 miles (as the road 
goes) from the plain. They lost the Tomatico and as a conse- 
quence they lost Oueroi 
Everything now depends upon the power of the Allies to 
hold what is left of this mountain sector securely. As will be 
seen from Sketch J.!ap III., between the line now held and the 
edge of the wall, the belt varies from barely four miles from 
the site of the lost Prassolan height to nine or ten miles south 
of the salient formed by the peak of Castel Gomberto. It 
is an average of rather more than five miles. But the mere 
reduction of this belt is not the essential thing for the enemy. 
The essential thing for him is to master the heights on both 
sides of the Brenta Valley. His only other policy is to elbow 
the line back from the Piave and weaken it at the junction of 
the mountains and the river. But that would not give him 
