LAND & WATER 
Italy's Great Record 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
September 6, 1917 
TJie writer of this article made a complete tour 0/ the Italian 
Front last winter, ^nd he has just now returned from another 
tour of the same Front under present conditions. 'Ihrec 
weeks ago lie was the guest of Italian officers in the trenches 
before Mount Hermada. ^ 
Among the several factors strongly contributing 
/% to the success of th? latest and most brilliant of the 
/ % Italian blows upon her Isonzo (r J Jian l<"ront, 
Ji A-thcre is no doubt that one of the m^ t important 
was its comparative unexpectedness, the fact that it was 
dclivored at a point where the enemy had least counted upon 
receiving it. This does not imply that the offensive itself 
was unexpected (oh the contrary, Austria, in spite of her 
inferior aerial ser\'ice in this theatre, could not but have 
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 opening 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 military' secret, in writing that the Italian GcntTal Staff 
appear to be" fairiy well agreed that the chances of striking 
a telling blow against the enemy are much better upon the 
Isonzo Front than upon any other part of the lini, which 
serpentines among the peaks and valleys of the High Alps. 
To the tyro, looking at a map and paying no heed to roads 
and contours, there appears to be a dazzling chance to cut 
off the enemy in the Trentino bastion by moving from the 
east or west, or from both directions at once, on Bolzano. 
But it is just this matter of roads and contours— tha lack of 
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 interrupted 
in a campaign that had the taking of Bolzano and Trento as 
its objective when Italy made peace with Austria in 18&6. 
and the fantastically brilliant victories of Colonel " Peppino " 
Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator, in taking the Col 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 Itahan 
General Staff that a really telling blow against the enemy in 
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 ha\e 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 be 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 Marne in taxicabs), had 
definitely stemmed the tide of the 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 
liave 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 a 
dozen words or so in what was plainly some pithy conclusive 
asseveration. The visitor leaned closer in an attitude which 
indicated he had not 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 Commandc r-in-Chief said when he spoke the 
third time, I have yet 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 summer of iqi6 took shape, and with 
the taking of Gorizia in August of that year the meaning was 
clear. From 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 tl^ I-jont 
to which our superiority 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 Vienna on the other. Broadly stated,, the 
Italian Commander-in-Chief's objectives are 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 ai she is there is of course always the chance 
that the taking of such a place as Trieste, signalling a series 
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 would have the 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 diificialties as those the 
Italians have already tra\ elled 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 \\ar strategy parlance that has been more loosely 
