September 6, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
used than that of " key," as applied to a position, the taking 
of which compels the evacuation of an important objecti%-e. 
Many a time and oft have these so-called ''keys" rusted in the 
hands that have grasped them while the door they were 
supposed to open still barred the way. In the sense that it 
would be impossible for a strong Austrian army to hold 
Trieste after the Hermada is in Italian hands, even this 
crucially important position has no right to the tf>nn of 
" kev." for if Trieste barred the way to some vitally im- 
portant position farther on. its capture could be made a 
terribly costly affair, just as is the advance of the British forces 
across the level plain of Flanders. Or if Trieste were the 
only, or the main, Austrian naval base on the Adriatic, if 
there were not Pola to carry on with, it is certain that the 
enemy could, and doubtless would, make a very desperate 
resistance before Trieste, even after the fall of the Hermada. 
As things are, however, I strongly incline to the belief, that the 
Austrians _will — as they have been doing from the first — 
make their great fight for Trieste at the Hermada, and that, 
when this great mountain fortress falls, the evacuation of the 
most important port on the Adriatic will not be long de- 
ferred. // the Austrian!; cannot hold the Hermada it is fairly 
safe to assume that they cannot hold Trieste. 
About the Hermada itself there is nothing especially dis- 
tinctite except the fact that it happens to have been placed 
across the road to Trieste. • Like so many ridges and rises 
along the Western Front, it owes its importance to its 
position rather than to its height, contour or any notable 
physical characteristic. Yet there is no one point along the 
whole Western Front that occupies a similar position to the 
Hermada. Douaumont and \'aux suggest themselves as 
fortified hills blocking the way to a very important objective ; 
but lx)th Douaumont and Vaux fell to the Germans without 
opening the way to \"crdun. Trieste, as I have said, will 
hardly .survive for long the fall of the Hermada, and the 
latter, once firmly in the hands of the Italians, w'ould be far 
harder to recapture from them than were Douaumont and 
Vaux foj the French to re-take from the Germans. 
MouAt Hermada 
Regarding the physical characteristics • of the Hermada, 
there is not much that I can add to the succinct and com- 
prehensive description of it given by Mr. Belloc in his last 
week's article : "A fairly compact and isolated hump, 
lietween the southern edge of which and the sea run the main 
railroad and the main road to Trieste." The name of 
" Gibraltar," so often applied to the Hermada, is apt enough, 
so far as it relates to a stronghold blockinga roadasGibraltar 
commands the road to the Mediterranean, but misleading if 
it is meant to conjure up a picture of a frowning cliff-begirt 
fortress like a media;val castle. 
I have seen the Hermada from observation posts scattered 
around something like a hundred degrees of a circle, and from 
these directions (which roughly correspond with those from 
which the Italian attacks have been made), a soldier with stout 
legs and a good wind — just such a soldier, indeed, as is the 
Italian Bersaglieri — could trot right up to the round shell- 
scarred' thousand- feet-high summit of the Hermada at the 
double. The principal , reason that he has not been able 
to do so up to this time was that the Austrian gun-caverns 
and protective galleries for the men were so deep in the rock 
that the Italian artillery had comparatively little effect upon 
them. The Austrian would retire witli his machine gun to 
the bowels of the earth until the bombardment of tlie Italian 
heavies was over, and then bob up serenely and mow down 
the attacking infantry from such of his half-demolished 
emplacements as were still serviceable. 
The vital importance attached by the Austrian to the 
Hermada is shown by the fact that he has continued to con- 
centrate and emplace artillery in that sector from the outset, 
the consequence being that while on the rest of the Isonzo 
front the Italian superiority in heavy guns has been on the 
increase for many months, on the Hermada, when an attack 
came, (le has been found ven,- nearly able to give shot for 
shot. In the May attacks, the Italian artillery, reinforced 
by the newly arrived British batteries, had considerably the 
best of the exchange, but the slackening pressure on the Russian 
front ena!)lerl thf enemy to bring up both guns and men in 
numbers and in time to prevent the attack being pressed to its 
ultimate objective, the summit of the Hermada.' When 
Cadorna " lets go with his right " again, however, we may con- 
fidently expect an artillery superiority that will give the 
magnificent Italian infantry a chance to get their teeth 
in. to go up and drive the enemy out of his holes as they did 
on the Sabutino, Kuk and the Vodice, and as they have just 
done on Monte Santo. When t^is happens the Hermada is 
doomed, and once firmly in Italian hantis the chances of the 
Austrian winning it bark are practically negligible. 
The fact that the Hermada is nothing more nor less than a 
honeycombed mountain bristling with guns makes it prac- 
tically invulnerable to any flanking attack save one striking 
deeply enough to cut its communications. If it holds out for 
any length of time against the frontal attacks which we 
may expect to see launched against it before long, something 
of this kind might develop as a consequence of the taking of 
Monte Santo and the deep Italian advance to the north. 
Nothing short of an outflanking movement deep enough to 
threaten the communications of the Hermada, however, 
can be expected to force the enemy to retire from that strong- 
hold. It is obviously out of the question for any Italian 
force to try to pass down the narrow strip of plain between 
the Hermada and the sea. It would be annihilated vmder the 
guns emplaced on this, the steepest side of the grim black 
mountain against just such a contingency. A similar fate 
would probably await any attempt to outflank the Hermada 
by advancing easterly from the present Italian positions on 
the south-eastern escarpments of the Carso. 
To sum up, then : if the Hermada falls in the course of the 
present series of Italian attacks, it will probably be taken by 
direct assaults launched after— for this theatre at least — • 
an unprecedented artillery preparation ; if it survives the pre- 
sent series of attacks it may fall under the threat of its com- 
munications of a wide encircling movement from the north. 
With the Hermada firmly in Italian hands, the question 
whether or not the Austrian will put up a fight for Trieste 
will hinge very largely upon whether or not he would expect 
to return to it again in case he is forced to leave. If he ex- 
pects that tlie Peace Treaty will be so framed as to give back 
all or a part of the teritory Italy has taken from him, he would 
naturally be inclined to begin his fight to save his remaining 
submarine bases at some point that would not involve the 
shelling of his principal port. . It was the hope that he would, 
sooner or later, be returning to Goriziathat made the Austrian 
give up that place without resorting to a house-to-house re- 
sistance that could have been made incalculably costly to the 
Italian. Most of the wanton shelling of this remarkably 
beautiful little city has been done since the Austrian has seen, 
his hope of coming back receding day by day as the Italians 
pushed forward to the north and south. 
The case of Trieste, once the Hermada is in Italian hands, 
will be precisely similar to that of Gorizia in the several months 
previous to its fall. The Italians will be in a position from 
which, with their hea\'ies, they can destroy it, block by block 
and dock by dock, if they so desire. This, because Trieste is 
to them an Italian city which they hope to enter into per- 
manent possession of, they will do almost as reluctantly as if 
it were Venice or Naples ; indeed, only as a last resort will they 
turn their guns upon a place which has become to them the 
symbol of all Italia Irredenta. This the Austrian fully under- 
stands, and whether or not he will force the Italian to do this 
by making a stand will, as I have said, depend upon 
how good he estimates his chances are of coming back. If 
favourable, he will doubtless try to draw the fighting to 
some other line ; if unfavourable* he will try to lure the Italian 
to destroying his prize with his own guns. 
The dilemma of the Italians wlien once they are in a position 
to bombard and to advance directly \ipon Trieste is a difficult 
one. On the one hand there will be the natual desire to enter 
this long-fought-for objective with as little delay as possible ; 
on the other there will be the no less natural desire to do the 
place as little injury, irreparable or otherwise, as possible. 
The Austrian fully understancUng this phase of the situation 
will, of course, endeavour to take full advantage of it. The 
Italians, so far, have taken the greatest care that their aerial 
and naval bombardments on Trieste and its vicinity have been 
directed towards points of unquestioned military' character. 
The increasingly frequent bombing raids by squadrons of 
Caproni aeroplanes and by dirigibles are always timed to do 
their work in the full light of early morning in order to be sure 
that the tons of explosive go exactly where they were in- 
tended to go. 
There has probably been less indiscriminate bomb-dropping 
in this theatre than in any other. Not even as reprisals for 
the wanton destruction wrought by the Austrian raids on 
Venice, Padua and Verona did the Italians resort to bombing 
the non-military sections of Trieste and other cities and towns 
about the head of the Adriatic. Whether this restraint 
would have been exercised had enemy regions other ^han 
those of Italia Irredenta been within practicable bombing 
range one cannot say. ' The fact remains that the Italians 
have not sought to compass the military discomfiture of the 
enemy by the destruction of civilian life and property, which 
is a valuable index of the reluctance with which they will 
resort to such methods to force the Austrian from Trieste. 
The capture and complete control of Hermada will un- 
doubtedly materially simplify the Italians' problem on this 
score. It i«; not generally known that, ever since the bringing 
no of the Italian " heavies " after the advances of last May, 
