Land & Water 
June 27, 1 9 18 
Cavaxuccherina there is hard land. Any movement there 
can be supported from the sea, and the St' Dona bridge-head 
might be turned. It will, I say, probablv appear, when we 
have the full accounts after the war, that the passage of the 
water here, with the threat it contained of advancing towards 
Grisolcra, was the movement which finally decided the enemy 
to abandon his bridge-head west of St. Dona, and with the 
loss of that there was no reason for attempting to liuld the 
difficult central bridge-heads up stream. 
The point of interest then became (and is at the moment 
of writing), the measure of success which the enemy would 
have in withdrawing his troops across the river. Save in 
the St. Dona bridge-head, the distance to be traversed 
was insignificant. The Austrians were quite close to the 
stream. It is probable also that not much heavy material 
had yet been got over. But though the distance of retire- 
ment was very short and the impediments accompanying it 
probably few, with insufiicient bridges, the bringing over of 
70,000 men, which is something like a man to a yard, counting 
all the bends of the stream, would be a formidable task ; 
and what we are now waiting for is news of how far that 
task has been accomplished. But it began (probably) on 
Saturday, and was not (apparently) observed till after 
mid-day on Sunday. The losses of the Austrians had 
already been exceedingly heavy before their offensive move- 
ment failed. It has continually appeared in the latter 
stages of this war that a successful offensive in its first stages 
is far less e.xpensive to the attacker than to the attacked, 
and this is due to the change in the value of artillery. But 
the second phase, when the offensive begins to be continued, 
when it still struggles to go forward, and when it has aban- 
doned this hope, and begins to consolidate itself, is the one 
in which losses begin to tell. Now, in the case of the present 
Austrian offensive this second stage was greatly prolonged 
in comparison with the first. The crossings of the river 
and the first apparently successful shock against the Italian 
line was a matter of thirty-six hours only, and much the 
greater part of the work was done in the first twelve ; but 
after that there came seven days of continuous fighting 
without any appreciable advance save the four or five 
thousand yards west of St. Dona. Everywhere else the 
offensive was checked, and yet attempted to extend itself 
even after the position was hopeless. 
In the particular case of the Montello the offensive steadily 
declined in power during all that week, until it had turned 
from a true offensive into a precarious defensive. 
The same thing was going on all down the river to 
the neighbourhood of Fossalta. Even there, in the 
St. Dona salient, the Italian pressure increased so rapidly 
that the enemy began to lose ground, and his final attempt 
last Friday to enlarge himself by a full massed attack against 
Losson was cruelly battered. Under such circumstances, the 
rate of casualties must necessarily have been very high 
indeed. How high exactly we do not know, but we shall be 
able to estimate it better when the Italians have occupied 
this belt, which the Austrians are abandoning, and can 
judge the waste of their enemy by observation upon the 
ground itself. 
Since there is nothing more to be said of the movement 
until further reports come in, which will Show us how far 
the Austrians have been successful in withdrawing to the 
further bank, let us turn to a general, though brief, recapitula- 
tion of the battle. 
To understand the battle as a whole, it is best to put it in 
the simplest possible form, and for that purpose I will here 
append a sketch in which nothing is mentioned but the ab- 
solutely essential points, and these only in diagrammatic 
form. 
You have on this diagram the Allied front in the two sec- 
tors attacked, which may be called respectively the River 
Sector and the Mountain Sector. You have that front mainly 
though not entirely supplied by communications running as 
does the barred line in the diagram. The enemy masses 
against this line from Lake Garda to the sea almost the whole 
of his offensive forces. There was nothing left in the Eastern 
marches of Europe, in what was once the Russian Empire, 
but a small number of troops of low value, and in the Balkan 
mountains little more than a police force. The Austro- 
Hungarian Empire, therefore, can put 71 divisions into line 
against the Italians and the Allied contingents who are with 
them. Of these 71 divisions he engages no less than 41 for 
the first main shock and its immediate reserves of men, keep- 
ing back 30 to put into the battle as it develops later. This 
force is supported by seven and a half thousand pieces : 
It will be appreciated that such a concentration either of 
men or of guns against the Italians had not been possible, 
and is only now possible as the result of the collapse of 
Russia. • 
The enemy's plan is obvious. He will come down from the 
mountains, pressing back the Allies on their extreme left 
where the arrows arc in the diagram, and so get down to the 
communications of the Italian Army, if he can press the line 
back to the neighbourhood of these communications, a mat- 
ter of about 20 miles, still better if he can break the line and 
reach the communications directly, he has trapped the whole 
Italian force between Lake Garda and the sea. But in order 
to do this he must hold the Italians everywhere. Therefore, 
while he makes his main attack in the mountains and as far 
to the left as possible (because the further^ to the left he makes 
it, the greater the result.should he reach the communications) 
while he masses no less than 29 divisions in the mountains, 
he also fights vigorously to cross the Piave with the remaining 
12 divisions, thus compelling the Italians to concentrate heavily 
in defence of that line, lest it should break after losing its de- 
fensive obstacle, the river. In connection with this crossing 
of the Piave, he proposes to seize the isolated hill at the point 
where the river front joins the mountain front, a hill called the 
Montello. To possess this hill would give him observation 
over the whole plain, and prevent Italian observation over 
his rear and communications which, hitherto from the Mon- 
tello, the Italians have possessed. But we must clearly bear 
in mind that all this fighting from the Montello southwards 
along the Piave, is a secondary part of his original plan. He 
is there only compelling the Italians to mass troops ; in other 
words, holding them by a threat, while he delivers his main 
blow in the mountains. 
It is a perfectly simple and even obvious conception. 
While it was yet dark, at three o'clock in the morning of 
Saturday, June 15th, he began his bombardment all along 
the line from Lake Garda to the sea. And at half-past seven 
he threw in his infantry. The critical point was the Asiago 
Plateau corresponding to the sector upon which I have put 
the arrows. This sector was thus defended : On the extreme 
left the ItaUans ; next to them the British, then the French, 
and then the Itahans again. The enemy's chief weight was 
against the British, and especially against the British left, 
where there was a point of junction with the Italians, and 
where the easiest approach to the plains from the mountains 
lies down a fairly open valley carrjdng both a road and a 
railway. Four divisions struck the blow : All, I believe, 
Austrian and German speaking. The 2nd, the i6th, the 
52nd, and the 38th, reading from left to. right— that is, 
from west to east. The first two succeeded in pushing back 
•the British line next to the Italians by about a thousand 
yards on a mile and a half of front. That was a dense forma- 
tion. We have no details yet, but it looks like a density of 
more than seven — and perhaps more than eight — men to the 
yard. The Italians gave great help on the left, which the 
British Commander acknowledges in special terms ; the 
other two divisions on the British right were checked abso- 
lutely ; the counter-attack was undertaken on the same day; 
and early on the, Sunday morning the whole position was 
restored. Further east the French had held the attack 
against them, and still further east in the mountains the 
Italians, after suffering a retirement almost to the very 
edge of the hills at the Col Moschin, returned and recovered 
the whole position. 
Meanwhile on the first day of the battle the Piave was 
crossed at several points. The eastern end of the Montello 
was seized by the enemy, and the nearest practical point to 
the sea, the last point before the marshes began, the bank 
opposite St. Dona was also seized, but so far everything 
turned upon what would happen in the mountains. 
By the third day of the battle— Monday, and quite early 
in the day— it was apparent that the effoi;t in the mountains 
had failed. We shall probably find, when 'we know the facts, 
that the cause of the failure was the very heavy loss the 
enemy sustained. At any rate, from that day, Monday, the 
whole battle changes in plan, and the enemy determines to 
give up his original effort to reach the communications. 
