As one motors through these ripe and beautiful towns and through the rich valleys that link them—­it is a smiling land abounding in old castles and villas, Vicenza is a rich museum of Palladio’s architecture and Bassano is full of irreplaceable painted buildings—­one feels that the things was a narrow escape, but from the military point of view it was merely an insane escapade.  The Austrians had behind them—­and some way behind them—­one little strangulated railway and no good pass road; their right was held at Pasubio, their left was similarly bent back.  In front of them was between twice and three times their number of first class troops, with an unlimited equipment.  If they had surmounted that last mountain crest they would have come down to almost certain destruction in the plain.  They could never have got back.  For a time it was said that General Cadorna considered that possibility.  From the point of view of purely military considerations, the Trentino offensive should perhaps have ended in the capitulation of Vicenza.

I will confess I am glad it did not do so.  This tour of the fronts has made me very sad and weary with a succession of ruins.  I can bear no more ruins unless they are the ruins of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Berlin, or suchlike modern German city.  Anxious as I am to be a systematic Philistine, to express my preference for Marinetti over the Florentine British and generally to antagonise aesthetic prigs, I rejoiced over that sunlit land as one might rejoice over a child saved from beasts.

On the hills beyond Schio I walked out through the embrasure of a big gun in a rock gallery, and saw the highest points upon the hillside to which the Austrian infantry clambered in their futile last attacks.  Below me were the ruins of Arsiero and Velo d’Astico recovered, and across the broad valley rose Monte Cimone with the Italian trenches upon its crest and the Austrians a little below to the north.  A very considerable bombardment was going on and it reverberated finely. (It is only among mountains that one hears anything that one can call the thunder of guns.  The heaviest bombardments I heard in France sounded merely like Brock’s benefit on a much large scale, and disappointed me extremely.) As I sat and listened to the uproar and watched the shells burst on Cimone and far away up the valley over Castelletto above Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the position of the Austrian frontier.  I doubt if the English people realise that the utmost depth to which this great Trentino offensive, which exhausted Austria, wasted the flower of the Hungarian army and led directly to the Galician disasters and the intervention of Rumania, penetrated into Italian territory was about six miles.

III.  BEHIND THE FRONT

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