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In this book I need not narrate all this history again. They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with masterly skill, according to the new method of "infiltration" which had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of '17 at Caporetto.
"Yes," said Bucci, "and I am a Colonel, and I have some decorations too, but I don't wear them on my nighty, and I want to go to sleep." He had been in Gorizia before Caporetto, and had kept, as a melancholy souvenir, the maps showing the line of his own Regiment's retreat. "I call it the Via Crucis," he said. "I want to go back.
As in 1915 he had crushed Serbia, in 1916 occupied two-thirds of Roumania, so this year he fell upon the Italians at Caporetto on the 25th October.
It can be said for this middle-aged poet that he has successfully defied the government of Italy, that he flouted the royal duke who was sent to parley with him, that he seduced the Italian army and navy into committing open mutiny "a breach of that military discipline," in the words of the Prime Minister, "which is the foundation of the safety of the state" and that he has done more to shake foreign confidence in the stability of the Italian character and the dependability of the Italian soldier than the Austro-Germans did when they brought about the disaster at Caporetto.
The Austrians lost twice as many prisoners and four times as many guns at Vittorio Veneto as they had taken at Caporetto. The war on the Italian Front was over, the Austrian Army was broken beyond recovery, the Austrian State was dissolving into its national elements, which only tradition, corruption and brute force had for so long held together.
Here just a year ago some of von Below's German troops, who broke the line at Caporetto, had been billeted, and later a Bulgarian Governor and staff had been installed, for the encouragement and flattery of the wavering minor allies of the enemy powers. On the same principle a Turkish Governor had been appointed at Feltre. The troops of occupation had been guilty of wicked excesses at Conegliano.
Italy had lost half Venetia and enormous quantities of guns in the breach of her defences at Caporetto. It seemed indeed at any moment, when the ice and snow of that dreadful winter of 1917-18 melted, as though Italy would share the fate of Rumania. Though the British army had had a grand success with their Tanks, they had, ere 1917 ended, lost nearly all the ground gained round Cambrai.
When the attack developed, some of the troops in the Caporetto sector unquestionably turned and ran, as troops of every great Army in this war have at times turned and run, under conditions of greater or less provocation.
In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened, and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington, and many staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have told, been sent to Italy with some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir Douglas Haig's command.
I have heard it said that a September victory in Palestine would have had its reflex on the Italian front, and that the Caporetto disaster would not have assumed the gigantic proportions which necessitated the withdrawal to Italy of British and French divisions from the Western Front and prevented Cambrai being a big victory. That is very doubtful.
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