United States or Nicaragua ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The foothills of the Julian Alps descend sharply to a plain near where the Isonzo issued from the gorge which it has cut through the mountains. The line between the plain and the mountains is sharp and clearly marked. There is no gentle tapering off of one into the other. This line between the hills and plain is somewhat irregular in shape and incloses a pocket in which Gorizia is situated.
There was on the Isonzo front, however, an absence of the horrors of war in the shape of devastated towns, villages, and countryside, with which the world has become familiar in illustrations from Belgium and northern France. Over no field of operations was the veil of official secrecy more securely held than over the events proceeding on the Austro-Italian front.
Italian batteries caused explosions and fires in the Austrian lines near Castagnievizza on the middle Isonzo. Austrian detachments that attempted to approach the Italian positions southeast of Vertoiba were repulsed. During the night of March 9, 1917, Austrian detachments, in the midst of a violent snowstorm, entered advanced positions on the southern slopes of Cima di Bocche.
The Italian front, I might add, divides itself into four sectors: the Isonzo, the Carnia and Cadore, the Trentino, and the Alpine. Directly below us, not more than a kilometre away, was a village which the Austrians were shelling. Through our glasses we could see the effects of the bombardment as plainly as though we had been watching a football game from the upper tier of seats in the Yale Bowl.
The artillery combat gradually increased in vehemence during the next few days, especially on the Isonzo front, indicating a resumption of offensive movements. About the middle of March, 1916, Italian troops began again to attack the Austrian positions. On March 15, 1916, a lively artillery duel and a series of attacks and counterattacks were repulsed from the Isonzo front.
But no serious impression was made on his positions except along the lower reaches of the Isonzo. Here the west bank from Tolmino down to Monfalcone and the sea fell into Italian hands. Gradisca was captured on 10 June and the river was crossed at different points.
The long series of Battles of the Isonzo, the journalists counted up to twelve of them in the first twenty-seven months in which Italy was at war, the succession of offensives "from Tolmino to the sea," which were only dimly realised in England and France, cost Italy the flower of her youth.
A second, framed as an order of the day, spoke of victory and the planting of the green, white and red banner on the Adige, and forward to the Isonzo. "I can hear nothing of Carlo Alberto's victory," Beppo said; "no one has heard of it.
If you have ever gone, in a single day, from the sunlit orange groves of Pasadena up to the snow-crowned peaks of the Coast Range, you will have as good an idea as I can give you of the journey from the Isonzo up to the Carnia. Down on the Carso the war is being waged under a sky of molten brass and in summer the winds which sweep that arid plateau are like blasts from an open furnace-door.
The northern part was held by the Italian Second Army, under General Capello, the southern by the Italian Third Army, under the Duke of Aosta. In the north the Isonzo runs through a deep ravine, with Monte Nero rising on its eastern side. Monte Nero is some 6800 feet high. The Alpini took it by a marvellous feat of mountain warfare in the first year of the war.
Word Of The Day