United States or Armenia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I have threaded beautiful and rugged Carnia nearly as far west as Monte Croce, have ascended the valley of the But to Mount Timau, where the Austrians, as elsewhere, are in close touch, and, passing on to wonderful Cadore, have visited the haunts of the Alpini above the sources of the Tagliamento and Piave.
We will not be able to relieve them, or get supplies to them, much before next April." And it was then only the middle of December! In the Carnia and on the Upper Isonzo one finds the anomaly of first-line trenches which are perfectly safe from attack. I visited such a position.
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.
Well, there they are, great eight and nine inch monsters, high above the highest of the wire roads, one of them that I know of at a height of ten thousand feet above the sea. There is no doubting it, incredible as it may seem, for they speak for themselves as the Austrians have found to their cost. The most advanced positions in the Carnia, as in the Trentino, are amid the eternal snows.
On none of the European battle-fronts is there a more beautiful and impressive journey than that from Udine up to the Italian positions in the Carnia.
That fresh-water fish have been known to remain locked in the flinty bosom of Monte Uda in Carnia, the Academical Discourse of Cyrillo de Cremona, pronounced there in the year 1749, might have informed us; and we are all familiar, I suppose, with the anchor named in the fifteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Strabo mentions pieces of a galley found three thousand stadii from any sea; and Dr.
The soldiers fighting in the Carnia, on the other hand, not infrequently wear coats of white fur to protect them from the cold and to render them invisible against the expanses of snow. When I was on the Italian front they told me an incident of this mountain warfare.
To the east of Monfalcone rose the red heights of the Carso, the barren limestone plateau which stretches from the Isonzo south into Istria. And beyond the Carso I could trace the whole curve of the mountains from in front of Trieste up past Gorizia and away to the Carnia.
They were driven back with heavy loss. Other local attacks which were attempted in the Posina Valley, on the Asiago Plateau, and in Carnia failed. On the Julian front, in the sector north of Goritz, the artillery duel, already spirited, became more intense, but was not followed by infantry action. The position which the Italians captured on Hill 363, east of Plava, was consolidated.
In the far distance rose great mountain masses. Up there were Feltre and Belluno, and behind, just visible when the light was very bright, the peaks of Carnia and the Cadore. It was an unaccustomed feeling, after months of comparative immunity from observation behind mountain ridges, to be in flat country again.
Word Of The Day