The Austrians had prepared all sorts of disagreeable surprises. They had hewn gun-positions out of solid cliffs, skilfully placed so as to cover the routes of approach, and had cemented up the embrasures. It was merely necessary to knock the cement out and pour shells upon the advancing Italians at a range of several miles. The batteries were inaccessible to storming parties, and the Italians had to drag up guns of equal caliber to put them out of business.
In some places rocks and masses of ice were rolled down the slopes, as in the brave old days of the Helvetians; and in this line the Austrians introduced an innovation. When the Italians began driving their trenches up the steep slopes of Podgora--the Gibraltar of Gorizia--the defenders rolled down barrels of kerosene and set them alight with artillery fire. This enterprise throve joyously until the Italian gunners got the range of the launching-point and succeeded in exploding a few barrels among the Austrians themselves.
[Sidenote: Austria had possession of the heights.]
The writer does not mean to give the impression that Italy's job in the Alps is all but finished. A glance at the map of the frontier will cure any one of such a notion. The Italians were forced to start this campaign under every strategic disadvantage. By the frontier delimited in 1866, they were left without natural defenses on the north and east. All along the Austrian boundary the heights remained in the hands of the Hapsburgs as natural menaces to Venetia and Lombardy. Italy received the plains, but Austria held the mountain fastnesses that hung above them.
This is so much the case that when Italy declared war, the Austrian general orders reminded the troops that they were in the position of men on the top floor of a six-story house, defending it from attackers who must mount from the street under a plunging fire.
[Sidenote: Chasseurs Alpins in the Vosges.]
But in one way or another the Italians have been doggedly fighting their way up the walls of the house. For one thing, their Alpini have brought to great perfection the use of skis in military operations on the snow-clad slopes. This is the first war in which skis have really come to the front. In France, too, the Chasseurs Alpins have been able to show the Germans some astonishing things with their long wooden snow-shoes in the winter fighting among the crests of the Vosges.