[Sidenote: Ships that sustained hardest fighting.]
It will be seen that the hardest fighting fell to the lot of the Battle-cruiser Fleet (the units of which were less heavily armored than their opponents), the Fifth Battle Squadron, the First Cruiser Squadron, Fourth Light-cruiser Squadron, and the Flotillas. This was inevitable under the conditions and the squadrons and Flotillas mentioned, as well as the individual vessels composing them, were handled with conspicuous ability, as were also the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Squadrons of the Battle Fleet and the 2nd Cruiser Squadron.
I desire to place on record my high appreciation of the manner in which all the vessels were handled. The conditions were such as to call for great skill and ability, quick judgment and decisions, and this was conspicuous throughout the day.
The campaigns carried on by Italy against Austria were, as had been noted in a former chapter, among the most difficult of the war. The Italian troops fighting with the greatest gallantry in a mountainous and, in places, an impassable country, continued to capture Austrian fortified places, along the entire Isonzo front. One of the most daring and most brilliant of their exploits is told in the following pages.
[Sidenote: A hot wind from the Mediterranean.]
[Sidenote: Thaw and avalanches in the Alps.]
Once or twice in every winter a thick, sticky, hot wind from somewhere on the other side of the Mediterranean breathes upon the snow and ice-locked Alpine valleys the breath of a false springtime. The Swiss guides, if I remember correctly, call it by a name which is pronounced as we do the word _fun_; but the incidence of such a wind means to them anything but what that signifies in English. To them--to all in the Alps, indeed--a spell of _fun_ weather means thaw, and thaw means avalanches; avalanches, too, at a time of the year when there is so much snow that the slides are under constant temptation to abandon their beaten tracks and gouge out new and unexpected channels for themselves. It is only the first-time visitor to the Alps who bridles under the Judas kiss of the wind called _fun_.
It was on an early January day of one of these treacherous hot winds that I was motored up from the plain of Venezia to a certain sector of the Italian Alpine front, a sector almost as important strategically as it is beautiful scenically. What twelve hours previously had been a flint-hard, ice-paved road had dissolved to a river of soft slush, and one could sense rather than see the ominous premonitory twitchings in the lowering snow-banks as the lapping of the hot moist air relaxed the brake of the frost which had held them on the precipitous mountain sides. Every stretch where the road curved to the embrace of cliff or shelving valley wall was a possible ambush, and we slipped by them with muffled engine and hushed voices.