irst,
already mentioned, is that it was part of the Austrian plan to yield
their outpost positions with slight resistance and protect their
numerically inferior forces in the main strongholds of the mountains.
The other is that the archduke and his generals made the mistake of
underestimating the enemy. For centuries Italy had supplied the
Austrian Court with its poets and musicians, until in the Dual
Monarchy the Italians were regarded as an effete race, fit only for
the politer pursuits of art, literature and song. Italy's successful
War of Independence in the latter half of the nineteenth century had
not altogether destroyed this impression. This idea, it may be said,
was not shared by the Germans, whose military men had made a closer
study of world conditions and had learned to respect the virility of
the men of modern Italy.

CHAPTER LXV

FIRST ENGAGEMENTS

Owing to the nature of the scene of hostilities the first days of the
Austro-Italian campaign brought a series of engagements between small
groups of combatants. Artillery played a large part, and here the
Austrians, with their big guns already in carefully studied positions,
had a decided advantage. Viewed as a whole only does the campaign at
this stage take on an importance and dignity that ranks with the great
battles on other fronts of the Great War. Never before had two great
powers fought in territory so absolutely ill adapted to the movement
of large bodies of troops. For the same reason the story attains a
picturesqueness absent from the dreary plains of Galicia and Poland
and Flanders. Austrians, Hungarians and Italians fought in a land
known throughout the world to tourists for its grandeur of scenery,
its towering, snow-clad peaks, and idyllic lakes and valleys. It was
warfare where the best soldier was the man most able to surmount the
natural difficulties and take advantage of the natural protection of
the ground. The official statements of the Italian and Austrian war
offices told of feats of mountaineering, and of hand-to-hand
struggles, of dripping bayonets and of combatants locked in last
embrace with hands clutching each other's throats.

On both sides of the boundary were thousands of men who had spent
their lives exploring the trackless mountainsides, climbing with ropes
and ice axes and staves. Both nations had encouraged the formation of
Alpine clubs.

Soon after midnight on May 23, 1915, the Alpini and Bersaglieri of the
It