e boundary line than did the Italian system on the south,
and they could bring up fresh troops with more speed. In the Gail
Valley they had a wide region in which they could mass hidden from the
enemy, and they had a good road up the mountains from Mauthen, while
the Italians had to depend upon rough tracks through the valley.
Although Cadorna had the hard task of keeping the doorway to Venice
closed while he attacked the enemy on both flanks, he accomplished his
purpose.

The Italian army operating in the province of Cadore won its next
success in an attack upon the village of Cortina, situated in a
salient of the frontier, 4,000 feet high, amid some of the most
beautiful scenery in the world. Cortina was taken on May 30. The
Austrians had barricaded the famous road winding up through the
Dolomites, and dug elaborate trenches; but the Italians, by superhuman
efforts, moved up their mountain guns, while the Alpini scrambled over
the mountains by the glaciers of Serapis and the tarns of Croda da
Lago, and descended into Cortina on either side. Then, holding the
enemy on the east, they advanced into the Tyrol westward to Falzarego.

In this region they had an experience which illustrated the foresight
of the Austrians in preparing for the attack they believed would come.
Some years before an Austrian had built a hotel in a deep ravine shut
in by walls of limestone and very difficult of approach. Tourists had
commented upon the lack of practicability of the man who placed a
hostelry in so inaccessible a spot. But when the war came it developed
that the hotel builder probably had a subsidy from the Government. For
sandbags, machine guns, and quick-firers quickly converted the hotel
into an excellent fort, which dominated the famous ravine. Thanks to
the hardiness and ingenuity of their picked Alpine troops, the
Italians, after a week of hard fighting, cleared the mountains above
the ravine and dropped upon the hotel fort.

By June 9, 1915, the Italians had won the Falzarego Pass. At times the
fighting raged on summits 10,000 feet high, where the thin air
exhausted the combatants far quicker than their physical exertions. In
the last battle of this engagement the Italians obtained a footing
upon a point of great strategical importance three miles beyond the
pass on the Sasso d'Istria, close to where the Dolomite road bends
southward through the ravine and penetrated the mountains in two
tunnels.

This victory gave the A