s. While the Italian Third
Army in massed assault was making its unsuccessful fight for
possession of Gorizia with Trieste as its ultimate objective, warfare
was in progress in a hundred places in the Julian, Carnic, Dolomite,
Trentino and Tyrolean mountains. Although along this part of the
frontier the Italians inflicted no vital harm upon the enemy during
the first two months of the war, they were successful in a multitude
of minor enterprises, each of which furnishes its stirring tale of
hand-to-hand fighting, individual heroism and novel expedients in a
country singularly adapted to some of the methods of primeval warfare.
Being on the defensive, the Austrians frequently made use of the
primitive ambush of mountain tribes. Loose, heavy bowlders were lashed
to the edge of a precipice and masked with pine branches. Then when
the enemy passed along the mountain path beneath, the wires holding
the rocks in place were cut, releasing a deadly avalanche upon the
advancing foe.

Any description of the fighting on this Alpine front becomes by
necessity a catalogue of apparently isolated operations, for the
nature of the ground negatived any great battle in force such as that
along the Isonzo River. In the Julian Alps the Italian mountaineers
gained a lucky success early in June. General Rohr, the Austrian
commander, had set two companies to guard a rampart of rock between
Tolmino and Monte Nero. The position was so strong that a few hundred
men with Maxims and quick-firers could have held it against an army
corps. Its strength, in fact, was so apparent that the Austrians took
their duties too lightly. Leaving only a few sentries on watch, both
companies enjoyed plenty of sleep at night. But one night the Italian
Alpinists climbed silently over the mountain, killed the enemy's
sentries with knives before they could make an outcry and coming upon
the two companies from the rear captured them with scarcely a
struggle.

The peak of Monte Nero, a stump-shaped mountain 7,370 feet high at the
headwaters of the Isonzo, proved important to the Italians, for it
gave them a fire-control station from which 12-inch shells were
dropped into the forts of Tolmino and the southern forts of Tarvis.
North of Monte Nero, where the boundary turns to the west, is the
important pass of Predil, the gateway to Tarvis, guarded on the
southeast by the fortress of Flitsch and on the west by Malborghetto.
These two positions were the strongest points