mmand, and he was succeeded by General Armando Diaz, whose brilliant
strategy during the remainder of the war marked him as a national hero
and one of the outstanding military geniuses of the war.

The order for a general retreat was issued on October 27th. Poison gas
shells rained blindness and death upon the retreating Italians and upon
the heroic rear-guards. The city of Udine and its environs were emptied
of their inhabitants; and Goritzia, which had been wrested after a
desperate effort from the Austrians, was retaken on October 28th.

That the entire Italian army escaped the fate that had come to the
Russians at the Masurian Lakes was due mainly to the third army
commanded by the Duke of Aosta. During the long running fight, it faced
about from time to time and drove the Germans back in bloody encounters.

By November 10th the Italian forces had come to the hastily prepared
entrenchments on the west bank of the Piave River. The Austrians and the
Germans dug in on the east bank from the village of Susegana in the
Alpine foothills to the Adriatic Sea.

Here a long-drawn-out battle was fought, resulting in enormous losses to
the Germans and Austrians. By this time reinforcements had come up from
the French front and every attempt by the enemy to gain ground met a
bloody check. The hardest fighting was on the Asiago Plateau. There,
although the Italians were greatly outnumbered, the concentration of
their artillery in the hills overlooking the great field completely
dominated the situation.

A factor that was of the utmost value in checking the Austrians was the
system of lagoon defenses running from the lower Piave to the Gulf of
Venice.

From November 13th, when the Austrians in crossing the lower Piave in
their headlong rush to Venice were suddenly checked by the Italian
lagoon defenses, the entire Gulf of Venice, with its endless canals and
marshes, with islands disappearing and reappearing with the tide, was
the scene of a continuous battle. A correspondent described the fighting
as absolutely without precedent. The Teutons were desperately trying to
turn the Italian right wing by working their way around the northern
limits of the Venetian Gulf. The Italians inundated the region and
sealed all the entrances into the gulf by mine fields. The gulf,
therefore, was converted into an isolated sea. Over this inland waterway
the conflict raged bitterly. The Italians had a "lagoon fleet" ranging
from the swiftest