liant and bloody storming
of Mounts Podgora and Sabotino on the western side of the river above
Goritzia, and simultaneously a crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and
a magnificent rush up the plateau and across the plateau of the Carso.
Goritzia itself was not organised for defence, and the Austrians were
so surprised by the rapid storm of the mountains to the north-west of it
and of the Carso to the south-east, that they made no fight in the town
itself.

As a consequence when I visited it I found it very little
injured--compared, that is, with such other towns as have been fought
through. Here and there the front of a house has been knocked in by
an Austrian shell, or a lamp-post prostrated. But the road bridge had
suffered a good deal; its iron parapet was twisted about by shell bursts
and interwoven with young trees and big boughs designed to screen the
passer-by from the observation of the Austrian gunners upon Monte Santo.
Here and there were huge holes through which one could look down upon
the blue trickles of water in the stony river bed far below. The driver
of our automobile displayed what seemed to me an extreme confidence in
the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was justified. At Sagrado
the bridge had been much more completely demolished; no effort had been
made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one crossed by a sort of
timber switchback that followed the ups and downs of the ruins.

It is not in these places that one must look for the real destruction
of modern war. The real fight on the left of Goritzia went through the
village of Lucinico up the hill of Podgora. Lucinico is nothing more
than a heap of grey stones; except for a bit of the church wall and the
gable end of a house one cannot even speak of it as ruins. But in one
place among the rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand
piano. Podgora hill, which was no doubt once neatly terraced and
cultivated, is like a scrap of landscape from some airless, treeless
planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the Carso to the right
(south) of Goritzia. Both San Martino and Doberdo are destroyed beyond
the limits of ruination. The Carso itself is a waterless upland with but
a few bushy trees; it must always have been a desolate region, but now
it is an indescribable wilderness of shell craters, smashed-up Austrian
trenches, splintered timber, old iron, rags, and that rusty thorny
vileness of man's invention, worse than all the t