press down upon the
Austrian valleys. But in the Trentino the Austrians are still well over
the crest on the southward slopes. When I was in Italy they still held
Rovereto.

Now it cannot be said that under modern conditions mountains favour
either the offensive or the defensive. But they certainly make
operations far more deliberate than upon a level. An engineered road or
railway in an Alpine valley is the most vulnerable of things; its curves
and viaducts may be practically demolished by shell fire or swept by
shrapnel, although you hold the entire valley except for one vantage
point. All the mountains round about a valley must be won before that
valley is safe for the transport of an advance. But on the other hand a
surprise capture of some single mountain crest and the hoisting of one
gun into position there may block the retreat of guns and material
from a great series of positions. Mountain surfaces are extraordinarily
various and subtle. You may understand Picardy on a map, but mountain
warfare is three-dimensional. A struggle may go on for weeks or months
consisting of apparently separate and incidental skirmishes, and then
suddenly a whole valley organisation may crumble away in retreat
or disaster. Italy is gnawing into the Trentino day by day, and
particularly around by her right wing. At no time I shall be surprised
to see a sudden lunge forward on that front, and hear a tale of guns
and prisoners. This will not mean that she has made a sudden attack, but
that some system of Austrian positions has collapsed under her continual
pressure.

Such briefly is the _idea_ of mountain struggle. Its realities, I
should imagine, are among the strangest and most picturesque in all this
tremendous world conflict. I know nothing of the war in the east, of
course, but there are things here that must be hard to beat. Happily
they will soon get justice done to them by an abler pen than mine.
I hear that Kipling is to follow me upon this ground; nothing can be
imagined more congenial to his extraordinary power of vivid rendering
than this struggle against cliffs, avalanches, frost and the Austrian.

To go the Italian round needs, among other things, a good head.
Everywhere it has been necessary to make roads where hitherto there have
been only mule tracks or no tracks at all; the roads are often still in
the making, and the automobile of the war tourist skirts precipices and
takes hairpin bends upon tracks of loose metal