True Stories of the Great War, Volume 2 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
History
True Stories of the Great War, Volume 2 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
"A mad, swearing mob, they were," he says, "on us as thick as ants. I
suppose they were swearing. Anyhow, we couldn't understand their lingo,
and they didn't say much after we had let them have five rounds of
rapid fire." You ask another what he said when the Bulgars stormed the
trench. "Said?" is the reply, "said? I never said anything. I was too
busy pumping hell into them to say anything. But my pal was shouting
hard enough for me and him as well." Get men with that spirit and
neither Bulgar nor German shall best them.
It is hard to explain how the Tenth Division, encompassed as it was,
won through, and perhaps the most satisfactory thing to do is to fall
back on the explanation of a Munster Fanger, whose only grumble is that
he was kept twelve hours in those terrible forty-eight hours' fighting
without food.
"They beat us with numbers. We couldn't hope to hold up against the
crowd they sent against us, a daft, clumsy gang of men. We gave 'em
hell, but their numbers beat us. But two days wasn't much of a time
to give theirselves to make us see we were beaten, and so we got away
with them still coming after us. You'd got to be there to see what
happened." It sounds very much like an anti-climax, but it is really
what happened. The Tenth Division escaped because it hadn't time to
know that by all the rules it was beaten.
THE ARTIFICIAL VOLCANO
_An incident of the Italian Campaign in the Dolomites_
_Related by Capitano Z----, of the Royal Italian Engineers_
No more spectacular feat has been accomplished in the present war
than the taking of the Col di Lana, a great peak whose summit,
towering above the Upper Cordevole Valley and commanding the main
highway through the Dolomites, was for many months held by the
Austrians. How the steel-clad crest of the Col was wrested from the
enemy is here set forth in detail. The narrator's name is suppressed
at his own request in his reminiscences in the _Wide World Magazine_.
I--STORY OF THE ROYAL ENGINEERS
It was Christmas Eve, 1915, and we officers of the Royal Italian
Engineers were huddled together in a trench, doing our best, at that
chilly elevation of some seven thousand eight hundred feet, to keep
ourselves warm. Not a word had been spoken for fully a quarter of an
hour. We were all intent, in the semi-darkness of our subterranean
refuge, on the smoking of our pipes, turning over and over in our minds
meanwhile the problem which had faced us for months past.
Entrusted with the task, amidst that wilderness of mountains known as
the Dolomite Alps, of driving back the Austrians, we had been fighting
our way forward week after week, month after month. You say that you
have never done any climbing in the Dolomites? Then you can have but
a faint idea of how formidable our work was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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