THE FALL OF MONTE SANTO

Even when our guns were turned against San Marco, we continued to man Sant’ Andrea O.P., for one could get good general observation to the northward from the other side of the ruined house which was the old O.P., and most of the trenches on San Marco were invisible except from aeroplanes.  I spent the night there several times during the August offensive, watching by turns with one of our Bombardiers, to whom I explained that wars were made by small groups of wicked men, generally also rich, sitting and planning in secret.  I proposed to him the need to shell such groups, while they were yet forming, with the shrapnel of public opinion.

It was also at Sant’ Andrea that I met a young Lieutenant of Italian Field Artillery, a Sardinian from Cagliari.  He had still the face of a child, and he had, too, that perfect self-possession and that wonderful, soft charm which are so often found together in the Italian youth.  I think of him often with affection, and with an eager hope that he passed unharmed through all the vicissitudes which were to follow.

He and I spent many hours together, watching those bloody, memorable hills.  I met him first on the 24th of August, and we drank a bottle of Vermouth together, and discussed with enthusiasm many subjects.  We even worked out in detail a scheme for the interchange of students, for periods of a year at a time, between Italian and British Universities after the war.  We then turned to modern history and I noticed that he did not respond as much as I had expected to the name of Garibaldi.  He held the historical theory that, broadly speaking, there are no really great men, but only lucky ones.  He put forward in support of this view the distribution of death, wounds and decorations in this war.  This theory of history has in it larger elements of wholesomeness and truth than has, for instance, the pernicious bombast of Carlyle.  I told my Sardinian friend that I had once heard it said by a most learned man that, if Rousseau had never lived, the world would not look very different to-day, except that probably there would be no negro republic in the island of Haïti.  This saying pleased him and he was inclined to think it plausible.

He told me that day that Monte Santo was reported taken, but the news was not yet sure.

I saw him again three days later and by then all the world knew that Monte Santo had fallen.  For Cadorna in his communique of the 25th had cried:  “Since yesterday our tricolour has been waving from the summit of Monte Santo!” Already we could see the flashes of Italian Field Guns in action near the summit.  All day I was buoyant, exhilarated, and as absorbed in the war as any journalist.

Victory has an intoxicating quality in this bright clear atmosphere, and among these mountains, which it has, perhaps, nowhere else.  All day there seemed to be in the air a strange thrill, which at evening seemed to grow into a great throbbing Triumph Song of the Heroes, ­incomparable Italians, living and dead.  The emotion of it became almost unbearable.

“Our tricolour is waving from the summit of Monte Santo!”

Here on the night of the 26th there occurred a scene wonderfully, almost incredibly, dramatic.  The moon was rising.  Shells passed whistling overhead, some coming from beyond the Isonzo toward the Ternova Plateau, others in the opposite direction from Ternova.  Rifle shots rang out from beneath Monte Santo, along the slopes of San Gabriele, where the Italian and Austrian lines were very close together, where no word on either side might be spoken above a whisper.  Suddenly there crashed out from the gloom the opening bars of the Marcia Reale, played with tremendous elan by a military band.  The music came from Monte Santo.  On the summit of the conquered mountain, the night after its conquest, an Italian band was playing amid the broken ruins of the convent, standing around the firmly planted Italian flag.  It was the Divisional Band of the four Regiments which had stormed these heights.  On the flanks of the mountain, along the new lines in the valley beneath, along the trenches half-way up San Gabriele, Italian soldiers raised a cry of startled joy.  Below the peak an Italian Regiment held the line within forty yards of the enemy, crouching low in the shallow trenches.  Their Colonel leaped to his feet and his voice rang out, “Soldiers, to your feet!  Attention!” All along the trench the soldiers, with a swift thrill of emotion, sprang to their feet.  Then again the Colonel cried, “My soldiers, let us cry aloud in the face of the enemy, ’Long live Italy!  Long live the King!  Long live the Infantry!’” Loud and long came the cheers, echoing and re-echoing from the rocks, taken up and repeated by others who heard them, first near at hand, then far away, echoing and spreading through the night, like the swelling waves of a great sea.

The Austrians opened fire on Monte Santo.  But the music still went on.  The Marcia Reale was finished, but now in turn the Hymn of Garibaldi and the Hymn of Mameli, historic battle songs of Italian liberty, pealed forth to the stars, loud above the bursting of the shells.  And many Italian eyes, from which the atrocious sufferings of this war had never yet drawn tears, wept with a proud, triumphant joy.  And as the last notes died away upon the night air, a great storm of cheers broke forth afresh from the Italian lines.  The moon was now riding high in the heavens, and every mountain top, seen from below, was outlined with a sharp-cut edge against the sky.

Four days after, not far from this same spot, General Capello, the Commander of the Italian Second Army, decorated with the Silver Medal for Valour some of the heroes of the great victory.  Among these was a civilian, a man over military age.  It was Toscanini, Italy’s most famous musical conductor.  It was he who, charged with the organisation of concerts for the troops, had found himself in this sector of the Front when Monte Santo fell, and, hearing the news, had demanded and obtained permission to climb the conquered mountain.  He reached the summit on the evening of the 26th and, by a strange chance, found his way among the rocks and the ruins of the convent, to the place where the band was playing.  His presence had upon the musicians the same effect which the presence of a great General has upon faithful troops.  They crowded round him, fired with a wild enthusiasm.  Then Toscanini took command of what surely was one of the strangest concerts in the world, played in the moonlight, in an hour of glory, on a mountain top, which to the Italians had become an almost legendary name, to an audience of two contending Armies, amid the rattle of machine guns, the rumble of cannon, and the crashes of exploding shells.

“Our tricolour is waving from the summit of Monte Santo!”

If the souls of poets be immortal and know what still passes in this world, be sure that the soul of Swinburne sings again to-day, from hell or heaven, the Song of the Standard.

   “This is thy banner, thy gonfalon, fair in the front of thy fight. 
   Red from the hearts that were pierced for thee, white as thy
                                                       mountains are white,
   Green as the spring of thy soul everlasting, whose life-blood is light. 
   Take to thy bosom thy banner, a fair bird fit for the nest,
   Feathered for flight into sunrise or sunset, for eastward or west,
   Fledged for the flight everlasting, but held yet warm to thy breast. 
   Gather it close to thee, song-bird or storm-bearer, eagle or dove,
   Lift it to sunward, a beacon beneath to the beacon above,
   Green as our hope in it, white as our faith in it, red as our love.”