[Sidenote: Gorizia has suffered from the war.]
[Sidenote: A shell interrupts the sight-seers.]
The day was one of evil omen. We went to Gorizia, that pretty Austrian
spa that was taken by the Italians last year, and has suffered from the
war as much as Udine, its neighbor across the old frontier, has
prospered. In the heart of the town its old castle towers up from an
isolated crag, and from the battlements you can look across the valley
to the Italian and Austrian lines on the slopes of San Marco opposite.
Scores of parties like our own had made this visit to Gorizia Castle,
and to-day the driving rain and valley mists made observation so bad
that it seemed more than usually safe to show oneself above the ramparts
on the side toward the enemy. Yet we had not been there three
minutes--a group of two well-known American correspondents and one
Italian, with an Italian officer, and myself--when an Austrian six-inch
shell burst with a crash hardly ten feet from the right-hand man of our
line. A black wall of flying mud towered up and blotted out the sky;
three of us were thrown headlong by the force of the explosion. Only the
fact that the shell had fallen deeply into the rain-softened bank of
earth on top of the battlements saved the names of the last four
visitors to the Italian front from being recorded on graves in Gorizia
cemetery.
"I've brought people here seventy or eighty times," said the officer who
was with us, "and nothing like that has ever happened before.
Pages:
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89