]
There were Austrian shells falling on the hill by group headquarters,
but none fell on that dense-packed road along which military traffic of
every kind and shape crawled and stuck and crawled on again. The tension
grew greater at our headquarters. The guns needed tractors to move them,
and motor-lorries were required to carry the battery stores. For the
English artillery contingent had no transport of its own, the
arrangement having been that this should be supplied by the Italians.
The French artillery contingent with the Italian Army, on the other
hand, was independent in this respect.
The organization with regard to the transport of guns is different in
the Italian and the British armies. The British system is that every gun
shall have its motor or horse-haulage permanently assigned to it, so
that it is always mobile at a moment's notice. In the Italian army the
mechanical transport service provides haulage for all units when
required, and as it is only in extraordinarily exceptional circumstances
that every single thing in the army needs moving at once, they are able
to effect considerable economies over the British method, which
constantly keeps large numbers of lorries and tractors and cars,
together with their drivers and mechanics, idle, since the units to
which they are attached are not at the moment in need of transport.
[Sidenote: Doubtful if all the British guns can be moved.]
By the time it was dark on Saturday evening the likelihood of all the
British guns getting away seemed doubtful, and the Italian artillery
colonel who supervised their employment as corps artillery came to our
group headquarters to say that preparations must be made for blowing the
last of them up, and that in any case each tractor must tow more than
one gun and come back for others directly it had got its first tows
behind the Isonzo.
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