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The Italians at Bay: Monfalcone

Monfalcone the most romantic point in the fighting line. And as the sun was setting I went down to Monfalcone, to a place which could not be mentioned then, but which was at the same time probably the oddest and the most romantic point of the world's fighting-line. Monfalcone was for the Austrians a sort of combination of Birkenhead and Bournemouth. There were important ship-building yards there, and it had besides popularity as a seaside place. In the shipyard the Austrians had left an eighteen-thousand-ton liner, of which the hull was complete and the decks built in. Tools of constructive labor are dropped.

To reach the ship you passed through a yard that was a rusty monument to the futility of war. There were all the tools of constructive labor just as they had been dropped when this nightmare of destructive passion burst upon the world; weather-reddened traveling cranes rusted to the tracks on which they will never move again; trucks overturned, a lathe smashed by a shell that had torn a wide gap in the roof above. Here, where the air used to tremble all day long with the clang of giant hammers, there was now silence and desertion, and the offices from which great ships were controlled on their voyages to far-off seas had become the barracks of Italian artillery-men. The partly built Austrian liner.

There was a big wooden staircase that the Italians had built leading up to the various decks of the great liner, and, once on board, you could walk out to the forward bridge of the ship where from a sort of conning-tower you looked out at the Austrian trenches less than a mile away without the possibility of being seen. An odd observation post, neither asea nor ashore, and to make the confusion of elements more complete, the gunners whose guns barked continually from just behind it were sailors of the Italian Navy, dressed not in blue, but in military gray-green.