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The Italians at Bay: Udine

Bustle and congestion when Udine becomes Army Head-quarters. To this forgotten township of the old Venetian province had come suddenly in the spring of 1915 all the bustle and congestion of the headquarters of the whole Italian Army. For the next two and a half years you could hardly find a room in Udine to sleep in; the people of the place opened large modern restaurants and cafes for the officers and soldiers who crowded its streets; big shops filled the gloom of the old areades with an incongruous expanse of plate-glass windows; the good burgesses of Udine made money and waxed fat. A tactical dead-lock on the western front.

It seemed, indeed, as if the steady shower of war prosperity that had fallen upon them for two years might last until that indefinite, but to most minds far-off, day when peace should come. For it was the general opinion that in the West, at least, the war had reached a condition of tactical dead-lock. Trench warfare had petrified movement, except in laborious shifting of a few hundred yards at a time, hardly perceptible on a small-scale map. The day of sweeping advances, of sudden retirements, was over. At a reasonable distance behind that unbudging wall of trenches you were as secure from personal displacement by the war as if you were at the other end of Italy; indeed, no earlier than the beginning of this month of October some people had arrived with their families at Udine from other parts of the country to carry on trades connected with the life of the army.