forty-foot precipice were slaughtered, and their bodies lay out on top of the ledge until they became skeletons.

The Italian trenches were just at the same level on the near side of the river. The lines of the Austrians were several hundred yards up an incline, looking almost straight down on the river-a series of perfect natural fortresses made of solid granite. They never expected the Italians to try again, or, if they did try, the Austrians believed it would be only a feint to cover operations further south in front of Hermada Mountain, which has barred the road to Trieste.

Searchlights Blind Austrians

When the Italians did try again, and this time succeeded, it was the biggest scheme ever inaugurated by the silent wizard of the Italian armies-Cadorna. Its very audacity contributed to its success. When dawn followed the night of the crossing, the Austrians could scarcely believe their eyes. An army stood in front of them. On those bridges, constructed over that terrible gorge between' darkness and dawn, an army corps had passed with scarcely the loss of a man.

On

And it was done chiefly by putting out the Austrians' eyes. On the hills opposite the Austrian positions, and at exactly the same level, the Italians had been concentrating searchlights for days. There seemed to be miles of them. the night when the pontoons were to be thrown across they were turned full on the Austrians for the first time, dazzling them to such an extent that they could see nothing of the work going on under their noses and only a few hundred yards under at that. It was almost as near as if bridges were being thrown over Broadway while an enemy with preventive means was on top of the Times Building and searchlights were on the Hotel Knickerbocker.

Naturally, the Austrians must have known that something was going on. There was considerable firing, and one bridge was damaged. But for the most part the crossing of the Isonzo was a complete surprise.

While the searchlights streamed constantly overhead, the Italian engineers

worked below in pitch dark. They had to drop their pontoon boats down that forty-foot wall on wooden skids, then join them across the rushing water, plank them over so that the troops could walk, and provide ladders for them to climb up the precipice on the Austrian side.

Time and again the current swept boats away before they were properly joined up. Frequently workers fell into the water and were carried instantly down. The constant cannonade helped the searchlights in fooling the enemy and kept the sound of the bridge-making from reaching the Austrians' ears.

In the morning, when the Austrians realized what had happened, they precipitated themselves backward a distance of more than seven miles to their positions beyond Volnik. What almost happened, instead of their successful retirement to Volnik, was the first surrender of an enemy army in this war.

When I arrived at the new footbridges I found the engineer corps still there making stone and concrete structures, over which artillery transports and my automobile could pass to the beginning of what is really Bainsizza. The Austrians had a fairly good road up behind their old lines to the top of a steep incline. There, where road making should be simpler than on the sides of mountains, their road trickled out into an ordinary Austrian path, and there I found what seemed to be thousands of Italian soldiers making a real military highway as quickly as possible.

We turned a curve suddenly and I saw in front an entire company of road builders lying flat on their faces squarely in our path. One of them yelled that the Austrians were sending over shrapnel. Another shouted at us to move on fast or turn back, warning us that waiting there was simply inviting a shell.

A Race Under Shell Fire

An order was given and the company crawled to the side of the road. I began to think discretion was desirable and was about to say so when, like a shot, the car went forward. The chauffeur had decided where we were to go without

waiting to hear from me.

We were to go forward over a mile of open road, and we were to go at top speed.

The road from our speeding-up point was scarcely a road at all. It had been prospected as a road by Italian engineers only the night before, there had been blasting operations, and loads of crushed stone-they were blocks rather than ordinary stones-were strewn all along to make the going harder. Yet we did it somehow and always at top speed.

As I looked behind me, I counted five distinct upheavals in the road where shells had struck less than a minute after we had passed. The Austrians evidently had not expected to see an automobile, so they did not have the proper range. Later, after we left our car in a safe shelter, we saw shrapnel raining over that road for half an hour, in the vain hope that we might be going back. We had leaped through just in time and knew better than to go back-before dark-until the road was finished and properly screened, or until certain Austrian guns were silenced.

Every wounded man is carried by hand from Holy Ghost Land, and every bit of food and water is carried in by night, although water was being piped up even while we were there.

Battle for San Gabriele

From Mount Santo (the Holy Mountain) one gets the greatest war spectacle in all the world-the fight for Mount San Gabriele. It is a stage box. The actors in the drama are so close that one can see the make-up and even watch the entrances and exits through the wings.

Mount Santo is an ideal looking mountain, for it rises 2,000 feet above the Gorizia plain and is so steep that the ascent seems like climbing a perpendicular wall. It is almost a sheer cliff on each side, and its summit rises like a church spire above everything surrounding except Sabotino, which is a mountain of its own level across the Isonzo half a mile away.

San Gabriele, which squats directly in front of Santo, is an ugly fat mountain of bare rock, the top of which is only 300 feet below the Holy Mountain's peak. That peak is the stage box so near the

tragedy that one could almost attract the performers' attention with tennis racket and balls.

Santo fell into Italian hands in much the same manner as many mountains fall by being entirely surrounded and so compelled to surrender. Thus it became an observatory not only for the battle for San Gabriele, but for a near view of the operations clear across the Gorizia plain over the Carso to the sea. From there one understands more particularly the strategy that will eventually mean the fall of Trieste.

Although the long-drawn battle for San Gabriele is limited in action, the mountain being a salient in the Austrian line, there has never been anything except at Verdun so bloody and so terrible.

The climb up Santo is long and hard, but not dangerous in the daytime. At night it is another matter on account of the precipice. However, the Italians, according to their custom, are now hacking a fine wide road in its granite side, and in a few more weeks expect to use the road for automobiles and guns. At the very top there is a great pile of broken white marble.

Where Francis Joseph Prayed

Up to a few months ago when the Italians concentrated their fire upon it, from Sabotino across the way these pieces were formed together into a sacred shrine where old Francis Joseph came to pray at the beginning of the war for the success of Austrian arms. The shrine faced west toward the old frontier. When the domineering Emperor was hauled up in a sedan chair to inaugurate thus the end of his tragic reign in a cataclysm of blood he prayed with arms spread out toward the smiling plains of Italy.

When the first shell burst through the stone portico of the shrine there stood revealed to the Italian observers a figure of the Virgin. Through the clear mountain air the observers on Sabotino could distinguish the colors of the frescoes about the Virgin's head. Another shell and both Virgin and frescoes crashed in fragments down the precipice facing Italy. To the Italian

gunners it seemed an omen that the illluck of the House of Hapsburg would continue to the end and that by Italy would their ramshackle empire be split into pieces, only to be remolded in a better way.

And now that rubble pile of what was an emperor's shrine is a box seat from which to watch the Italian lines go forward on Austrian soil.

When first I looked down on the battle for San Gabriele I seemed to hang indirectly over the crater of a volcano. A matter of 40,000 Italian shells on a daily average are bursting over San Gabriele's crest. In addition are the Austrian shells, for the lines on San Gabriele are now so close that the topmost positions have been taken and retaken half a dozen times.

A Rolling Sea of Smoke

At the moment of my arrival it seemed as if the artillery was outdoing itself for the final hours before dark. So for a few minutes I could see nothing but a rolling sea of smoke so near that I could almost smell it, while on an exact level with my eyes the puff balls of shrapnel sparked and exploded so rapidly that their detonations, rolling up mountain gorges, seemed to put the whole world a-tremble.

It all made me wonder whether we were still hanging on to our world. There was never fevered nightmare more appalling. No Hippodrome producer in his wildest imaginings ever pictured such a scene. Even Dante's Inferno was outclassed. It was veritably a hell on earth of which no pen can give the details.

Occasionally through the smoke waves we could see the bald, tortured surface of the crest. A shell would strike and we could see the sparks as a granite ledge was shivered and splintered in every direction. Caverns yawned up at us where the melinite bombs rebounded and

spent their rage. Black lines zigzagged over the surface-crazy and grotesque. They were the trenches.

Sometimes we could see figures leaping upon the stone parapets. They were like damned souls. Another shell would blot out the sight, and when it cleared the figures would all be huddled

and still-only black patches against the dirty gray of the rock.

I shifted my glasses to the breaking spray of shrapnel directly in front of me. There were the usual kinds of shrapnel, the white puff balls, and the ugly black clods. There was also a new kind, Austrian, that was yellow. The effect of all three together was marvelously beautiful. In that clear air, with the slanting sun rays and deep blue sky, when those three clouds of shrapnel would break simultaneously in about the same spot the colors spread out like a gigantic bouquet of flowers. Hermada and the Carso

The

I turned my glasses over Gorizia and the Carso to where the ugly turtlebacked Hermada Mountain has been blocking the road to Trieste. I had gone through Gorizia that morning, and had been duly and properly shelled. Austrians fire constantly upon the town from Mount San Marco, a flat mud hill in front of the city, an ideal machinegun nest that cannot be taken until it is flanked after the fall of San Gabriele. But Gorizia is only like every other captured city, and held no particular interest for me except just to say that I had been there.

I had also prowled over the Carso, that tableland of flint like our Bad Lands, which has caused more blindness among Italian soldiers than in any other army. The reason is that shells, hitting the Carso, so splinter the rock that quite as much damage is caused by splinters as by shells. Every trench is hewn from the solid rock. I often crouched in them to avoid pieces of rock that whistled through the air so far from the shell that I could not find the smoke of the explosion.

I glanced back to the inferno of San Gabriele. "But why spend so much time over this mountain,” I asked the officer, "especially as you may say you have it?" He smiled. "You would be surprised to know how few men we have lost down there," he said, "and we are not occupied alone with San Gabriele. Meanwhile it has used up about fifteen Austrian divisions. * * * Most of those divisions are dead."

In the dying daylight I again fixed my glasses on the rocky slopes below. The artillery fire had lulled a little, so that we could see more clearly. All about the surface of the bald crest was dotted with black, grotesque shadows-shadows that did not move. There were the pieces of the fifteen Austrian divisions that were dead.

Grandiose Display of Fireworks

Day fled quickly behind the higher mountains, and the evening fireworks began. Flares began to go up on all the surrounding hills, and were answered from mountain peaks miles away-rockets breaking in showers of stars that seemed to glimmer as far from the earth as the millions of real stars in the clear heavens.

We sat and watched, silent before the magnificent spectacle. The artillery was turned again upon San Gabriele. Shells crashed and exploded, striking lines of fire from the bare cliffs. The shrapnel hissed and screamed and screamed and broke in clouds of sparks.

For miles on every side the whole world seemed gone crazy. A thousand Japanese lanterns seemed to wave in a giddy whirl on the mountain peaks, then to break each into a dozen pieces and go out.

Sometimes sheds or motor caissons, struck by shells on far distant roads, would soar up in flames that lasted several minutes. In the valleys a million fireflies seemed to bob up and down in rhythmic air dance. Through every cleft and gorge the sound of cannon echoed and re-echoed as if a thousand valkyries were galloping madly from peak to peak,

while through all the infernal din there came the ceaseless barking of machine guns and sometimes the yells of men.

On San Gabriele itself we could see more plainly than by day. The explosions would sometimes light up spaces of rock for a distance of many yards. We could often catch glimpses of trenches and the shimmer of helmets and bayonets. Sometimes for brief moments between shifts in the smoke we could see troops climbing up the slopes between the zigzag black trench line. clawing at the rocky ground. Once we saw men in the very act of falling backward in the bright light of an exploding shell.

Suddenly, quite suddenly, something happened. I scrambled to my feet and rubbed an unsteady hand over my eyes. My officer also got up quickly.

I had a strange feeling that a great power had suddenly come to watch and bid mankind to cease his struggles and be still.

For from behind a distant snow peak there had floated the splendid and majestic moon. All the flares and rockets seemed to fade away. The flashes of shrapnel and melinite died out before that effulgent glow of beautiful mellow light that softly draped and enfolded the entire gigantic scene.

Even the racket of the guns seemed to die down and the carnage to shrink.

It was the same cold, wonderful moon, but on that night it seemed like the eye of God from which there flowed too much light for armies to go on with their killing unashamed.

terattacks, launched an assault upon it and seized the position.

Later in the day the enemy came back in strength, and after violent efforts succeeded in thrusting the Canadians off the crest of this old mound of cinders, though they still cling to the western side. It is another incident in the long series of fierce and bloody encounters which since the battle of Vimy on April 9 have surrounded the City of Lens and given to its streets and suburbs a sinister but historic fame.

The Canadians have fought here with astounding resolution. They have hurled themselves against fortress positions and by sheer courage have smashed their way through streets entangled with quickset hedges of steel, through houses alive with machine-gun fire, through trenches dug between concrete forts, through tunnels under red brick ruins sometimes too strong to be touched by shell fire, and through walls loopholed for rifle fire and hiding machine-gun emplacements designed to enfilade the Canadian way of advance.

Six German divisions have attacked them in turn and have been shattered against them. These are the Seventh and Eighth, the Fourth Guards Division, the Eleventh Reserve, the Two Hundred and Twentieth, and the First Guards Reserve Division. In addition to these six divisions some portions, at any rate, of the One Hundred and Eighty-fifth Division and of the Thirty-sixth Reserve Division have been engaged.

The total German strength used at Lens must well exceed fifty battalions, and the German losses may perhaps be estimated at between 12,000 and 15,000 men. The Canadians themselves have been hard pressed at times, but have endured the exhaustion of a great struggle with amazing strength of spirit, grimly and fiercely resolved to hold their gains unless overwhelmed by numbers in their advanced positions, as it has sometimes happened to them.

City of Blood and Death

But it is no wonder that some of the men whom I met yesterday coming out of that city of blood and death looked like men who had suffered to the last limit of

Their Their

mental and bodily resistance. faces were haggard and drawn. eyes were heavy. Their skin was as gray as burnt ash. Some of them walked like drunken men, drunk with sheer fatigue, and as soon as they had reached their journey's end some of them sat under the walls of a mining village, with their chalky helmets tilted back, drugged by the need of sleep, but too tired even for that.

They were men of the battalions who three days ago came face to face with the enemy in No Man's Land, a stretch of barren, cratered earth between St. Emile and the northern streets of Lens, and fought him there until many dead lay strewn on both sides and their ammunition was exhausted. An officer of one of these battalions came out of a miner's cottage to talk to me. He was a very young man, with a thin, cleanshaven face, which gave him a boyish look. He was too weary to stand straight and too weary to talk more than a few jerky words. He leaned up against the wall of the miner's cottage and passed a hand over his face and eyes, and said: "I'm darned tired. It was a hell of a fight. We fought to a finish, and when we had no more bombs of our own we 'Heine's' bombs and used picked up those."

They Call Him "Heine"

Heine the Canadians call their enemy Heine and not Fritz-" was at least three times as strong as us, and we gave him hell. It was hand-to-hand fighting-rifles, bombs, bayonets, butt ends-any old way of killing a manand we killed a lot. But he broke our left flank, and things were bloody in the centre. He had one of his strong points there, and swept us with machine guns.

"My fellows went straight for it, and a lot of them got wiped out. But we got on top of it, and through the wire, and held the trench beyond until Heine came down with swarms of bombers."