MOUNTAIN BATTLES.

DEFENCE OF MONTELLO.

From G. WARD PRICE. ITALIAN HEADQUARTERS, Sunday.

The first twenty-four hours of the great Austrian offensive have resulted in the capture of 3.100 prisoners, among them a colonel and eighty-eight other officers, by the Italians. The unusual number of attackers which has fallen into the hands of the defence is a sign both of the energy of the enemy’s assaults and of the determination of the counter-attacks with which they were repulsed. Except for lack of secrecy, the Austrians, in fact, organised this supreme effort of theirs better than might have been expected. It has been well planned and resolutely delivered. The credit due to the Italians is all the greater for repulsing it completely in many places, containing it in others, and nowhere allowing a break through to be now made. The sector on which the enemy has gained most ground is on the Piave. There the Austrians have made three principal crossings of the river and have established three bridgeheads or salients into the original Italian line. To make this possible they blinded the Italian artillery and aeroplanes by using great quantities of smoke-shells, which covered the river and the Italian trenches on its bank with a dense black fog. Thus hidden, Austrian patrols hurried across the water in boats and on rafts under no more than a random fire from the defence. Having reached the western bank they pulled the pontoon bridges across and pushed reinforcements rapidly forward. The most notable of these crossings has been the enemy’s penetration in the Montello sector, the position which the British forces held all last winter. As General Plumer pointed out in his despatch, the Montello is of particular importance, because it is the hinge between the mountain and the Piave sectors of the Italian front. It stands, in fact, at the angle where the Piave leaves the mountains and enters the Venetian Plain. The Montello is a curious hill. It is an isolated hog’s back 700ft high in the middle and 7½ miles long, running almost east and west, with the foot of its northern and eastern slopes washed by the river. Its surface is undulating and dotted with farms and little woods, and an unusual feature is that it is crossed from north to south by no fewer than twenty-four roads. The value of the Montello to the enemy would be that it would dominate from the flank and rear all the Italian positions defending the line of the Piave in the dead flat plain to the south. The attack on the French sector immediately to the right of our own on the Asiago Plateau was launched at the same hour, 7.30. The French line runs out in an abrupt promontory at one point towards the enemy, and the grassy hill on which these advanced positions lie was the only point where the Austrians got a temporary footing. Repulsed everywhere else along the line, they fell back to their own departure trenches. The small body that remained hiding in the dug-outs on the hill outposts were bombed out by successive parties of Frenchmen, and 278 prisoners were taken. One group of twelve French bombers brought back 160.