Karst Plateau

Hungarians were also in our sector of the Front before our arrival. Certainly they have had to endure much during the five week long "Ari" (Artillerie) preparation of the Italians, but they let the trenches go dreadfully to the dogs. During the night each and every bombarded trench should have again been duly deepened and improved, every breech in the rampart should have been filled in with sandbags, and tattered obstacle should have been erected again without fail. The Honved apparently did none of this. Generally, I can never remember here, where the Honved left behind a decent position to us. Everything was dirty, filthy, and in a state of ruin. I speak the purest truth--all of my Kameraden of the 9^th Feldjägerbataillon can bear witness, that the Hungarians even permitted the Welschen to remove the wire obstacles from in front of each battle line on the brightest of days, as I have just said, only in order to not receive any artillerie fire, because if one of them shot at an Italian, then they would thereby run away and thus allow their "Ari" to again aim at the Hungarians, until nothing more of them was stirring. The Hungarians also hadn't hastened themselves with the removal of corpses. ⁽¹³⁾ No one can imagine how new position appeared. The communication trenches to the forward battle line were still maintained to a depth of perhaps one-meter; if one sneakily ducked within them, then one was still halfway covered against infantry fire. Naturally these communication trenches were interrupted by numerous shell holes, as well as by the laying therein and about of the badly wounded and the corpses of those who had broken down on the way to the dressing station and died. Although the ground was rocky there lay within the trenches an extremely thick and greasy brown-red layer of mud which had washed together from the folds in the rocks during the downpours of rain. The slough stood in the shell holes often as deep as a man and was hideously intermixed with pieces of corpses, such as shreds of hand skin, intestines, skulls, ribs, and other similar pieces of half-decayed men. Floating about within these pools were bloated corpses whose flesh was already falling from their skulls in decaying shreds. If then, especially at night, someone who had been badly wounded would try to haul himself to the Aid Station with his last bit of strength, he might fall into such a pool, which would act as a death trap and suffocate him in misery. I, who was at that time healthy and full of strength, fell into such dreadful mud troughs several times, and had to summon forth exertions of all my strength in order to free myself from these thick, gurgling and bubbling mires. The stench is unimaginable. The human sense of smell doesn't hold out and refuses to function--Thank God--after spending a couple of hours in such air, so that this infernal vapor can be completely breathed. Such a plaguing smell must, of course, paralyze the smelling nerves.

Now, these communication trenches had yet another evil side. For as we occupied our position, there just gave forth a thunderstorm with such pounding abundance that I thought that all of the downpours which I had experienced in our anyhow very rain-rich Steirerland ⁽¹⁴⁾ were nothing more than a mild May shower in comparison. This only happens down there where the moisture-saturated sea air collides with the icy mountain wind and instantly condenses itself, and almost even travels instantly again back to the earth. The bleak rocks absorb nothing with the water running off of every stone and forming innumerable little streams which all become caught by the communication trenches running contrary to their direction. Moreover, the communication trenches had quite a steep slope at many points, whereby then a truly fast flowing and often genuinely chest deep brook was formed. And thus what everyone needed. My Kompagnie was inserted at just such a time. It was half-dark, thus incidentally between 7 and 8 o'clock in the evening. We had to use the trench because the Welschen still had plenty of shooting light with the small distance between front lines of 30-100 paces.