and sleeping the exhausted sleep of men who had travelled all the
previous day, and worked all the night.
The non-commissioned officers kicked and pulled them to their feet, and
shoved them to their positions along the parapet. From here they
peered, befuddled with sleep, down into the valley.
With the exception of Luigi Castelani, not a single man in the Third
Battalion had ever faced an armed enemy, and now after an infinity of
nerve-tearing waiting, at last the experience was upon them in the dark
before the dawn when a man's vitality is at its lowest ebb.
Their bodies were chilled and their brains unclear. In the uncertain
light, the mob that poured into the valley was as numerous as the sands
of the desert, each figure as large as a giant and as ferocious as a
marauding lion.
It was in this moment that Colonel Aldo Belli, panting with exertion
and nervous strain, stepped out of the narrow communication trench on
to the firing platform of the forward line of emplacements. The
Sergeant in command of the trench recognized him instantly and let out
a cry of relief.
'my Colonel, thank God you have come.' And forgetful of rank and
position he seized the Count's arm. Aldo Belli was so busy trying to
fight off the man's sweaty and importunate clutches that it was some
seconds before he actually glanced down into the darkened valley then
his bowels turned to jelly and his legs seemed to buckle under him.
'Merciful Mother of God,' he wailed. 'All is lost. They are upon us.
With clumsy fingers he unbuckled the flap of his holster and as he fell
to his knees he drew the pistol.
'Fire!' he screamed. 'Open fire!' And crouching down well below the
level of the parapet, he emptied the Beretta straight upwards into the
dawn sky.
Manning the Italian parapets were over four hundred combatants; of
these over three hundred and fifty were riflemen, armed with
magazine-loaded bolt-action weapons, while another sixty men in teams
of five serviced the cunningly placed machine guns.
Every man of this force had endured grinding nervous strain, listening
to the war drums and now confronted by a sweeping mob of threatening
figures. They crouched like dark statues behind their weapons, fingers
curled stiffly around the triggers, and squinted over the open sights
of rifle and machine gun.
The Count's-shriek of command and the crackle of the pistol shots were
all that was necessary to snap the paralysing bonds of fear that held
them. The firing was started around Aldo Belli's position, by men
close enough to hear his command. A long line of muzzle flashes
bloomed and twinkled along the forward slope of the valley, and three
machine guns opened with them. The tearing sound of their long
traversing bursts drowned out the crackle of musketry and their tracer
flickered and flew in long white arcs out across the valley to bury
itself in the dark moving blot of humanity.
Taken in the flank, the mob broke and surged away towards the dark
silence of the far slope of the valley, away from the sheets of bright
white tracer and the red rows of rifle fire. Leaving their dead and
