GORIZIA UNDER FIRE.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 February 1916, Page 8

GORIZIA UNDER FIRE.

■' BUSINESS AS USUAL. COOLNESS OF THE PEOPLE. Accounts received from German sources enable a vivid impression to be gathered of the energy with which the Italians have pressed their operations against Gorizia. According to Italian statements, made subsequent to the fall of Podgora positions, the bulk of the population was sent away recently, and the town practically converted into one large fortress, as though with the purpose of compelling the attackers to destroy it in their efforts to capture it. But while the Podgora positions were still held, life in Gorizia seems to iiave been very little removed, all things considered, from the normal, despite the falling shells; and nobody will wish to withhold a tribute from the civil population, which bore itself with courage and philosophical calmness (says an exchange). The ridge of Podgora appears to have been regarded by the Austrians as impregnable; it was picturesquely described as a hedgehog's back of iron, bristling with guns and alive with gushing tire. No enemy, it was thought, could cross it. Thus, despite the pressure of the investment in other quarters, the Gorizians went on living much their usual life in their city of white churches and pnlnzzi. hilly streets and broad squares, with its gardens of laurel, pines and palms. Many business premises, naturally. were closed, for in times of peace much of the business of Gorizia had been in Italian hands. On such premises one generally found the significant notice, "Temporarily closed." In one street a wliole row of flower shows remained open, their windows ablaze with roses, violets and asters. Indeed, in this town, under fire day and night, the flower trade flourished steadily. Barbers, too, shaved on with a steady hand, amid the thunder of the artillery—Austrian and Italian—and here and there one might buy rings, made from the aluminium fuses of Italian shells and inlaid with copper, dispalyed as "Souvenirs of Gorizia." TORN BY SHELLS. So many shells fell into the town that their fearful novelty wore away, and people who suspended business lost caste wMth their neighbors. Yet almost every street bore its marks of warfare, ill the shape of broken windows, cracked walls' and shell holes. There was one tower almost completely girdled with shrapnel pits. Certain streets were barricaded as being too dangerous for traffic. In such streets one saw window frames broken away, walls crumbled, iron shutters full of holes, as though j their substance bad been thin cardboard through which fingers had been thrust. But nobody quickened his pace on account of these spectacles. One street which had suffered pretty badly in this way was promptly renamed "Shrapnel street" by tile inhabitants. People would scramble between the wooden barriers and the house walls, and take a walk along its forbidden ways. A writer in the Hamburger Fremdenhlatt, who was in Gorizia on November 13, speaks with surprise of the throngs of men, women and children in the town, heedless of the fact that hardly a day passed without its victims. The only allusion to the risk made to him came from an old man, rather hard of hearing, who remarked: "They are firing too much to-day; I shan't go for my walk." At the entrance to Gorizia, amidst a group of tall cypresses, is a cemetery, which, like all cemeteries in this warstricken region, is full of the graves of soldiers. Over each grave is a large cross of plain wood, and from each cross hangs a fresh ivreath of small white chrysanthemums. Many of the graves have been disturbed, unavoidably, by shell fire, and on All Saints' Day the rain of shells was so thick that the people of Gorizia could not visit their dead, and no lamps burned on the mounds in the graveyard. But the danger was goon forgotten, and a fortnight. later the writer already quoted found mothers in the streets with their children in their arms, seemingly disturbed by no anxieties. In a busy cafe a visitor sat reading his newspaper at the self-same window, and before the self-same marble table, at wihch another guest had been killed a few minutes before.