第二是奥军修建了大量的防御工事,做好了意大利入侵的准备。以下内容引自Battle in the Alps:A History of the Italian Front of the First World War
They worked frantically to construct defensive positions over terrain which was usually not suitable for digging trenches. Most often, gun pits and troop shelters had to be blasted into the solid rock, or stone and timber walls set up across stretches of literally solid ground. Trees had to be felled to create fields of fire. Barbed wire and defensive materials and weapons of all kinds had to be hauled to the crests of mountain ridges. And of course roads for supply had to be etched into the often sparsely-populated frontier areas. Later, when army commands had been set up, mechanical drilling and boring equipment became available. It was a godsend to the engineers attempting to hollow out bunkers, dig tunnels, and secure gun battery emplacements. Pneumatic drills driven by gasoline engines were the norm, but the heavier, faster drills and the tunnel-boring machines were sometimes fully gear-driven and were usually self-propelled; one model ran on a narrow-gauge railway. Visiting the front in August 1916, Lord Northcliffe observed a rock drill which was “unusually light and strong”, displaying a “new type of Mercedes engine”.