am's fighting machines hanging high over
Naples like an evening swarm of gnats.

"It seemed to have no more to do with us than a flight of birds.

"Even the mutter of guns far away in the southeast seemed to us to
signify nothing....

"Each day, each dream after that, we were still exalted, still seeking
that refuge where we might live and love. Fatigue had come upon us,
pain and many distresses. For though we were dusty and stained by our
toilsome tramping, and half starved and with the horror of the dead
men we had seen and the flight of the peasants--for very soon a gust of
fighting swept up the peninsula--with these things haunting our minds it
still resulted only in a deepening resolution to escape. O, but she was
brave and patient! She who had never faced hardship and exposure had
courage for herself--and me. We went to and fro seeking an outlet, over
a country all commandeered and ransacked by the gathering hosts of war.
Always we went on foot. At first there were other fugitives, but we did
not mingle with them. Some escaped northward, some were caught in
the torrent of peasantry that swept along the main roads; many gave
themselves into the hands of the soldiery and were sent northward. Many
of the men were impressed. But we kept away from these things; we had
brought no money to bribe a passage north, and I feared for my lady at
the hands of these conscript crowds. We had landed at Salerno, and
we had been turned back from Cava, and we had tried to cross towards
Taranto by a pass over Mount Alburno, but we had been driven back for
want of food, and so we had come down among the marshes by Paestum,
where those great temples stand alone. I had some vague idea that by
Paestum it might be possible to find a boat or something, and take once
more to sea. And there it was the battle overtook us.

"A sort of soul-blindness had me. Plainly I could see that we were being
hemmed in; that the great net of that giant Warfare had us in its toils.
Many times we had seen the levies that had come down from the north
going to and fro, and had come upon them in the distance amidst the
mountains making ways for the ammunition and preparing the mounting of
the guns. Once we fancied they had fired at us, taking us for spies--at
any rate a shot had gone shuddering over us. Several times we had hidden
in woods from hovering aeroplanes.

"But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and
pain.... We were in an op