ment we slept in a great barn of
a hotel whose echoing corridors had, in happier days, been a favorite
resort of the wealth and fashion of Hungary, but whose once costly
furniture had been sadly dilapidated by the spurred boots of the
Austrian staff officers who had used it as a headquarters; in the
mornings we had our sugarless coffee and butterless war-bread on a lofty
balcony commanding a superb panorama of the Istrian coast from Icici to
Volosca and of the island-studded Bay of Quarnero, and commuted to and
from Fiume in the big gray Lancia in which we had traveled along the
line of the Armistice for upward of 2,000 miles.

We had our first view of the Unredeemed City (though it was really not
my first view, as I had been there before the war) from a curve in the
road where it suddenly emerges from the woods of evergreen laurel above
Volosca to drop in steep white zigzags to the sea. It is superbly
situated, this ancient city over whose possession Slav and Latin are
growling at each other like dogs over a disputed bone. With its snowy
buildings spread on the slopes of a shallow amphitheater between the
sapphire waters of the Adriatic and the barren flanks of the Istrian
Karst, it suggested a lovely siren, all glistening and white, who had
emerged from the sea to lie upon the bare brown breast of a mountain
giant.

The car, with its exhaust wide open, for your Italian driver delights in
noise, roared down the grade at express-train speed, took the hairpin
curve at the bottom on two wheels, to be brought to an abrupt halt with
an agonized squealing of brakes, our further progress being barred by a
six-inch tree-trunk which had been lowered across the road like a
barrier at an old-time country toll-gate. At one side of the road was a
picket of Italian carabinieri in field-gray uniforms, their huge cocked
hats rendered a shade less anachronistic by covers of gray linen, with
carbines slung over their shoulders, hunter fashion. On the opposite
side of the highway was a patrol of British sailors in white drill
landing-kit, their rosy, smiling faces in striking contrast to the
saturnine countenances of the Italians. (I might explain,
parenthetically, that Fiume, being in theory under the jurisdiction of
the Peace Conference, was at this time occupied by about a thousand
French troops, the same number of British, a few score American
blue-jackets, and nearly 10,000 Italians.) The sergeant in command of
the carabinieri ste