had once heard it said by a most learned man
that, if Rousseau had never lived, the world would not look very
different to-day, except that probably there would be no negro republic
in the island of Haiti. This saying pleased him and he was inclined to
think it plausible.

He told me that day that Monte Santo was reported taken, but the news
was not yet sure.

* * * * *

I saw him again three days later and by then all the world knew that
Monte Santo had fallen. For Cadorna in his communique of the 25th had
cried: "Since yesterday our tricolour has been waving from the summit of
Monte Santo!" Already we could see the flashes of Italian Field Guns in
action near the summit. All day I was buoyant, exhilarated, and as
absorbed in the war as any journalist.

Victory has an intoxicating quality in this bright clear atmosphere, and
among these mountains, which it has, perhaps, nowhere else. All day
there seemed to be in the air a strange thrill, which at evening seemed
to grow into a great throbbing Triumph Song of the Heroes,--incomparable
Italians, living and dead. The emotion of it became almost unbearable.

"Our tricolour is waving from the summit of Monte Santo!"

Here on the night of the 26th there occurred a scene wonderfully, almost
incredibly, dramatic. The moon was rising. Shells passed whistling
overhead, some coming from beyond the Isonzo toward the Ternova Plateau,
others in the opposite direction from Ternova. Rifle shots rang out from
beneath Monte Santo, along the slopes of San Gabriele, where the Italian
and Austrian lines were very close together, where no word on either
side might be spoken above a whisper. Suddenly there crashed out from
the gloom the opening bars of the Marcia Reale, played with tremendous
_elan_ by a military band. The music came from Monte Santo. On the
summit of the conquered mountain, the night after its conquest, an
Italian band was playing amid the broken ruins of the convent, standing
around the firmly planted Italian flag. It was the Divisional Band of
the four Regiments which had stormed these heights. On the flanks of the
mountain, along the new lines in the valley beneath, along the trenches
half-way up San Gabriele, Italian soldiers raised a cry of startled joy.
Below the peak an Italian Regiment held the line within forty yards of
the enemy, crouching low in the shallow trenches. Their Colonel leaped
to his feet and his voice rang out, "S