nd the depth of an Alliance. And ours will stand
the test."

But that day he was inconsolable. For Italy was wounded and bleeding,
and the dramatic swiftness and horror of the disaster had bent her pride
and almost broken it. But, though the future seemed black as a night
without stars, the hope of a coming daybreak remained strong in the
hearts of a few. But the struggle ahead would be cruelly hard. What had
Italy left to offer those who would still fight in her defence? Still,
as of old,

"Only her bosom to die on,
Only her heart for a home,
And a name with her children to be,
From Calabrian to Adrian Sea,
Mother of cities made free."

Yet this was a rich reward when, a year later, the dawn broke in all
its glory.

* * * * *

I turned over and over in my mind in the weeks and months that followed,
as fresh evidence accumulated, the meaning and the causes of the
disaster of Caporetto, and gradually I came to definite and clear cut
conclusions. It was the Second Army that had been broken, and in the
course of the retreat had almost disappeared. It was a common thing to
hear the Second Army spoken of as a whole Army of cowards and
"defeatists." Many foreign critics, with minds blankly ignorant of
nearly all the facts, seemed to think that the whole business could be
accounted for by a few glib phrases about German and Socialist
propaganda, or the supposed lack of fighting qualities in the Italian
race. Yet it was this same Second Army, which in those now distant days
in August had conquered the Bainsizza Plateau, amid the acclamations of
all the Allied world. Whole Armies do not change their nature in a
night, even when worn out with fighting and heavy casualties. The thing
was not so simple as that.

* * * * *

In fixing responsibility for Caporetto, one must draw a sharp
distinction between responsibility for the original break in a narrow
sector of the line, and responsibility for not making good that break,
before the situation had got hopelessly out of hand. In the former case
the responsibility must rest partly upon the troops and subordinate
Staff charged with holding that narrow sector and partly upon the High
Command; in the latter case the chief responsibility, and a far graver
one, must rest upon the dispositions of the High Command. This was the
view apparently taken by the Commission appointed by the Italian
Governme