d a good standard
of fluent conversation is required. In these early days my Italian was
rather broken, so we talked mostly French. At Milan all my companions
except one got out, and a new lot got in. But I was growing sleepy, and
after the formal introductions I began to drowse.

* * * * *

I woke several times in the night and early morning, and, half asleep,
looked out through the carriage window upon wonderful sights. A railway
platform like a terrace in a typical Italian garden, ornate with a row
of carved stone vases of perfect form, and vines in festoons from vase
to vase, and dark trees behind, and then a downward slope and little
white houses asleep in the distance. This I think was close to Brescia.
Then Desenzano, and what I took to be the distant glimmer of Lake Garda
under the stars. Verona I passed in my sleep, having now crossed the
boundary of Lombardy into Venetia, and Vicenza and Padua are nothing
from the train. At Mestre, the junction for the Front, all the Italian
officers got out, and I went on to Venice.

Except for three British Naval officers I was, I think, the only
foreigner there, and a priest, whom I met, took me for an American.
Everything of value in Venice, that could be, was sandbagged now for
fear of bombs, and much that was movable had been taken away. I spent
three hours in a gondola on the Grand Canal and up and down the Rii,
filled with a dreamy amazement at the superb harmonies of form and
colour of things both far away and close at hand. And even as seen in
war-time, with all the accustomed life of Venice broken and spoiled, the
spaciousness of the Piazza S. Marco, and the beauty of the buildings
that stand around it, and at night the summer lightnings, and a
rainstorm, and a cafe under the colonnade, where music was being played,
will linger always in my memory. All the big hotels were closed now, or
taken over by the Government as offices or hospitals, and the gondolas
lay moored in solitary lines along the Grand Canal, and even the motor
boats were few and, as a waiter said to me, "no one has been here for
three years, but the people are very quiet and no one complains."

CHAPTER III

FROM VENICE TO THE ISONZO FRONT

I left Venice next morning by the 5.55 train, and reached Palmanova at
half-past ten. As one goes eastward by this railway, there is a grand
panorama of hills, circling the whole horizon; to the north and
north-east the Car