he little
fishing villages seemed almost to draw sunshine out of the dull sky. I
stopped at Sturla and drank two cups of coffee and ate some biscuits,
and decided to walk on to Nervi. It was now near the hour of sunset and
the sun, having kept invisible all day, half broke through the clouds,
turning them first red and then golden. So the sky was when I came to
Quarto dei Mille, with its monument looking out to sea, that historic
place whence Garibaldi and the Thousand set sail for their great
adventure, the liberation of Sicily and Naples, and the unification of
Italy, with British warships following them, some say by chance, so that
the enemies of Italy dared not interrupt their passage.

Then said I to myself, standing all alone at Quarto, "Italy will not be
defeated, nor even mainly saved from defeat by foreign aid. The
strongest and best of her children will pull her through, even though
they be not all the nation. But the rest will do their share also, and
will follow, when the bravest lead. How young, and how uncertain of
herself as yet, is Italy! And yet, how lovable, how well worth serving!"
The Germans with their "special gas" and with other factors in their
favour, counted on breaking, not only the line of the Second Army, but
the morale of the Italian people. For a moment they seemed to have
succeeded. In the darkest days I talked with many whose stuffing seemed
all gone. But then, with the promise of Allied help, with the sight of
even a handful of new French and British uniforms, and under the spell
of the oratory of their statesmen and their journalists, things began to
change and Italian hearts grew brave again.

The Italians are a mercurial people. If they are more easily cast down
by defeat than we British, they are more easily encouraged by even the
distant prospect of victory, and they react to influences that would
leave us unmoved. The coarse insults of the enemy press were everywhere
angrily quoted, and the national spirit rose to a red glow of passion.
The Socialists Turati and Treves,--the latter the author of the famous
phrase, "nessuno in trincee quest' inverno,"[1]--who before Caporetto
had criticised the war as aggressive, imperialist and unnecessary, said
now that all Italians must unite and fight on to drive back the invader
from Italian soil. And cool brains, such as Nitti and Einaudi,
reinforced all this with logical demonstrations of the economic
impossibility of a separate peace, with