s, under the command of a certain Sicilian Colonel
named Canale, a dapper little man who generally wore white gloves, even
in the front line. He was a fearless and capable officer and did all in
his power for the comfort of our Batteries.

From Rubbia I drove in a car to the Battery. As I left the Group
Headquarters, a number of wooden huts at the foot of the wooded slopes
of Monte San Michele, which rise upwards from the road, I went under the
railway which in peace-time connects Gorizia with Trieste. It is useless
now, being within easy range of the Austrian guns, which have, moreover,
broken down the high stone bridge on which the line crosses the
Vippacco. A young Sicilian Sergeant accompanied me as a guide and
pointed out Gorizia, some six miles away to the north, a
widely-scattered town, very white in the sunlight, lying at the foot of
high hills famous in the history of the war on this Front, Monte
Sabotino, Monte Santo, Monte San Gabriele, of which there will be more
for me to say hereafter.

The gun positions of my new Battery were situated just outside the
little village of Pec, inhabited mostly by Slovene peasantry before the
war, now all vanished. The village had been much shelled, first by
Italian and then by Austrian guns, and there was not a house remaining
undamaged, though several had been patched up as billets and cookhouses
by British troops. Another of our Batteries had their guns actually in
the ruins of the village, but ours were alongside a sunken road, leading
down to the Vippacco. The guns themselves were concealed in thick bowers
of acacias, the branches of which had been clipped here and there within
our arc of fire. I doubt if anywhere, on any Front, a British Battery
occupied a position of greater natural beauty. The officers' Mess and
sleeping huts were a few hundred yards from the guns, right on the bank
of the Vippacco, likewise hidden from view and shaded from the sun by a
great mass of acacias, a luxuriant soft roof of fresh green leaves. Our
Mess, indeed, had no other roof than this, for there was seldom any
rain, and, as we sat at meals, we faced a broad waterfall, a curving
wall of white foam, stretching right across the stream, which was at
this point about seventy or eighty yards wide. Innumerable blue
dragon-flies flitted backwards and forwards in the sunlight. Though the
weather was warm, it was less hot than usual at this time of year, and
the surroundings of our Mess reminded