great and well-disciplined effort, I pulled my thoughts
together, and said to myself, "Enough of these musings of the peace-time
soldier!"

CHAPTER XLII

LAST THOUGHTS ON LEAVING ITALY

On the 3rd of December I passed out of Italy, after eighteen months
spent as a soldier within her borders. These eighteen months will always
be lit up for me by the memory of a great comradeship between men of
Allied nations. We have lived together through the dark days and the
sunshine, through sorrow and joy, through uncertainty and defeat to
final victory.

I have been very fortunate in my personal relations in Italy. I have
found always among Italians, both civilian and military, and from simple
soldier to General, the most open friendliness, the most unsparing
kindliness, the most happy spirit of good fellowship. And on my journey
home I closed my eyes and imagined myself back once more at Venice in
full Summer, and at Milan, and at hospitable Ferrara, and at Rome in the
Spring, and on the shores of the Bay of Naples, and out on Capri, and in
the wonder world of Sicily,--and always among friends. And then my steps
went back in fancy to the battlefields, where our guns had been in
action. I saw again the great peaks and the precipitous valleys of the
Trentino. I saw the wreck of liberated Asiago, ringed round with
mountains whose sides were clothed with shattered pine trees, heavy with
snow, and I went down once more by that astounding mountain road from
Granezza to Marostica, with the Venetian Plain and all its cities spread
out beneath my feet, and Venice herself on the far horizon, amid the
shimmer of sunshine on the distant sea. I stood again on the bridge at
Bassano, looking up the Val Brenta, with Monte Grappa towering above me
on my right hand, and then turning south-eastward across the level plain
I heard again the rushing waters of the Piave and, crossing to the
farther side, passed through Conegliano, burnt out and ravaged, and
Vittorio Veneto, a name that will resound for ever, to the broken bridge
over the Meduna, east of Pordenone, and the village of Nogaredo, whither
I came as one of its first liberators. And, as in a dream, I saw Udine,
unspoilt and radiant as she was fifteen months ago, before Caporetto,
and poor little Palmanova, as I last saw her, wreathed in the black
smoke of her own burning, and the cypresses and the great church of
Aquileia and the lagoons of Grado.

Then the flying feet of memory carr