ied me beyond the Isonzo, up the
wooded slopes of San Michele, where the dead lie thicker, and along the
Vippacco, running swiftly between banks thick with acacias, and among
the ruined suburbs of Gorizia, up towards those desolate lands, which
for future generations of Italians will be, I think, the holiest ground
of all,--the bare summit of Monte Santo, and the mountain-locked
tableland of Bainsizza, and the rocky, inexorable Carso. These rocks
have, perhaps, been more deeply soaked with blood than any other part of
the entire Allied line on any continent. Here died many thousands of the
bravest and the best of the youth of Italy. "Nella primavera si combatte
e si muore, o soldato." How many great lovers, fathers, thinkers, poets,
statesmen, that might have been, but never were, lie here! These lands
will ever be more thickly peopled with the cemeteries of the dead than
with the villages of the living, lands desolate and barren, yet strange
and beautiful. Clear and clean is the beauty of those graves in the
noonday brightness, delicate and tremulous in the early dawn and in the
soft light of a fading day, and for us, who think of those dead with a
proud and tender emotion, that beauty is, in some sort, a frail
consolation. The dust of strong men from the great mountains is buried
here, and of men from the historic cities and the small unknown towns
and the little white villages of Italy, and of peasants from the wide
plains, and of brave men from the islands, and a handful of Frenchmen
and Englishmen along with them, and very many of those tragic soldiers,
drawn from many races, who died in the service of the Austro-Hungarian
State, fighting against their own freedom. I see again, as vividly as
though it were yesterday, those high-hearted legions of Italy, sturdy
men and fresh-faced boys, going forward with a frenzied courage,
supported by an Artillery preparation which elsewhere would have been
thought utterly insignificant, to assault positions which elsewhere
would have been declared impregnable.

"The world," said Lincoln at Gettysburg, "will little note nor long
remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced; that
from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly
res