about amidst the shell craters
and the fragments and the red-rusted wire, with the silken shiver of
passing shells in the air and the blue of the lower sky continually
breaking out into eddying white puffs, it is wonderful how tawdry such
panoplies of the effigy appear. We knew that we and our allies are upon
a greater, graver, more fundamental business than that sort of thing
now. We are very near the waking point.

"Well," I said, "it's got to be done."

"Aye," he said, easing the strap of his rifle a little; "it's got to be
done."

THE WAR IN ITALY (AUGUST, 1916)

I. THE ISONZO FRONT

1

My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon Udine. So far I had
had only a visit to Soissons on an exceptionally quiet day and the
sound of a Zeppelin one night in Essex for all my experience of actual
warfare. But my bedroom at the British mission in Udine roused perhaps
extravagant expectations. There were holes in the plaster ceiling and
wall, betraying splintered laths, holes, that had been caused by a bomb
that had burst and killed several people in the little square outside.
Such excitements seem to be things of the past now in Udine. Udine keeps
itself dark nowadays, and the Austrian sea-planes, which come raiding
the Italian coast country at night very much in the same aimless,
casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins raid England, apparently
because there is nothing else for them to do, find it easier to locate
Venice.

My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the level roads of the
plain, roads frequently edged by watercourses, with plentiful willows
beside the road, vines and fields of Indian corn and suchlike lush
crops. Always quite soon one came to some old Austrian boundary posts;
almost everywhere the Italians are fighting upon what is technically
enemy territory, but nowhere does it seem a whit less Italian than
the plain of Lombardy. When at last I motored away from Udine to the
northern mountain front I passed through Campo-Formio and saw the
white-faced inn at which Napoleon dismembered the ancient republic
of Venice and bartered away this essential part of Italy into foreign
control. It just gravitates back now--as though there had been no
Napoleon.

And upon the roads and beside them was the enormous equipment of a
modern army advancing. Everywhere I saw new roads being made, railways
pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals; everywhere the villages swarmed
with grey so