originally in The London Daily Chronicle of May
29, 1915.]

We have all learned a good deal of French, Russian, and Austrian
geography in the last ten months; and, in the same sad school, we
shall now become better acquainted with the region of mountain and
plain which, through and for 140 miles east of Lake Garda, is the
Austro-Italian borderland, and with the northeastern coast of the
Adriatic, where there will be important side issues. There is this
great difference, among others, between the Adriatic and the Alpine
military problems: On the one side, the Germanic powers can now only
assume the defensive; on the other, they can, and probably will,
attempt the invasion of provinces dear not only to Italians, for their
homes and a splendid galaxy of historic associations, but to
cultivated minds throughout the world for treasures of art abounding
even in the humblest towns and villages.

The irregularity of this northern frontier is the product of an
unhappy history; it does not follow the line of the mountain summits
or any other natural feature, and still less is it a limit marked by
race or language. A glance at the map shows its salient
characteristic--the piece of the Austrian Tyrol, from forty to sixty
miles wide, which is thrust southward toward the great plain of
Lombardy and Venetia, and toward the four provincial capitals,
Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, and Belluno. The Trentino--as it is called,
after the very ancient city of Trent, once the chief town of Tyrol,
now a market centre dignified by many towers and poverty-stricken
palaces and castles--is thoroughly Italian; but it still gathers much
of its importance, as it has done ever since Roman times, from the
fact that the best and oldest road from Germany and West Austria over
the Alps runs through it to Verona. For nearly half a century one of
the grandest of mountain railways has followed this olden track of
conquest and pilgrimage, from Innsbruck over the Brenner Pass, through
Botzen, and down the Adige Valley. More recently a branch line has
been built which runs from Trent southeastward to Padua and Venice.

It is not only the Italian resistance to Austrian aggression and
tyranny that has made this doorway into the lowlands about the Po a
vast battlefield. From the Middle Ages onward France and Austria
constantly fought out their quarrels here. In 1796, Napoleon, after
routing Marshal Wurmser at Lonato and Castiglione, small towns to the
south of t