the blare
of dance music and the popping of champagne corks has been replaced
by the blare of bugles and the popping of rifles.

If you have ever gone, in a single day, from the sunlit orange groves
of Pasadena up to the snow-crowned peaks of the Coast Range, you will
have as good an idea as I can give you of the journey from the Isonzo
up to the Carnia. Down on the Carso the war is being waged under a sky
of molten brass and in summer the winds which sweep that arid plateau
are like blasts from an open furnace-door. The soldiers fighting in
the Carnia, on the other hand, not infrequently wear coats of white
fur to protect them from the cold and to render them invisible against
the expanses of snow. When I was on the Italian front they told me an
incident of this mountain warfare. There was desperate fighting for
the possession of a few yards of mountain trenches and a
half-battalion of Austrian Jaegers--nearly five hundred men--were
enfiladed by machine-gun fire and wiped out. That night there was a
heavy snowfall and the Austrian corpses sprawled upon the
mountainside were soon buried deep beneath the fleecy flakes. The long
winter wore along, the war pursued its dreary course, to five hundred
Austrian homes the Austrian War Office sent a brief message that the
husband or son or brother had been "reported missing." Then the spring
came, the snow melted from the mountainsides, and the horrified
Italians looked on the five hundred Austrians, frozen stiff, as meat
is frozen in a refrigerator, in the same attitudes in which they had
died months before.

With countless hair-pin, hair-raising turns, our road wound upward,
bordered on one hand by the brinks of precipices, on the other by bare
walls of rock. It was a smooth road, splendidly built, but steep and
terrifyingly narrow--so narrow in places that it was nothing more than
a shelf blasted from the sheer face of the cliff. Twice, meeting
motor-lorries downward bound, we had to back along that narrow shelf,
with our outer wheels on the brink of emptiness, until we came to a
spot where there was room to pass. It was a ticklish business.

At one point a mountain torrent leaped from the cliff into the depths
below. But the water-power was not permitted to go to waste; it had
been skilfully harnessed and was being used to run a completely
equipped machine-shop where were brought for repair everything from
motor-trucks to machine-guns. That was one of the things that
im