have expanded
amazingly in order to meet the demand for shells, field-guns, and
motor-trucks. Turin, as an officer smilingly remarked, "now consists
of the Fiat factory and a few houses." The United States is not the
only country to produce that strange breed known as munitions
millionaires. Italy has them also--and the jewellers and champagne
agents are doing a bigger business than they have ever done before.

As the train tears southward into Tuscany you begin to catch fleeting
glimpses of the men who are making possible this sudden
prosperity--the men who are using the motor-trucks and the shells and
the field-guns. _They_ don't look very prosperous or very happy.
Sometimes you see them drawn up on the platforms of wayside stations,
shivering beneath their scanty capes in the chill of an Italian dawn.
Usually there is a background of wet-eyed women, with shawls drawn
over their heads, and nearly always with babies in their arms. And on
nearly every siding were standing long trains of box-cars, bedded with
straw and filled with these same wiry, brown-faced little men in their
rat-gray uniforms, being hurried to the fighting in the north. It
reminded me of those long cattle-trains one sees in the Middle West,
bound for the Chicago slaughter-houses.

Rome in war-time is about as cheerful as Coney Island in midwinter.
Empty are the enticing little shops on the Piazza di Spagna. Gone from
the marble steps are the artists' models and the flower-girls. To
visit the galleries of the Vatican is to stroll through an echoing
marble tomb. The guards and custodians no longer welcome you for the
sake of your tips, but for the sake of your company. The King, who is
with the army, visits Rome only rarely; the Queen occupies a modest
villa in the country; the Palace of the Quirinal has been turned into
a hospital. The great ballroom, the state dining-room, the
throne-room, even the Queen's sun-parlor, are now filled with white
cots, hundreds and hundreds of them, each with its bandaged occupant,
while in the famous gardens where Popes and Emperors and Kings have
strolled, convalescent soldiers now laze in the sun or on the
gravelled paths play at bowls. In giving up their home for the use of
the wounded, the King and Queen have done a very generous and noble
thing, and the Italian people are not going to forget it.

If Rome, which is the seat of government, shows such unmistakable
signs of depression, imagine the stagnation of Flo