ly general who has
visited them is the King. Should he venture into exposed positions,
as he frequently does, he is halted by the local command. It is, of
course, tactfully done. "I am responsible for your Majesty's safety,"
says the officer. "Were there to be an accident I should be blamed."
Whereupon the King promptly withdraws. If he is not permitted to take
unnecessary risks himself, neither will he permit others. When the
Prince of Wales visited the Italian front last summer, he asked
permission to enter a certain first-line trench, which was being
heavily shelled. The King bluntly refused. "I want no historic
incidents here," he remarked dryly.

[Illustration: The King of Italy and General Cadorna at Castelnuovo.
Scarcely a day passes that the King does not visit some sector of
the battle-line, but he rarely gives advice unless it is asked for,
and never interferes with the decisions of the Comando Supremo.]

[Illustration: The Peril in the Clouds.
The gunners of an Italian anti-aircraft battery sight an Austrian
airplane.]

To obtain a room in Udine is as difficult as it is to obtain hotel
accommodation in New York during the Automobile Show. But, because I
was a guest of the Government, I found that a room had been reserved
for me by the Comando Supremo at the Hotel Croce di Malta. I was told
that since the war three proprietors of this hotel had made their
fortunes and retired, and after I received my bill I believed it.
There was in my room one of those inhospitable, box-shaped porcelain
stoves so common in North Italy and the Tyrol. To keep a modest
wood-fire going in that stove cost me exactly thirty lire (about six
dollars) a day. But a fire was a necessity. Luxuries came higher. Yet
the scene in the hotel's shabby restaurant at the dinner-hour was well
worth the fantastic charges, for there gathered there nightly as
interesting a company as I have not often seen under one roof: a poet
and novelist who has given to Italy the most important literary work
since the days of the great classics, and who, by his fiery and
impassioned speeches, did more than any single person to force the
nation's entrance into the war; an American dental surgeon who
abandoned an enormously lucrative practice in Rome to establish at
the front a hospital where he has performed feats approaching the
magical in rebuilding shrapnel-shattered faces; a Florentine
connoisseur, probably the greatest living auth