frequent right-angle and
hair-pin turns. Here a skid or a side-slip or the failure of your
brakes is quite likely to bring your career to an abrupt and
unpleasant termination. To motor along one of these military mountain
highways when it is slippery from rain is as nerve-trying as walking
on a shingled roof with smooth-soled shoes. At one point on the Upper
Isonzo there wasn't enough room between our outer wheels and the edge
of the precipice for a starved cat to pass.

* * * * *

Now we were well within the danger zone. I knew it by the screens of
woven reeds and grass matting which had been erected along one side of
the road in order to protect the troops and transport using that road
from being seen by the Austrian observers and shelled by the Austrian
guns. Practically all of the roads on the Italian side of the front
are, remember, under direct observation by the Austrians. In fact,
they command everything. Everywhere they are above the Italians. From
the observatories which they have established on every peak they can
see through their powerful telescopes what is transpiring down on the
plain as readily as though they were circling above it in an airplane.
As a result of the extraordinary advantage which the Austrians enjoy
in this respect, it has been found necessary to screen certain of the
roads not only on both sides but above, so that in places the traffic
passes for miles through literal tunnels of matting. This road masking
is a simple form of the art of concealment to which the French have
given the name "_camouflage_," which has been developed to an
extraordinary degree on the Western Front. That the Italians have not
made a greater use of it is due, no doubt, to the wholly different
conditions under which they are fighting.

Now the crowded road that we were following turned sharply into a
narrow valley, down which a small river twisted and turned on its way
to the sea. Though the Italian positions ran along the top of the hill
slope just above us, and though less than a thousand yards away were
the Austrian trenches, that valley, for many miles, was literally
crawling with men and horses and guns. Indeed it was difficult to make
myself believe that we were within easy range of the enemy and that at
any instant a shell might fall upon that teeming hillside and burst
with the crash that scatters death.

Despite the champagne-cork popping of the rifles and the basso prof