Sidenote: Success of the medical officers.]

The work of the medical officers of the Fleet, carried out very largely
under the most difficult conditions, was entirely admirable and
invaluable. Lacking in many cases all the essentials for performing
critical operations, and with their staff seriously depleted by
casualties, they worked untiringly and with the greatest success. To
them we owe a deep debt of gratitude.

[Sidenote: Ships that sustained hardest fighting.]

It will be seen that the hardest fighting fell to the lot of the
Battle-cruiser Fleet (the units of which were less heavily armored than
their opponents), the Fifth Battle Squadron, the First Cruiser Squadron,
Fourth Light-cruiser Squadron, and the Flotillas. This was inevitable
under the conditions and the squadrons and Flotillas mentioned, as well
as the individual vessels composing them, were handled with conspicuous
ability, as were also the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Squadrons of the Battle
Fleet and the 2nd Cruiser Squadron.

I desire to place on record my high appreciation of the manner in which
all the vessels were handled. The conditions were such as to call for
great skill and ability, quick judgment and decisions, and this was
conspicuous throughout the day.

* * * * *

The campaigns carried on by Italy against Austria were, as had been
noted in a former chapter, among the most difficult of the war. The
Italian troops fighting with the greatest gallantry in a mountainous
and, in places, an impassable country, continued to capture Austrian
fortified places, along the entire Isonzo front. One of the most daring
and most brilliant of their exploits is told in the following pages.

TAKING THE COL DI LANA

LEWIS R. FREEMAN

Copyright, World's Work, June, 1917.

[Sidenote: A hot wind from the Mediterranean.]

[Sidenote: Thaw and avalanches in the Alps.]

Once or twice in every winter a thick, sticky, hot wind from somewhere
on the other side of the Mediterranean breathes upon the snow and
ice-locked Alpine valleys the breath of a false springtime. The Swiss
guides, if I remember correctly, call it by a name which is pronounced
as we do the word _fun_; but the incidence of such a wind means to them
anything but what that signifies in English. To them--to all in the
Alps, indeed--a spell of _fun_ weather means thaw, and thaw means
avalanches; avalanches, too, at a time of the year when there is so much
snow t