ire trouble, nightfall found us lost in
the Dolomites. For mile after mile we pushed on through the darkness
along the narrow, slippery mountain roads, searching for a shelter in
which to pass the night. Occasionally the twin beams from our lamps
would illumine a building beside the road and we, chilled and hungry,
would exclaim "A house at last!" only to find, upon drawing nearer,
that, though it had evidently been once a habitation, it was now but a
shattered, blackened shell, a grim testimonial to the accuracy of
Austrian and Italian gunners. It was late in the evening and bitterly
cold, before, rounding a shoulder of the mountain up whose steep
gradients the car seemed to have been panting for ages, we saw in the
distance the welcome lights of the hamlet of Santa Lucia.

I do not think that the public has the slightest conception of the
widespread destruction and misery wrought by the war in these Alpine
regions. In nearly a hundred miles of motoring in the Cadore, formerly
one of the most delightful summer playgrounds in all Europe, we did not
pass a single building with a whole roof or an unshattered wall. The
hospitable wayside inns, the quaint villages, the picturesque peasant
cottages which the tourist in this region knew and loved are but
blackened ruins now. And the people are gone too--refugees, no doubt, in
the camps which the Government has erected for them near the larger
towns. One no longer hears the tinkle of cow-bells on the mountain
slopes, peasants no longer wave a friendly greeting from their doors: it
is a stricken and deserted land. But Cortina d'Ampezzo, which is the
_cheflieu_ of the Cadore, though still showing many traces of the
shell-storms which it has survived, was quickening into life. The big
tourist hotels at either end of the town, behind which the Italians
emplaced their heavy guns, were being refurnished in anticipation of the
resumption of summer travel and the little shops where they sell
souvenirs were reopening, one by one. But the losses suffered by the
inhabitants of these Alpine valleys, desperately serious as they are to
them, are, after all, but insignificant when compared with the enormous
havoc wrought by the armies in the thickly settled Friuli and on the
rich Venetian plains. Every one knows, presumably, that Italy had to
draw more heavily upon her resources than any other country among the
Allies _(did you know that she spent in the war more than four-fifths of
her tota