t my attention was attracted by an iron
paling, in a field beside the road, enclosing a gigantic chair carved
from stone. My curiosity aroused, I stopped the car to examine it. From
a faded inscription attached to the gate I learned that this was the
crowning chair of the Dukes of Carinthia, in which the ancient rulers of
this region had sat to be crowned. There it stands in a field beside
the highway, neglected and forgotten, a curious link with a picturesque
and far-distant past.

Our route from Klagenfurt led back through Villach to Tarvis and thence
over the Predil Pass to the Friuli plain and Udine, a journey which we
expected to accomplish in a single day; but there were delays in
re-crossing the Line of the Armistice and other and more serious delays
in the mountains, caused by torrential rains which had in places washed
out the road, so that it was already nightfall when, emerging from the
gloomy defile of the Predil Pass, we saw before us the twinkling lights
of the Alpini cantonment at Caporetto, that mountain hamlet of black
memories where, in the summer of 1917, the Austro-German armies, aided
by bad Italian generalship and Italian treachery, smashed through the
Italian lines and forced them back in a headlong retreat which was
checked only by the heroic stand on the Piave. The Caporetto disaster
would have broken the hearts and annihilated the resistance of a less
courageous people than the Italians. Yet the Italian army, shattered and
disorganized as it was, stopped the triumphant progress of the
invaders; stopped it almost without artillery or ammunition, for
hundreds of guns had been abandoned during the retreat; stopped it with
the bodies of Italy's youth, the boys fresh from the training-camps, the
class of 1919, called to the colors two years before their time! They
stopped that victorious rush upon the line of the Piave, a broad,
shallow stream meandering through a flat plain with never a height to
command the enemy's positions, never a physical feature of the terrain
to satisfy the requirements of strategy. Not only was the line of the
Piave held by the Italians against the advice of their Allies, but it
was held in defiance of all the lessons taught by Italian history, for
that the Piave could not be successfully defended has been the judgment
of every military leader since first the barbarians began to sweep down
from the Alps to lay waste the rich Venetian plain. The Italians made
their heroic st