pped up to the car, saluted, and curtly asked for our
papers. I produced them. Among them was a pass authorizing us to go when
and where we pleased in the territory occupied by the Italian forces. It
had been given to me by the Minister of War himself, but it made about
as much impression on the sergeant as though it had been signed by
Charlie Chaplin.

"This is good only for Italy," he said. "It will not take you across the
line of the Armistice."

[Illustration: AT THE GATES OF FIUME

Major Powell (second from left), Mrs. Powell, Captain Tron of the
Italian _Comando Supremo_, and the car in which they travelled 1,000
miles]

Thereupon I played my last trump. I produced an imposing document which
had been given me by the Italian peace delegation in Paris. It had
originally been issued by the Orlando-Sonnino cabinet, but upon the fall
of that government I had had it countersigned, before leaving Rome, by
the Nitti cabinet. It was addressed to all the military, naval, and
civil authorities of Italy, and was so flatteringly worded that it would
have satisfied St. Peter himself. But the sergeant was not in the
least impressed. He read it through deliberately, scrutinized the
official seals, examined the watermark, and then disappeared into a
sentry-box on the roadside. I could hear him talking, evidently over a
telephone. Presently he emerged and signaled to his men to raise the
barrier. "Passo," he said grudgingly, in a tone which intimated that he
was letting us enter the jealously guarded portals of Fiume against his
better judgment, the bar swung upward, the big car leaped forward like a
race-horse that feels the spur, and in another moment we were rolling
through the tree-arched, stone-paved streets of the most-talked-of city
in the world. As we sped down the Corsia Deak we passed a large hotel
which, as was quite evident, had recently been renamed, for the words
"Albergo d'Annunzio" were fresh and staring. But underneath was the
former name, which had been so imperfectly obliterated that it could
still easily be deciphered. It was "Hotel Wilson."

To correctly visualize Fiume you must imagine a town no larger than
Atlantic City crowded upon a narrow shelf between a towering mountain
wall and the sea; a town with broad and moderately clean streets,
shaded, save in the center of the city, by double rows of stately trees
and paved with large square flagstones which make abominably rough
riding; a town with several