A number of Italians gathered round, one of whom I discovered to be a
priest, conscribed to serve with the Medical Corps. I bantered this man
in a friendly way about secret drinking and the confessional and women
and paradise, causing uproarious delight among the bystanders. And the
priest took it all in excellent part.

On the 22nd we heard that, irrespective of the movements of the rest of
the Corps, a special Group of Heavy Artillery was to be formed,
including ourselves, to be lent to the Italian Fourth Army in the
mountains. There began to be rumours of an offensive on our part.

On the 23rd we made a reconnaissance up the mountains to look for
positions. We started through Bassano, which the Austrians had begun to
shell the day before with long range guns, starting a trickling, pitiful
exodus of terrified civilians. Just before reaching Marostica we struck
up a valley running northwards past Vallonara. The road soon began to
rise more steeply. It was a war road, broad and of splendid surface, one
of those many achievements of the Italian Engineers, which entitles them
to rank easily first among the engineers of the great European
Armies.[1] Before the war this road had been in parts a mere mule track,
in parts non-existent. We went through a number of little Alpine
villages, Crosara, Tortima, Fontanelli, Rubbio. We had soon risen more
than three thousand feet above the plain, which lay far beneath, spread
out gloriously like a richly coloured carpet, green, white and brown,
through which ran two broad, twisting, silver threads, the rivers Brenta
and Astico. There had been more than a hundred bends in the road up to
this point, but the gradient was never uncomfortably steep. Snow lay
thick on the higher levels and the pine and fir trees were all
snow-crowned. Sometimes the road ran along the edge of rocky gorges,
dropping sheer for hundreds of feet below, with a great mountain wall on
the other hand rising sheer above us. The air grew perceptibly colder as
we mounted higher.

[Footnote 1: I have seen it stated, by an impartial authority, that
there has been no roadmaking in war time to compare with that of the
Italians on the Alpine and the Isonzo Fronts and in Albania, since the
Napoleonic wars. A distinguished British engineer, with great experience
of roadmaking in many countries, has also told me that in his opinion
the Swedes are the best roadmakers in the world, the Italians a close
second, and the rest of