ether, we took a carrozza and drove to the Villa Borghese Gardens,
where we walked and sat for several hours. Then we went back to the
Piazza Venezia, and walked in the neighbourhood and contemplated the
monuments. My friends said that Rome was the capital city of the world,
and praised also the giant memorial to Italian Unity and Victor Emmanuel
II., which, still unfinished, dominates the Piazza, and indeed a large
part of the city. This memorial is, I believe, condemned by the greater
part of foreign aesthetic opinion, the Germans alone conspicuously
dissenting. Personally I like it in the fading light from close at hand,
and in a bright light from a distance, as one sees it, for instance,
from the Pincio.

We spoke a little, but not much, of the war. They were both for fighting
on till final victory, whatever the cost, and both spoke with admiration
of the inflexible and stubborn spirit of the British nation. Very
wonderful too is the spirit which animates the Alpini. My Alpino friend
had been wounded in the leg last August at Rombon, and still walked
lame. He told me of incidents which he had witnessed, of Alpini charging
across and through uncut enemy wire, with the wounded and the dying
crying to their comrades, "Ciao![1] Ciao! Avanti!" He sang me also
certain songs of the Alpini, in one of which they sing that in the
Italian tricolour the green stands for the Alpini,[2] the white for the
snow on their mountains and the red for their blood. O these "fiamme
verdi," who can talk and sing themselves into such transfigured
ecstasies, as to turn, death and pain almost into easy glories!

[Footnote 1: "Ciao" is a colloquialism, much the same as our own "so
long," or "good-bye and good luck!" It is an intimate word, used only
between friends at parting.]

[Footnote 2: The regimental colours of the Alpini are plain green, worn
on the collar.]

The three of us dined at a little restaurant near the Pantheon, and my
friends wrote their names and a greeting to my wife on a post card, and
an old man at the next table ordered a bottle of wine, in which we all
drank the health of the Allies, and a party at another table began to
sing, and went on singing for nearly an hour. We stayed in that
restaurant talking till eleven p.m., when the lights were turned out,
and then my friends demanded that we should make another "giro
artistico," which terminated beneath Trajan's Column, where in the warm
air we sat and talked for half a