will grow in beauty year by year. Even now it is well wooded, with
larger trees just below the tower. The village lies at the foot of the
slope. Just outside it, off the road on slightly rising ground at the
end of an avenue, is another and larger Ossario, containing twenty
thousand skulls and sets of bones, French and Austrian. The building is
full of banners and wreaths and memorial tablets, including one lately
sent by the French troops now fighting on the Italian Front.

"Ceux de la grande guerre
A ses glorieux anciens.
1859-1918."

A few skeletons have been preserved intact, including one said to have
been an Austrian bandmaster, a giant eight feet tall. The nationality of
some of the skulls can be determined by bullets, French or Austrian,
found in the head and now attached by a string.

I stepped forth from this well-ordered tomb into the outer sunshine with
a sense of personal oppression and of human ineffectiveness. How slowly
and how clumsily do the feet of History slouch along! And yet, if
Napoleon III. had kept faith with Cavour, the fighting here might have
liberated Venetia without the necessity for another war a few years
later. How quiet and silent lie these battlefields of yesterday! Even
so, one day, will lie the pine woods round Asiago, shell-torn and
tormented now, and populous with the soldiers of many nations, yet of a
wondrous beauty in the full moonlight and the fresh night air. I shall
be back up there in three days' time!

* * * * *

We drove back in the warm evening, by the road through Pozzolengo toward
Peschiera, along which many of the defeated Austrians fled in 1859. The
roadside was dusty, but along all the hedges the acacias still showed a
most delicate and tender green.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE ASIAGO PLATEAU ONCE MORE

During August and September we were kept pretty busy on the Plateau.
Concentrations on enemy trenches and wire and special counter-battery
shoots by day and counter-battery support of Infantry raids by night
were continually required of us. We fired high explosive by day and
chiefly gas shell at night. Our own Infantry and the French on our right
raided the enemy's front and support lines very frequently, bringing
back many prisoners. The French constantly penetrated and reconnoitred
the enemy's defensive system on Mount Sisemol. Many of us were inclined
to think that the casualties, sometimes heavy, which were incurred i