edly to the more
difficult country behind. At night all the inhabitants sit out on the
ramparts, talking of the hot weather and the war, and watching the
searchlights winking on the hills.

In the centre of the town is a large Piazza, planted round with myrtles
which smell strong and sweet in the sun, and at midday an old woman sets
up a stall here and sells the newspapers of Rome and Milan, Bologna and
Venetia. In one corner of this Piazza is a restaurant, where one can
play billiards and dine well and cheaply. A youth serves here who has
been rejected for the Army because of defective eyesight. He speaks a
little French and a little German and a very little English, and in
moments of excitement words from all these languages come tumbling out
together, mixed up with Italian. He has, I am sure, an Italian-English
phrase book, which he consults hurriedly in the kitchen, for, whenever
he sets a new course before one, he shoots out some carefully prepared
and usually quite irrelevant sentence, and watches eagerly to see if one
understands. In another corner of the Piazza stands a campanile with a
peal of those absurd little jangling bells, which are among the most
characteristic charms of Italy. Down a side street is the Albergo Rosa
d'Oro, where for a week I was billeted. The padrone, a little round man,
is always smiling. He thinks the war will last three years more and
seems pleased at the prospect, for the town and the district round are
full of soldiers, and he must be making great profits. But his wife,
when one speaks of the war, says "it _must_ end soon; we must go on
hoping that it will end soon."

The station, where my fatigue party worked, lies outside the town. When
the Austrians provoked war in 1914, they had special trains waiting here
to carry away the Italian troops who, they hoped, would go and fight for
them against the Russians,--a poor fool's dream! In normal times it must
be a quiet place with little traffic. But now there is continual
movement, Infantry going up to the front line and often waiting for
hours at the station, and other Infantry coming back to rest, goods
trains of enormous length passing through, motor lorries loading and
discharging, driven very skilfully though sometimes very recklessly,
horse and mule transport in great variety, both military and civilian,
some of the horses wearing straw hats with two holes for the ears, and
carts drawn by stolid, slow-moving oxen. With all this co