* * * *

Grado lies on several islands, in its own lagoons. The Austrians were
developing it, in a haphazard way, as a watering-place before the war,
and there are several large hotels and the beginnings of a Sea Front.
The canals are filled with fishing boats with brown sails, which seldom
put to sea now for fear of mines.

One approaches Grado by a steamer which starts from a little cluster of
houses on the mainland known as Belvedere, and takes one down a long
channel through a maze of 'wooded islands, one of which is now the
Headquarters of an Italian Seaplane Squadron. The islands are thickly
clothed with tamarisks and pollarded acacias and stone pines, and are
reputed to be somewhat malarial. There is a long beach at Grado, where
all the world bathes, and the water is deliciously warm, with a bottom
of hard sand. Lying in the water, I could see right round the Gulf of
Trieste as far as Capodistria, and straight opposite to me lay Trieste,
the Unredeemed City of Italy's Desire, very clear against a background
of hills. Through glasses I could even distinguish the trams running in
her streets. I could easily fancy her scarcely a mile away across that
sheet of blue sunlit sea. Thus must she often have appeared to Italians
fighting and dying by sea and land to reach her, who remained ever just
out of reach.

CHAPTER VII

A GRAMOPHONE AND A CHAPLAIN ON THE CARSO

The Battery moved up to its new position on the edge of the Carso on the
night of July 25th. The guns were drawn by Italian tractors. It was a
long business getting the guns out of their gun pits, as we had not much
room for turning, and a still longer one getting them into the new pits,
after unhooking the tractors, down a steep slope and round two
right-angle turns. Owing to our nearness to the front line no lights
could be used and the night was darker than usual. For hours the gun
detachments were at work with drag ropes, lowering, guiding and hauling,
and the monotonous cry, that every Siege Gunner knows so well, "On the
ropes--together--heave!" went echoing round those rocks till 2 a.m. next
morning.

* * * * *

This new position of ours was only three hundred yards from the
Austrians, though we had between us and them the river Vippacco and a
high hill, a spur of that on which the ruined monastery of S. Grado di
Merna stood. The trenches here ran on either side of the Vippacco. An
Italian