cco bridge at Rubbia. When next I heard
of him it was a month later at the height of the Italian offensive. He
had been severely wounded on the Bainsizza Plateau.

The British Red Cross did splendid work in Italy and made a big
contribution to Anglo-Italian friendship and understanding. They began
their operations in Italy in September 1915, and were thus the first
Englishmen to "show the flag" on the Italian Front. Thousands of
Italians will gratefully and affectionately remember them till the end
of their lives. More even than the British fighting troops who came
after them, the British Red Cross will remain a historic legend in Italy
in the days to come.

CHAPTER X

A CEMETERY AT VERSA

I was at Versa, as I have already said, from the 2nd to the 10th of
August, to supervise a party working on the hospital. I walked one
evening down the village street, where in the light of the sunset an
Italian military band was playing to a mixed crowd of soldiers and
civilians. Just outside the village I came to the gates of a cemetery,
where six tall cypresses stand like sentinels on guard over the graves
of many hundreds of Italian dead. This was at first a civilian
graveyard, but all the dead have Italian names, except one Kirschner,
and even he was called Giuseppe and has an Italian inscription on his
tombstone. For this is Italia Redenta, in this one little corner of
which a great company of Italian youth have already laid down their
lives. And now the graves, in long straight rows, have filled one newly
added field, and begun to flow across a second, and soon from the Field
Hospitals in the village more dead will come.

Here, as in our war graveyards in France, no religious dogma or
supernatural hope intrudes upon the little wooden crosses. On these, for
the most part, you can read only the bare conventional attributes of
each little handful of dust, which has passed through its quivering
agony into the still sleep of decay,--its name and regiment, its
civilian home, the place and date of its death. A few have more than
this. Here lie the two brothers Bellina in one grave, with a cross at
their head and another, rougher and larger, at their feet, announcing
simply, "I due fratelli," "the two brothers." And here is a tombstone
engraved with an anchor, for one who, very early in the war, was hit
while fording the Isonzo in face of the enemy's fire. "Al Pontiere
Guazzaro Giuseppe che valorosamente sfidando le infide ac