ldiers; everywhere our automobile was threading its way
and taking astonishing risks among interminable processions of motor
lorries, strings of ambulances or of mule carts, waggons with timber,
waggons with wire, waggons with men's gear, waggons with casks, waggons
discreetly veiled, columns of infantry, cavalry, batteries _en route._
Every waggon that goes up full comes back empty, and many wounded were
coming down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. Goritzia had
been taken a week or so before my arrival; the Isonzo had been crossed
and the Austrians driven back across the Carso for several miles; all
the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding up to make good these
gains and gather strength for the next thrust. The roads under all this
traffic remained wonderful; gangs of men were everywhere repairing the
first onset of wear, and Italy is the most fortunate land in the world
for road metal; her mountains are solid road metal, and in this Venetian
plain you need but to scrape through a yard of soil to find gravel.

One travelled through a choking dust under the blue sky, and above the
steady incessant dusty succession of lorry, lorry, lorry, lorry that
passed one by, one saw, looking up, the tree tops, house roofs, or the
solid Venetian campanile of this or that wayside village. Once as we
were coming out of the great grey portals of that beautiful old relic of
a former school of fortification, Palmanova, the traffic became suddenly
bright yellow, and for a kilometre or so we were passing nothing but
Sicilian mule carts loaded with hay. These carts seem as strange among
the grey shapes of modern war transport as a Chinese mandarin in painted
silk would be. They are the most individual of things, all two-wheeled,
all bright yellow and the same size it is true, but upon each there are
they gayest of little paintings, such paintings as one sees in England
at times upon an ice-cream barrow. Sometimes the picture will present
a scriptural subject, sometimes a scene of opera, sometimes a dream
landscape or a trophy of fruits or flowers, and the harness--now much
out of repair--is studded with brass. Again and again I have passed
strings of these gay carts; all Sicily must be swept of them.

Through the dust I came to Aquileia, which is now an old cathedral,
built upon the remains of a very early basilica, standing in a space in
a scattered village. But across this dusty space there was carried the
head of the upsta