na and certain things in Verona.
Italians must forgive us English this little streak of impertinent
proprietorship in the beautiful things of their abundant land. It is
quite open to them to revenge themselves by professing a tenderness for
Liverpool or Leeds. It was, for instance, with a peculiar and
personal indignation that I saw where an Austrian air bomb had killed
five-and-thirty people in the Piazza Erbe. Somehow in that jolly old
place, a place that have very much of the quality of a very pretty and
cheerful old woman, it seemed exceptionally an outrage. And I made a
special pilgrimage to see how it was with that monument of Can Grande,
the equestrian Scaliger with the sidelong grin, for whom I confess a
ridiculous admiration. Can Grande, I rejoice to say, has retired into a
case of brickwork, surmounted by a steep roof of thick iron plates; no
aeroplane exists to carry bombs enough to smash that covering; there he
will smile securely in the darkness until peace comes again.

All over Venetia the Austrian seaplanes are making the same sort of
idiot raid on lighted places that the Zeppelins have been making over
England. These raids do no effective military work. What conceivable
military advantage can there be in dropping bombs into a marketing
crowd? It is a sort of anti-Teutonic propaganda by the Central Powers to
which they seem to have been incited by their own evil genius. It is
as if they could convince us that there is an essential malignity in
Germans, that until the German powers are stamped down into the mud
they will continue to do evil things. All of the Allies have borne the
thrusting and boasting of Germany with exemplary patience for half a
century; England gave her Heligoland and stood out of the way of her
colonial expansion, Italy was a happy hunting ground for her
business enterprise, France had come near resignation on the score of
Alsace-Lorraine. And then over and above the great outrage of the
war come these incessant mean-spirited atrocities. A great and simple
wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war itself, had it been
fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would have made no such deep and
enduring breach as these silly, futile assassinations have down between
the Austro-Germans and the rest of the civilised world. One great
misdeed is a thing understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the
consciousness of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a
national sin but a