national insanity; that we dare not leave the German
the power to attack other nations any more for ever....

Venice has suffered particularly from this ape-like impulse to hurt and
terrorise enemy non-combatants. Venice has indeed suffered from this war
far more than any other town in Italy. Her trade has largely ceased;
she has no visitors. I woke up on my way to Udine and found my train at
Venice with an hour to spare; after much examining and stamping of my
passport I was allowed outside the station wicket to get coffee in the
refreshment room and a glimpse of a very sad and silent Grand Canal.
There was nothing doing; a black despondent remnant of the old crowd
of gondolas browsed dreamily among against the quay to stare at me the
better. The empty palaces seemed to be sleeping in the morning sunshine
because it was not worth while to wake up....

2

Except in the case of Venice, the war does not seem as yet to have made
nearly such a mark upon life in Italy as it has in England or provincial
France. People speak of Italy as a poor country, but that is from a
banker's point of view. In some respects she is the richest country on
earth, and in the matter of staying power I should think she is
better off than any other belligerent. She produces food in abundance
everywhere; her women are agricultural workers, so that the interruption
of food production by the war has been less serious in Italy than in any
other part of Europe. In peace time, she has constantly exported labour;
the Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to America, north and
south, to Switzerland, Germany and the south of France. The cessation of
this emigration has given her great reserves of man power, so that she
has carried on her admirable campaign with less interference with her
normal economic life than any other power. The first person I spoke to
upon the platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding
Italian potatoes to the British front in France. Afterwards, on my
return, when a little passport irregularity kept me for half a day in
Modane, I went for a walk with him along the winding pass road that goes
down into France. "You see hundreds and hundreds of new Fiat cars," he
remarked, "along here--going up to the French front."

But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw scores of thousands of
shells piled high to go to Italy....

I doubt if English people fully realise either the economic sturdiness
or the pol