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Early one afternoon in the Piazza Venezia I fell in with two Italian officers, an Alpino and an Engineer, both wounded and not yet fit to go back to the Front.  We rapidly made friends, and, having drunk beer together, we took a carrozza and drove to the Villa Borghese Gardens, where we walked and sat for several hours.  Then we went back to the Piazza Venezia, and walked in the neighbourhood and contemplated the monuments.  My friends said that Rome was the capital city of the world, and praised also the giant memorial to Italian Unity and Victor Emmanuel II., which, still unfinished, dominates the Piazza, and indeed a large part of the city.  This memorial is, I believe, condemned by the greater part of foreign aesthetic opinion, the Germans alone conspicuously dissenting.  Personally I like it in the fading light from close at hand, and in a bright light from a distance, as one sees it, for instance, from the Pincio.

We spoke a little, but not much, of the war.  They were both for fighting on till final victory, whatever the cost, and both spoke with admiration of the inflexible and stubborn spirit of the British nation.  Very wonderful too is the spirit which animates the Alpini.  My Alpino friend had been wounded in the leg last August at Rombon, and still walked lame.  He told me of incidents which he had witnessed, of Alpini charging across and through uncut enemy wire, with the wounded and the dying crying to their comrades, “Ciao![1] Ciao!  Avanti!” He sang me also certain songs of the Alpini, in one of which they sing that in the Italian tricolour the green stands for the Alpini,[2] the white for the snow on their mountains and the red for their blood.  O these “fiamme verdi,” who can talk and sing themselves into such transfigured ecstasies, as to turn, death and pain almost into easy glories!

[Footnote 1:  “Ciao” is a colloquialism, much the same as our own “so long,” or “good-bye and good luck!” It is an intimate word, used only between friends at parting.]

[Footnote 2:  The regimental colours of the Alpini are plain green, worn on the collar.]

The three of us dined at a little restaurant near the Pantheon, and my friends wrote their names and a greeting to my wife on a post card, and an old man at the next table ordered a bottle of wine, in which we all drank the health of the Allies, and a party at another table began to sing, and went on singing for nearly an hour.  We stayed in that restaurant talking till eleven p.m., when the lights were turned out, and then my friends demanded that we should make another “giro artistico,” which terminated beneath Trajan’s Column, where in the warm air we sat and talked for half an hour more, and separated about midnight, I having had eight hours of continuous practice in the use of the second person singular of Italian verbs.

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