The second week in October we moved down from the Plateau and lay for a week at Mestre, within sight of Venice.  One clear afternoon it looked as though one could throw a stone across the intervening water.  Every one took for granted that a big Italian offensive was imminent.  The rumour was that it would be timed to begin, as near as possible, on the anniversary of the defeat of Caporetto.  In Italy more weight is attached to anniversaries than with us.  One felt expectation everywhere in the air.

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It was during these days that I fell in with the Rumanian Legion.  I had been in Padua and saw a group of them standing on the platform at the railway station.  They were obviously not Italians.  Their uniform was similar to that of the Italian Infantry, but their collars were red, yellow and blue, and they wore a cockade of the same three colours on their hats.  They wore Sam Browne belts, too, and carried a pugnale like the Italian Arditi.  I asked a Carabiniere on duty who they were.  He smiled but did not know.  “Perhaps Yugo-Slavs,” he suggested.  One of them overheard our conversation and came up to me saying, “Siamo Rumeni, Legione Rumena.”  Then followed a tremendous fraternisation.  We shook hands all round and began to talk.  We talked Italian, which, being very like their own language, they all understood.  Indeed, for an Italian Rumanian is much easier to understand than many of the Italian local dialects.

They were attractive people, of all ages and very friendly, rather like Italians, but with a queer indescribable racial difference.  They were natives, mostly, of Transylvania and had much to say of the oppression of their nationality by the Magyars.  Most of them had been conscribed to fight in the Austro-Hungarian Army, but had crossed over to the Italian lines at the first opportunity.  One said, “There are four millions of us in Austria and Hungary.”  Then, with an air of restrained fury, “Is that not enough?” Another said, “But after the war there will be a Great Rumania—­great and beautiful.”  And another said, “We Rumanians must be very grateful to Guglielmone.[1] If he had not made this war, we should not have seen the Greater Rumania in our lifetime.  But now, if it was not certain before, the blunders of Carluccio[2] have put it beyond all doubt.”  And another told me that his father wrote and spoke English very well, having lived for twelve years in America at St Louis.  And another explained to me how the Rumanians had retained, more than any other modern nation, the speech and customs and dress and traditions of the ancient Romans, which things they had originally derived from the legionaries of the Emperor Trajan.[3] When we parted I said, “May we all meet again on the field of victory beyond the Piave.  Long live the Greater Rumania!” And they all cried, “Long live England!  Long live victory!” And so I was going away, when one of them, a little fellow, with a rather sad, earnest face, who had apparently missed a parting handshake, ran after me about twenty yards, and seized me by the hand and cried again, “Long live victory!”