About ten o’clock I went forward from the Battery position to the river bank at Palazzon to ascertain the situation.  A little man named Sergeant Barini, half an Italian and half an Englishman, but serving in the English Army and attached to our Battery, accompanied me.  At Palazzon the river was broad and, under fire, unbridgeable, and we went half a mile down stream along what up to this morning had been our front line trench, to the bridgehead at Lido Island.  The islands in mid stream were crowded with prisoners and wounded coming back and fresh troops going forward, and dead bodies lay about, British and Austrian together, of men who had fought their last fight, and two crashed aeroplanes.  The Austrians had put up elaborate barbed-wire defences on the island, but these had been pretty well broken up by our fire.

Some enemy guns of big calibre were still shelling the crossings and causing casualties among a Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers, who were in reserve, waiting on the bank for the order to cross.  I tried to locate as accurately as possible the direction of these guns and reported them by telephone to our Brigade Headquarters.  I saw an Infantry Brigadier, who said that things were going well, but asked for some additional Artillery support for his left flank on the other side, and, if possible, for an enemy Battery, which he thought was near Susegana Castle, to be knocked out.  I looked across the river and saw the dense white smoke screen which our Field Guns were putting up to cover the advance.

These Italian rivers of the Venetian Plain, fed by the melting Alpine snows, are not at all like the Thames.  Where I was, there were about nine successive channels, varying in breadth and depth, and in between, stones and sand and rough vegetation on islands varying in size and shape and number with the height of the river.  And it was no uncommon thing for the river to rise or fall several feet in a night, for whole islands to be submerged, or for whole channels to run dry.  The difficulty here of carrying out military operations according to a time table arranged several days in advance was very great.

Over the main channels pontoons had been thrown, over others light plank bridges, less strongly supported, through others everybody was wading.  Large bodies of Engineers, mostly Italian, were ceaselessly working at these river crossings, and working magnificently.  For not only was it necessary to be constantly strengthening and multiplying the bridges already made, to take the ever-increasing volume of traffic that would be required to supply the troops across the river, but the enemy’s guns were still firing with terrible accuracy at the crossings, and swarms of enemy planes were constantly appearing, bombing the bridges and the islands in a last desperate effort to hold up our advance.  Our planes, too, were never far away, and succeeded in driving off or driving down many of these attackers.  But others got through and were constantly undoing the work of the Engineers.