It was a very rapidly moving warfare that day.  One Infantry Brigade Headquarters, with whom I kept in intermittent touch, occupied four successive positions, miles apart, in the course of twelve hours.  About noon I came to a ruined village, Tezze.  I went on to reconnoitre it with one signaller.  In a half wrecked house we heard the voices of Italian peasant women and saw through an open door an ugly, little, dirty child, probably about a year old, crawling among rubbish and refuse.  The village was only just ours.  On the far side of it men of the Manchester Regiment were lining a ditch, under cover of a hedge, waiting the order to charge.  They warned me to go no further along the road which, they said, was under enemy machine gun fire.  Every few minutes enemy shells whistled over our heads and burst in the fields and houses behind us.  A wet wind blew down the road.  There was no fixed, clearly marked line.  Everything was in movement and rather uncertain....

Enemy guns, captured with their ammunition, swung round and firing at the enemy, big guns and little guns....

On the British left the Como Brigade were advancing rapidly in spite of pretty strong opposition.  For a while our left flank had been perilously in the air, but the danger was past now....

All the roads were thick with Austrian equipment thrown away in the confusion of departure, rifles, steel helmets (grotesquely shaped, like high-crowned bowler hats), ammunition, coats, packs (handsomely got up, with furry exteriors), mail bags, maps, office stores, tin despatch boxes, photographs of blonde girls, bayonets, hand bombs, ... everything dead thrust into the ditches, both men and horses, the latter smelling earlier and stronger than the former. (The more I look at dead bodies, the more childish and improbable does the old idea of personal immortality appear to me!) ...

At one cross-roads a huge pool of blood, mingling with and overwhelming the mud.  Here a whole transport team of heavy grey horses with wagons had been hit and blown up.  Close by, in a ditch, two British wounded lay on stretchers, covered with blankets.  One, only lightly wounded, gave us information and directions.  The other was very near to death.  His face was growing pale already, as only the faces of the dead are pale.  He was shifting feebly and ineffectually, with the vain instinct to escape from pain.  He was past speech, but he looked at us out of wide open half-frightened eyes that seemed to question the world despairingly, like an animal, broken helplessly in a trap....

There were some civilians wandering on the roads, liberated now but uncertain whither to go or what place was safe, their possessions on carts.  But soon the storm of battle will have passed well beyond them and they will be able to return to what is left of their homes.  One old woman in black, walking lame, asked me if the Austrians would come back, and began to cry.  I heard some of our soldiers saying in wonder to each other, “did you see those civies going along the road just now?” Queer, irrelevant creatures in the battle zone!...