Our Battery is living partly in a little terra-cotta Villa and partly in a barn close by.  We are among the Euganean Hills, a group of little humps, shaped like sugar loaves, which rise out of the dead level of the Venetian Plain, south-west of Padua.  Here Shelley wrote a famous and beautiful poem, and Venice, on a clear day, is visible in the distance from a monastery perched among trees upon one of the loftiest humps.  Our guns, which will never fire any more, sit in a neat row, “dressed by the right,” along the garden path outside the Villa, their noses pointing across a grass lawn.  Their names, which are the Battery’s Italian history, are painted on their muzzles and their trails in large white letters, picked out with red upon a dark green ground:  Carso, Piave, Altipiano and Trentino. Trentino is my gun.  They look very ornamental in their new coats of paint, and with a high polish on their unpainted metal parts.

It is an hour of anticlimax.  There is nothing to do, and one has to “make work” in a hundred silly, ingenious ways.  Next week some of the men who have been out of England for 19 months will go on leave.  Then, after a fortnight in England, unless something tremendous and unexpected happens, they will all come back again.  And there will still be nothing to do.  Was it Wordsworth who said that poetry is “emotion remembered in tranquillity”?  Wordsworth would undoubtedly have written much poetry here.  Our chief delight is Leary’s musical voice.  He sings to us in the evenings after dinner, “La Campana di San Ginsto” and “Addio, mia bell’, addio” and choice stornetti, and “Come to Ferrara with me,” a cheerful song of his own composing, set to a music-hall tune which was famous three years ago, and “We’ll all go a-hunting to-day,” an old song with a superb chorus.  And so the days pass, one very like another.

I dreamed last night that a regular soldier of high degree and uncertain nationality appeared to me and said, “Do you not see now, young man, that peace is degeneracy, and that war is an ennobling discipline?” And I, chancing my luck, replied, “Yes, the great von Moltke himself said that peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream.”  Whereupon my visitor changed into a white owl and vanished with a hoot.  And I awoke, and found that I had overslept myself and that the nine o’clock parade, which I was due to attend, was already falling in outside.

Then said I to myself bitterly, “At any rate we here have all survived, and, therefore, since war is the greatest of all biological tests, we must all be very fit to have survived, especially that most fit young man, who came out to the Battery from England a day or two before the armistice was signed, after three years at Shoeburyness, and the fittest of all must be those whose survival, apart from such dangers as influenza and air raids, has never been in doubt, the valuable people who have been kept in England, because they were members of concert parties or football teams at the depots, or officers’ servants to influential imboscati, or influential imboscati themselves.”