Italian troops, dusty columns marching along the road, throw up at me an occasional greeting as the lorry goes by.  Long lines of transport pass continually.  “Sempre Avanti Savoia!” “Sempre Avanti Italia!” I find my eyes wet with tears, for the beauty and the glory and the insidious danger of that intoxicating war-cry; for the blindness and the wickedness and the selfish greed that lurk behind it, exploiting the generous emotions of the young and brave; for the irony and bitter fatuity of any war-cry in a world that should be purged of war.

* * * * *

And so I came to Palmanova to supervise the loading of shell, in the company of Captain Shield and another Ordnance officer.  Shield had travelled much and mixed with Italians on the borders of Abyssinia.  He told me that with no other European race were our relations in remote frontier lands more harmonious.  They and we have, he said, a perfect code of written and unwritten rules to prevent all friction.  He told me, too, of a young Englishman out there, quite an unimportant person, who had a bad attack of sun-stroke and whose life was in great danger.  The only hope was to get him through quickly to the coast, and the shortest road lay through Italian territory.  So application was made to the Italian authorities for a right of passage, which they not only granted, but mapped out his route for him, for it was difficult country and unfamiliar to our people, and sent a guide, and had a mule with a load of ice waiting for him at every halting-place along the road, and so saved his life, treating him with as much consideration and tenderness as they could have been expected to show to a member of their own Royal Family.

* * * * *

Palmanova lies just within the old Italian frontier, a little white town surrounded by a moat, which in summer is quite dry, and by grassy ramparts shaped like a star.  It was first fortified by the Venetian Republic four hundred years ago, and again by Napoleon.  It can be entered only through one of three gates, approached by bridges across the moat, from the north, south-east and south,—­the Udine Gate, the Gradisca Gate and the Maritime Gate.  Each gate is double, so that you pass through a small square court, almost like a well, and at each gate you can see the remains of an old portcullis and drawbridge.  Each is topped by two slender towers, and is wide enough to allow only one vehicle to pass at a time, and at each there is a guard of Carabinieri in their grey lantern-hats, to stop and examine all questionable traffic.

From the ramparts you can see the Carnic and the Julian Alps, sweeping round the Venetian plain in a great half circle.  To the north the mountains seem to rise sheer out of green orchards and maize fields, but to the east there is a gradual slope of less fertile uplands, where the Austrians in the first days of war on this Front would not face the onrush of the Italians in the open, but fell back hurriedly to the more difficult country behind.  At night all the inhabitants sit out on the ramparts, talking of the hot weather and the war, and watching the searchlights winking on the hills.