In the centre of the town is a large Piazza, planted round with myrtles which smell strong and sweet in the sun, and at midday an old woman sets up a stall here and sells the newspapers of Rome and Milan, Bologna and Venetia.  In one corner of this Piazza is a restaurant, where one can play billiards and dine well and cheaply.  A youth serves here who has been rejected for the Army because of defective eyesight.  He speaks a little French and a little German and a very little English, and in moments of excitement words from all these languages come tumbling out together, mixed up with Italian.  He has, I am sure, an Italian-English phrase book, which he consults hurriedly in the kitchen, for, whenever he sets a new course before one, he shoots out some carefully prepared and usually quite irrelevant sentence, and watches eagerly to see if one understands.  In another corner of the Piazza stands a campanile with a peal of those absurd little jangling bells, which are among the most characteristic charms of Italy.  Down a side street is the Albergo Rosa d’Oro, where for a week I was billeted.  The padrone, a little round man, is always smiling.  He thinks the war will last three years more and seems pleased at the prospect, for the town and the district round are full of soldiers, and he must be making great profits.  But his wife, when one speaks of the war, says “it must end soon; we must go on hoping that it will end soon.”

The station, where my fatigue party worked, lies outside the town.  When the Austrians provoked war in 1914, they had special trains waiting here to carry away the Italian troops who, they hoped, would go and fight for them against the Russians,—­a poor fool’s dream!  In normal times it must be a quiet place with little traffic.  But now there is continual movement, Infantry going up to the front line and often waiting for hours at the station, and other Infantry coming back to rest, goods trains of enormous length passing through, motor lorries loading and discharging, driven very skilfully though sometimes very recklessly, horse and mule transport in great variety, both military and civilian, some of the horses wearing straw hats with two holes for the ears, and carts drawn by stolid, slow-moving oxen.  With all this coming and going, and with a temperature of over a hundred degrees in the shade, the Albergo della Stazione does a great trade in iced drinks!

I made the acquaintance of two families in this town.  At Signor Lazzari’s any British officer was always welcome after dinner for music and talk and light refreshments.  An Italian General was billeted there and two or three Italian officers of junior rank.  A Corporal with a magnificent voice, an operatic singer before the war, came in to sing one night, and a Private from his Battalion played his accompaniment.  In Italy, as in France, the art of conversation and a keen joy in it, are still alive, perhaps because Bridge is still almost unknown.  Signor Lazzari’s handsome and charming daughter was an admirable hostess.