if we made a big advance.  It would be wasted labour to repair them now, for the Austrians would only break them down again.  The Italians have run up a low, broad wooden bridge, sheltered from Austrian view behind one of the broken stone bridges.  From time to time the Austrians hit this bridge, and then the Italians quickly make it good again.  To be able to cross the Isonzo at this point is a convenience, but not a military necessity, for all movement of troops and supplies into Gorizia can be carried out on the left bank of the river and across bridges some miles further down-stream.

The suburbs of the town were badly knocked about, but the centre was not at this time much damaged.  Gorizia lies in a salient of the hills, with the Austrians looking down upon it from the tops of most of them.  But, still hoping to win it back, they do not shell it heavily or often.  There are special reasons, too, for their forbearance.  For Gorizia is a sort of Austrian Cheltenham, whither Austrian officers retire in large numbers to pass their last years in villas which they take over from one another’s widows.  So the Austrian officer class has a sort of vested interest in the preservation of the place.  So also have certain Hebrew Banks in Vienna, which hold mortgages on a great part of the land in and around the city, which just before the war was being rapidly developed as a fashionable Spa.  It is a well laid out town, with large public gardens and good buildings, architecturally very like the larger Italian towns on the other side of the old frontier, Udine for example, but with a certain element of a heavier and more rococo style, the Viennese.  There is still a fairly large civilian population in the town, and one restaurant still keeps open.

I found the British Red Cross in the Via Ponte Isonzo, in what had once been a big boarding-house, with a large untidy garden behind.  Most of those stationed there were motor ambulance drivers, about twenty in number, some too old to fight, some rejected for health, some Quakers, unwilling to kill, but willing to risk their own lives on behalf of the wounded, others again boys under military age, who go, as soon as they can, to the Navy or the Flying Corps.  It is brave and nervous work they do, driving ambulances in the dark, without lights and under fire.

After dinner I sat out in the garden in the twilight and talked with an old acquaintance of mine, who has had a large share in the organisation and daily work of the British Red Cross in Italy.  The Italians, he said, are really beginning to feel their feet, as a united nation, in this war.  Men of all classes from all parts of Italy are meeting and mixing with one another as they have never done before, and the old regionalismo is being rapidly undermined.  He himself has almost ceased to think critically of the past or speculatively of the future, but just lives and works in the present.  As to the state of the world after the war, he is very confident,