I first saw Udine on the 5th of August.  I was still on duty at Versa, but the conversation in the R.A.M.C.  Mess bored me, particularly at meals; it was all sputum and latrines, gas gangrene and the relative seniority of the doctors one to another.  There was nothing to keep me at Versa, for my gunner fatigue party did not in truth need any supervision.  So I determined to go to Udine.  I started, walking, about 10 a.m.  It was not too hot.  I walked about three miles and then picked up a lorry.  One can generally get a ride on an Italian lorry if there is any room, by waving one’s stick at the driver, shouting out one’s destination, and looking agreeable.  This one took me to Mogaredo and then stopped.  I then walked another three miles to a point near Trevignano.  Here I was within ten miles of Udine and picked up another lorry which took me the rest of the way.  It was driven by a Triestino who, seeing what was coming, had left the Unredeemed City just before Italy declared war.  His face was very sad, and he made a gesture of weeping, drawing his fingers downwards from his eyes across his cheeks, though his eyes were dry.  “How long?” he asked.  “How long before Trieste will be free?”

We approached Udine through a long avenue of plane trees, planted under Napoleon.  It is a gay little town, with arcaded streets, clustering round a hill on the top of which stands a Castello, with a memorial tower to the martyrs of 1848, and on the hill slopes public gardens full of cypresses.  Udine was at this time a nest of British newspaper correspondents.  I began to make their acquaintance in the afternoon.  First an Anglo-Italian lady from Rome, whom I met sitting out behind the Hotel Grande d’Italia under the shade of trees.  She was evidently something of a figure here and received several callers, all ladies of Udine, as we sat drinking coffee.  One of these, on learning that I was a gunner, took out a locket and handed it to me.  It contained a picture of a marvellously handsome boy.  It was her eldest son, killed three months before in Cadore, a Lieutenant in a Mountain Battery.  He was only nineteen.  His mother began to weep as she handed me the locket, and it was the lady from Rome who told me these things.  Then the mother cried, between her sobs, “E troppo crudele, la guerra!” And as I handed the locket back, I thought of the unmarried childless parson in khaki who considered that “three or four years of war may be tremendously worth while.”

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Later I met and dined with two of the male correspondents of the London Press.  Conversation, in the sense of a mere flow of talk, is never difficult with newspaper men.  They are among the most articulate of the British, although much that they articulate is only patter.  These two had plenty of miscellaneous information, much of which I received in a sceptical spirit, but I learned some interesting facts, which I verified from other sources later on.  Chief of these was the effect produced upon Young Italy by the personal gallantry of the poet D’Annunzio, who, when he is not flying at the head of the Italian bombing planes against Pola, is making fiery orations to the Infantry in the front line and distributing among them little tricolor flags bearing his own autograph.