He told me that day that Monte Santo was reported taken, but the news was not yet sure.

* * * * *

I saw him again three days later and by then all the world knew that Monte Santo had fallen.  For Cadorna in his communique of the 25th had cried:  “Since yesterday our tricolour has been waving from the summit of Monte Santo!” Already we could see the flashes of Italian Field Guns in action near the summit.  All day I was buoyant, exhilarated, and as absorbed in the war as any journalist.

Victory has an intoxicating quality in this bright clear atmosphere, and among these mountains, which it has, perhaps, nowhere else.  All day there seemed to be in the air a strange thrill, which at evening seemed to grow into a great throbbing Triumph Song of the Heroes,—­incomparable Italians, living and dead.  The emotion of it became almost unbearable.

“Our tricolour is waving from the summit of Monte Santo!”

Here on the night of the 26th there occurred a scene wonderfully, almost incredibly, dramatic.  The moon was rising.  Shells passed whistling overhead, some coming from beyond the Isonzo toward the Ternova Plateau, others in the opposite direction from Ternova.  Rifle shots rang out from beneath Monte Santo, along the slopes of San Gabriele, where the Italian and Austrian lines were very close together, where no word on either side might be spoken above a whisper.  Suddenly there crashed out from the gloom the opening bars of the Marcia Reale, played with tremendous elan by a military band.  The music came from Monte Santo.  On the summit of the conquered mountain, the night after its conquest, an Italian band was playing amid the broken ruins of the convent, standing around the firmly planted Italian flag.  It was the Divisional Band of the four Regiments which had stormed these heights.  On the flanks of the mountain, along the new lines in the valley beneath, along the trenches half-way up San Gabriele, Italian soldiers raised a cry of startled joy.  Below the peak an Italian Regiment held the line within forty yards of the enemy, crouching low in the shallow trenches.  Their Colonel leaped to his feet and his voice rang out, “Soldiers, to your feet!  Attention!” All along the trench the soldiers, with a swift thrill of emotion, sprang to their feet.  Then again the Colonel cried, “My soldiers, let us cry aloud in the face of the enemy, ’Long live Italy!  Long live the King!  Long live the Infantry!’” Loud and long came the cheers, echoing and re-echoing from the rocks, taken up and repeated by others who heard them, first near at hand, then far away, echoing and spreading through the night, like the swelling waves of a great sea.