bombs fell very close to us.  At last we hailed a British lorry, which took us to Villa Passi, and then on to Carbonera, where odds and ends of Batteries had been turning up for several days past.  The Major was very delighted to see us, a rumour having got about that we and the last guns had been left on the wrong side of the Tagliamento, when the bridge went up.  He had almost given up hope of seeing us again.

Then I went to bed and slept for hours and hours.  Next morning from my window I could see the Alps lying very low on the horizon, like a ball of fluffy snow.  The sun was shining and a fountain was playing in the garden.  I could hardly realise that we had reached, for a moment at least, a place of peace, where there was no more fighting or retreating.  Our men were worn out, most of them, and slept like logs.  They had been sorely tried.  Their pluck and endurance had been splendid.  But they got no message of thanks or praise from the British General who at that time nominally commanded us.  This distinguished man I had last seen in the Square at Palmanova, amid the smoke and flames, with his car standing close at hand ready to push off, and he had arrived at Treviso in good time.  He was now comfortably installed at the Villa Passi, and the day some of our footsore men limped into Treviso, he was lunching with his Staff, all bright and polished and sleek, in the Hotel Stella d’Oro.

We all expected, for days, that he would call a parade and address the men who had saved what he used to call “his guns,” or at least that he would send some message.  But he made no sign, except to open a canteen for the sale of the 20,000 cigarettes, which some intelligent subordinate had saved in preference to valuable gun stores now in Austrian hands.

* * * * *

The day after my arrival I read a newspaper for the first time for over a week, but the news was very bad and the retreat still continuing.  The Austrians were across the Tagliamento in strong force at several points.  I tried to reason and make distinctions, but my brain was still too tired to answer the helm, so I left it.  We ate hot polenta and drank wonderful coffee, having established our Battery Mess in the porter’s lodge at the entrance to the Villa Lebreton, and persuaded the porter’s wife to cook for us.  All the Battery had discovered the polenta at the porter’s lodge and our men crowded the kitchen at all hours of the day.  We all appreciated good food after the short rations of the retreat.

Conversation was intensely depressing when not utterly trivial.  I remember walking round and round the vegetable garden at the back of the Villa with an Italian friend of mine, trying both to face the facts and to draw some comfort from them.  It was an impossible task.  My friend was full of despair and bitterness.  “The fruits of thirty months of war all lost in two days,” he said, “and much more lost besides!  What will all the mothers