It began to snow as we came into Marostica, and we had great difficulty with the lorries even on gentle gradients.  The roads were frozen hard and in places very slippery.  We managed, however, to reach Casa Girardi before nightfall and found that our advance party had put up some wooden huts, and cut some trees for fuel.  All that night the snow came down in clouds, but the next day, and the next few following, were very fine.  The sun shone all day long from a cold, cloudless sky upon a waste of flashing snow, with here and there trees sticking out of it, and strange red morning lights in the sky behind it, and sweeping winds across it, and in the sunset the white hillsides slowly changed to a mauve pink.  It was a scene of wonderful beauty.  But the temperature was ten degrees below zero one day at noon, and the next day twenty-four below zero at 9 a.m. and nine above zero at noon.

These conditions were disconcerting to good shooting, the lower temperatures not having been contemplated by those who compiled our range table in England.  But we got all four guns satisfactorily registered by the second day, to the evident pleasure of the Italian Colonel under whose command we were temporarily placed.  This man had a somewhat ferocious appearance and a reputation for great rudeness, both to his superiors and his subordinates in the military hierarchy.  It was said that, but for this, he would long ago have been a General.  To us, however, he showed his politer side, patting the Major on the back and repeating several times “buon sistema, buon sistema!”

The physical discomfort of those early days was great, but we were full of buoyancy and health.  Everything froze hard during the night, one’s boots, one’s clothing, if damp when taken off, the ink in one’s fountain pen.  In the morning water poured into a basin froze hard in a couple of minutes and the lather froze on one’s face before one had time to shave.  The Major, breaking through one of the most fundamental traditions of the British Army, announced that no one need shave more than once in three days.  The morning after our arrival we had a discouraging breakfast.  No fire could be got to burn and no tea had been made.  There was nothing to eat except a few very hard ration biscuits and some eggs boiled hard the night before, and now frozen through and through.  One cracked the shell and found icicles beneath, and miserably held fragments of egg in one’s mouth until they thawed!

But gradually, by patient work and organisation, these early troubles were surmounted.  The whole Battery had been provided with Italian greatcoats and other Italian mountain equipment,—­white Alpine boots lined with fur, alpenstocks, spiked snow grips, which could be fastened on to one’s boots like skates, and white clothing to put on over the top of everything else, to render us invisible against a snowy background.  I used to hear some amusing comments in the Battery on our Alpine situation.  “This is the sort of thing you see pictures of in books, but...!” “I suppose folks would pay quids in peace time to see this!”