Visitors to the Italian front used to find most convenient arrangements made to give them a rapid idea of conditions there.  Lying almost entirely among mountains, the line presented unusual opportunities for survey from dominating heights, and there were many places where, at leisure and in virtual safety, one could watch the Austrian intrenchments from close range.  Fast cars took you up to these vantage-points, and a number of staff-officers, speaking perfect English and knowing every detail of the front and its history, raised these visits from the level of sight-seeing excursions to opportunities for learning a great deal that was important and technical.

[Sidenote:  The Austro-German offensive begins.]

The very last of these journeys, which had been made by visitors of every country, took place on October 24, the day that the great Austro-German offensive began, and I remember how, as we drove along in the rain, all our talk was of the bad news of that morning—­that the enemy, reinforced by a huge number of divisions brought secretly from the Russian front, and profiting by a night of rain and fog, had thrust down into the valley of the Isonzo between Plezzo and Tolmino, carried, apparently by surprise, two Italian lines across the ravine after a short and very violent bombardment, and then, pushing on, had captured Caporetto, thus cutting off the Italian troops on Monte Nero and the other mountains beyond the Isonzo, and opening a most serious gap in the very center of the Italian line.

[Sidenote:  Gorizia has suffered from the war.]

[Sidenote:  A shell interrupts the sight-seers.]

The day was one of evil omen.  We went to Gorizia, that pretty Austrian spa that was taken by the Italians last year, and has suffered from the war as much as Udine, its neighbor across the old frontier, has prospered.  In the heart of the town its old castle towers up from an isolated crag, and from the battlements you can look across the valley to the Italian and Austrian lines on the slopes of San Marco opposite.  Scores of parties like our own had made this visit to Gorizia Castle, and to-day the driving rain and valley mists made observation so bad that it seemed more than usually safe to show oneself above the ramparts on the side toward the enemy.  Yet we had not been there three minutes—­a group of two well-known American correspondents and one Italian, with an Italian officer, and myself—­when an Austrian six-inch shell burst with a crash hardly ten feet from the right-hand man of our line.  A black wall of flying mud towered up and blotted out the sky; three of us were thrown headlong by the force of the explosion.  Only the fact that the shell had fallen deeply into the rain-softened bank of earth on top of the battlements saved the names of the last four visitors to the Italian front from being recorded on graves in Gorizia cemetery.

“I’ve brought people here seventy or eighty times,” said the officer who was with us, “and nothing like that has ever happened before.”