[Sidenote:  Austrians use seventeen-inch howitzers.]

I went up again to visit the British batteries which were with the Third Army on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, and from one of their observatories watched the heavy shelling.  The Austrians were using huge seventeen-inch howitzers, and the explosions of their gigantic shells, each weighing a ton, was like a small eruption.  A solid block of piebald smoke as big as a cathedral sprang into the air and it was a minute or more before the last of it had drifted away.

[Sidenote:  Monfalcone the most romantic point in the fighting line.]

And as the sun was setting I went down to Monfalcone, to a place which could not be mentioned then, but which was at the same time probably the oddest and the most romantic point of the world’s fighting-line.  Monfalcone was for the Austrians a sort of combination of Birkenhead and Bournemouth.  There were important ship-building yards there, and it had besides popularity as a seaside place.  In the shipyard the Austrians had left an eighteen-thousand-ton liner, of which the hull was complete and the decks built in.

[Sidenote:  Tools of constructive labor are dropped.]

To reach the ship you passed through a yard that was a rusty monument to the futility of war.  There were all the tools of constructive labor just as they had been dropped when this nightmare of destructive passion burst upon the world; weather-reddened traveling cranes rusted to the tracks on which they will never move again; trucks overturned, a lathe smashed by a shell that had torn a wide gap in the roof above.  Here, where the air used to tremble all day long with the clang of giant hammers, there was now silence and desertion, and the offices from which great ships were controlled on their voyages to far-off seas had become the barracks of Italian artillery-men.

[Sidenote:  The partly built Austrian liner.]

There was a big wooden staircase that the Italians had built leading up to the various decks of the great liner, and, once on board, you could walk out to the forward bridge of the ship where from a sort of conning-tower you looked out at the Austrian trenches less than a mile away without the possibility of being seen.  An odd observation post, neither asea nor ashore, and to make the confusion of elements more complete, the gunners whose guns barked continually from just behind it were sailors of the Italian Navy, dressed not in blue, but in military gray-green.

[Sidenote:  A view of coveted Triest.]

Triest, the coveted city, lay ten miles away in full view, and each night the Italians saw its windows answer with flashes of dull gold the last rays of the sun setting behind Italy.  As you looked from Monfalcone across the dreamy blue of the empty gulf between, the town lay like a stone image, lifeless except for the white smoke curling gently from a single tall chimney into the quiet evening air.  Much nearer along the coast was the Castle of Duina standing on an abrupt cliff.  It belongs to the Grand Duchess of Thurn and Taxis, who used to gather parties of poets, painters, and writers there to stay in what was like a legendary palace looking down from its high headland upon the sunlit, sail-flecked Adriatic, stretching away into the shining distance.