But the genius who has organised all this system, the little Japanese colonel, does not waste time walking around.  He is at work at an eternal map decorated with green, blue and red spots, which show the distribution of his forces and their respective strength and fighting value.  Somehow I could not tear myself away from this quarter.  It was so orderly....

Behind the commanding hillock in the Italian centre I found Lieutenant P——­, the Italian naval officer, dining off bread and Bologna sausage, which he was stripping after the Italian fashion, inelegantly using his knife both to punctuate his sentences and to assist the passage of his food.  “Look out,” he cried, as soon as I had appeared, “it is very warm here; the bullets are flying low.”  The leaves of the trees under which he was sitting were indeed falling thickly, cut down by snipers’ fire.  But still I wish he would walk down to a Japanese post not more than five hundred feet away and watch a little Jap and a half dozen Chinese snipers at work against each other.  That is where I had just been—­convoying some supplies.  The little Japanese had ostentatiously placed his sailor cap just in front of an empty loophole twenty feet from where he actually squatted, and where he had probably been a few seconds before I had arrived.  The snipers saw this and promptly fired, bang, bang, bang, a long line of shots following one after the other in quick succession.  Hum! they must be reloading now, said the little Jap plainly by the expression on his face; and jumping straight on top of the wall in front of him he hastily snapped at one of his enemies.  Then down he came again, but hardly quick enough, for bricks were dislodged all around him, and once he received one on the head.  The little man rubbed his cranium ruefully, shook himself like a dog to get rid of the sting, and then with a little more caution began his strange performance again.  This is what is going on all round the Japanese posts—­men bobbing up and firing rapidly, in some cases only fifty feet away from one another.  The Italians are lying comfortably on their stomachs completely out of sight, and wildly volleying far too often.  Already their ammunition is running low, although there is hardly any need really to reply at all to our enemies.  They have crept closer, it is true, and without surprising any one, or even causing notice, their numbers of riflemen have grown from hour to hour.  Now I come to think of it, there must be many hundreds of men lying all round us and firing just as they please.  But they are hidden behind walls and ruined houses; they belong to our curious state; they are the essential things after all.  How foolish one becomes!