the Front in the higher Alps, where, as on the Adamello, trenches are
cut in the solid ice, where the firing of a single gun may precipitate
an avalanche, where more Italians are killed by avalanches than by
Austrians, where guns have to be dragged up precipices and perched on
ledges fit only, one might think, for an eagle's nest, where food,
ammunition, reinforcements, wounded and sick have all to travel in small
cages attached to wire ropes, slung from peak to peak above sheer drops
of many thousand feet, where sentries have to stand rigidly stationary,
so as to remain invisible, and have to be changed every ten minutes
owing to the intense cold, where Battalions of Alpini charge down snow
slopes on skis at the rate of thirty miles an hour, where refraction and
the deceiving glare of the snow make accurate rifle fire impossible even
for crack shots,--the Isonzo Front is not so astounding and impossible a
Front as this, but it is yet a very different Front from any on which
British troops are elsewhere fighting in this war.

It is a country with a strange beauty of its own; it is, in its own
measure, rough and mountainous, and it is within sight of other and
loftier mountains to the north-west. At my first view of it I remembered
a speech of Carlo, the hero of Meredith's _Vittoria_, concerning Lombard
cities away on the other side of the Trentino, "Brescia under the big
Eastern hill which throws a cloak on it at sunrise! Brescia is always
the eagle's nest that looks over Lombardy! And Bergamo! You know the
terraces of Bergamo. Aren't they like a morning sky? Dying there is not
death; it's flying into the dawn. You Romans envy us. You have no Alps,
no crimson hills, nothing but old walls to look on while you fight.
Farewell, Merthyr Powys...." To me those words were always recurring on
the Italian Front. "Dying here is not death; it's flying into the dawn."
I would have liked to have them engraved on my tombstone, if Fate had
set one up for me in this land, whose beauty casts a spell on all one's