something very irritating in a motor car dashing past, with its
occupants reclining in easy positions, its siren hideously shrieking,
and blinding dust-clouds rising in its wake.

German propaganda was insidiously active in Italy throughout the war,
and spread many lying stories with the object of discrediting the
British. Among these was one, the details of which do not matter now,
concerning the fact that only British Artillery, and no British
Infantry, had at that time been sent to Italy. Our Reconnaissances,
involving our visible and daily presence among the gallant succession of
Italian Brigades, who held the blood-stained line on the Carso and
across the valley of the Vippacco, were the most fitting reply which we
could make to German propaganda.

* * * * *

I made my first Front Line Reconnaissance on July 27th, two days after
we had moved forward to our new Battery position. That day I visited the
trenches on the Volconiac, starting in the early afternoon and getting
back at nightfall. I took with me as a guide a young Italian gunner, a
Neapolitan by birth, who had been a waiter in an Italian restaurant in
New York before the war. He had been in the Austrian offensive of 1916
in the Trentino, where all the guns of his Battery had been lost and
nearly all his comrades killed or captured.

From the Battery position we followed the road behind Hill 123, up a
glorious valley, whose sides were thickly wooded with pines, gradually
thinning under the destruction wrought by Austrian shell fire and the
Italian military need for timber. The only other vegetation here was a
little coarse grass. On the lee side of Hill 123, sheltered from