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.]