My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the level roads of the
plain, roads frequently edged by watercourses, with plentiful willows
beside the road, vines and fields of Indian corn and suchlike lush
crops. Always quite soon one came to some old Austrian boundary posts;
almost everywhere the Italians are fighting upon what is technically
enemy territory, but nowhere does it seem a whit less Italian than
the plain of Lombardy. When at last I motored away from Udine to the
northern mountain front I passed through Campo-Formio and saw the
white-faced inn at which Napoleon dismembered the ancient republic
of Venice and bartered away this essential part of Italy into foreign
control. It just gravitates back now--as though there had been no
Napoleon.

And upon the roads and beside them was the enormous equipment of a
modern army advancing. Everywhere I saw new roads being made, railways
pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals; everywhere the villages swarmed
with grey soldiers; everywhere our automobile was threading its way
and taking astonishing risks among interminable processions of motor
lorries, strings of ambulances or of mule carts, waggons with timber,
waggons with wire, waggons with men's gear, waggons with casks, waggons
discreetly veiled, columns of infantry, cavalry, batteries _en route._
Every waggon that goes up full comes back empty, and many wounded were
coming down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. Goritzia had
been taken a week or so before my arrival; the Isonzo had been crossed
and the Austrians driven back across the Carso for several miles; all
the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding up to make good these
gains and gather strength for the next thrust. The roads under all this
traffic remained wonderful; gangs of men were everywhere repairing the
first onset of wear, and Italy is the most fortunate land in the world
for road metal; her mountains are solid road metal, and in this Venetian