particularly around by her right wing. At no time I shall be surprised
to see a sudden lunge forward on that front, and hear a tale of guns
and prisoners. This will not mean that she has made a sudden attack, but
that some system of Austrian positions has collapsed under her continual
pressure.

Such briefly is the _idea_ of mountain struggle. Its realities, I
should imagine, are among the strangest and most picturesque in all this
tremendous world conflict. I know nothing of the war in the east, of
course, but there are things here that must be hard to beat. Happily
they will soon get justice done to them by an abler pen than mine.
I hear that Kipling is to follow me upon this ground; nothing can be
imagined more congenial to his extraordinary power of vivid rendering
than this struggle against cliffs, avalanches, frost and the Austrian.

To go the Italian round needs, among other things, a good head.
Everywhere it has been necessary to make roads where hitherto there have
been only mule tracks or no tracks at all; the roads are often still in
the making, and the automobile of the war tourist skirts precipices and
takes hairpin bends upon tracks of loose metal not an inch too broad
for the operation, or it floats for a moment over the dizzy edge while
a train of mule transport blunders by. The unruly imagination of man's
heart (which is "only evil continually") speculates upon what would be
the consequences of one good bump from the wheel of a mule cart. Down
below, the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look far too
small and spiky and scattered to hold out much hope for a fallen man
of letters. And at the high positions they are too used to the
vertical life to understand the secret feelings of the visitor from
the horizontal. General Bompiani, whose writings are well known to all
English students of military matters, showed me the Gibraltar he is