The railroad stations at Florence and Bologna were under military
control, the quays patrolled, the exits guarded, the buildings stuffed
with soldiers. I could see their sleeping forms huddled in the straw
of the cattle cars on the sidings, also long trains of artillery and
supplies. Shortly after daylight the guards pulled down our shutters
and warned us against looking out of the windows for the remainder of
the journey. A childish precaution, it seemed, which the officers
constantly disregarded. But when I peeped at the sunny fields of the
flat Lombard plain, one of the swarthy men in civilian black leaned
over and firmly pulled down the shade. Italy was taking her war
seriously.

At Mestre we lost the officers: they were going north to Udine
and--beyond. The almost empty train rolled into the Venetian station
only an hour late. The quay outside the station was strangely silent,
with none of that noisy crew of boatmen trying to capture arriving
_forestieri._ They had gone to the war. One old man, the figure of
Charon on his dingy poop, sole survivor of the gay tribe, took me
aboard and ferried me through the network of silent canals toward the
piazza. Dismantled boats lay up along the waterways, the windows of the
palaces were tightly shuttered, and many bore paper signs of renting.
"The Austrians," Charon laconically informed me. It would seem that
Venice had been almost an Austrian possession, so much emptiness was
left at her flight. But within the little squares and along the winding
stony lanes between the ancient palaces, Venice was alive with citizens
and soldiers--and very much herself for the first time in many centuries.
The famous piazza recalled the processional pictures of Guardi. Only the
companies of soldiers that marched through it on their way to the station
were not gorgeously robed: they were in dirty gray with heavy kits on