save Venice from even a slight bombardment, quite apart from such pounding
as the Germans have given Rheims, or Arras, or Ypres. At the first hostile
blow Venice would sink into the sea, a mass of ruins, returning thus
bereaved to her ancient bridegroom.

Italy is aware of the vengeful warfare she must expect. Great
preparations for the defense of Venice have been made. The city might
be ruined; it could not be taken. The gray destroyers moving in and
out past the Zattere contrasted strangely with the tiny gondolas shaped
like pygmy triremes. It was the mingling of two worlds,--the world of
the gondola, the marble palace of the doges, of the jeweled church of
St. Mark's, and the world of the torpedo boat and the aerial bomb,--the
world as man is making it to-day. The old Venetians were good fighters,
to be sure, not to say quarrelsome. War was never long absent, as may
easily be realized from the great battle-pieces in the Ducal Palace.
But war then was more the rough play of boisterous children than the
slaughterous, purely destructive thing that modern men have made it. And
when those old Venetians were not fighting, they were building greatly,
beautifully, lovingly: they were making life resplendent.

That awakening in the early dawn into the modern world of distant
enemies and secret deadly missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed
me a steel arrow which had been dropped within the arsenal, a small,
sharpened, nail-like thing that would transfix a body from head to feet.
These arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will.
That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing
its way across the heavens, is the true symbol of war today, not face
to face except on rare occasions, but hellish in its impersonal will
to destroy.