the silver ripple of the waves below, and in the little garden behind the
nightingale began to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of this
morning and opened his heart in the old way to the moonlight May night
and to Venice?

* * * * *

The enemy did not return that night, the moon gave too clear a light.
But a few evenings later, when the sky was covered with soft clouds,
there was an alarm and the guns mounted on the palace roofs began again
bombarding the heavens. This time the darkness was shot by comet-like
flashes of light, and the exploding shells gave a strange pyrotechnic
aspect to the battle in the air. Again the enemy fled across the Adriatic
without having done any special damage. Only a few old houses in the
poorer quarter near the arsenal were crumbled to dust.

Since that first week of the war the aeroplane attacks upon Venice
have been repeated a number of times, and though the bombs have fallen
perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo frescoes in the
Scalsi church were ruined, no great harm had been done. The military
excuse--if after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an excuse--is the
great arsenal in Venice. The real reason, of course, is that Venice is
the most easily touched, most precious of all Italian treasure cities,
and the Teuton, as a French general said to me, wages war not merely
upon soldiers, but also upon women and children and monuments. It is
vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts the Austrian aeroplanes
across the Adriatic--the essential spirit of the barbarian which the
Latin abhors.

* * * * *