The gun positions of my new Battery were situated just outside the little village of Pec, inhabited mostly by Slovene peasantry before the war, now all vanished.  The village had been much shelled, first by Italian and then by Austrian guns, and there was not a house remaining undamaged, though several had been patched up as billets and cookhouses by British troops.  Another of our Batteries had their guns actually in the ruins of the village, but ours were alongside a sunken road, leading down to the Vippacco.  The guns themselves were concealed in thick bowers of acacias, the branches of which had been clipped here and there within our arc of fire.  I doubt if anywhere, on any Front, a British Battery occupied a position of greater natural beauty.  The officers’ Mess and sleeping huts were a few hundred yards from the guns, right on the bank of the Vippacco, likewise hidden from view and shaded from the sun by a great mass of acacias, a luxuriant soft roof of fresh green leaves.  Our Mess, indeed, had no other roof than this, for there was seldom any rain, and, as we sat at meals, we faced a broad waterfall, a curving wall of white foam, stretching right across the stream, which was at this point about seventy or eighty yards wide.  Innumerable blue dragon-flies flitted backwards and forwards in the sunlight.  Though the weather was warm, it was less hot than usual at this time of year, and the surroundings of our Mess reminded me vividly of Kerry.  In the first days that followed I could often imagine myself back in beautiful and familiar places in the south-west corner of Ireland.  Only Italian gunners coming and going, for several of their Battery positions were close to ours, and the Castello di Rubbia across the water, slightly but not greatly damaged, broke this occasional illusion.

These Italians took us quite for granted now, and that evening I began to learn about their Front.  Things were pretty quiet at present on both sides, but greater activity was expected soon.  I made the acquaintance of Venosta, an Italian Artillery officer attached to the Battery.  He was from Milan, a member of a well-known Lombard family, and had a soft and quiet way with him and a certain supple charm.  At ordinary times he preferred to take things easily, and was imperturbable by anything which he thought unimportant.  But in crises, as I learned later on, he could show much calm resource and energy.

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I woke next morning to the sound of the Vippacco waterfall, and the following day I got my first real impression of this part of the Italian Front.  The Battery was doing a registration shoot and I went up in the afternoon with our Second-in-Command to an O.P. on the top of the Nad Logem to observe and correct our fire.  It was a great climb, up a stony watercourse, now dry, and then through old Austrian trenches, elaborately blasted in the Carso rock and captured a year ago.  The Nad Logem is part of the northern edge of the