He was wonderfully kind to Colonel Rocca, the commanding officer, keeping him supplied with cigarettes and tobacco from the supply furnished for distribution among the privates. When the colonel expressed a desire to accompany him on one of his week-end outings or even to be carried to some neighboring city (the army only allowing a horse and cart for his personal service), the Y Fiat was always at his service. This courtesy resulted in John Calhoun being awarded the Croce di Guerra, for distinguished service at the front, though Cento was seventy-five miles from the front line and he never so much as heard the roar of a distant gun. He did visit the battlefields, the whole front line from the Adriatic Sea, along the Piave, Mt. Grappa and the Trentino, westward to Tonale Pass and northward to Innsbruck, but it was after the armistice. He made a choice collection of war relics and photographs, which he subsequently used in his lecture: "Personal Experiences at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, or How I Won the War Cross." He had spent his boyhood on the trails of Pine Mountain, often riding to mill straddle of a mule. When the family moved to Madison County he drove a speedy trotter to a side-bar buggy over the turnpike, then in his own Pierce-Arrow over excellent roads, then in Italy a Y Fiat. He was educated by gradation to speedy locomotion and was a most competent judge of good roads. He knew what he was talking about when he said that there were no other roads in the world like the old Roman roads of the plain and no other highways exhibited such engineering skill and perfection as those of the mountains, north from Brescia along Lake Iseo to Tonale Pass, with its tunnels, curves and gradual ascents. How he did enjoy riding over the old Roman road from Bologna to Milan with Colonel Rocca, telling him about what he had done and had seen! One of his lectures, descriptive of this road, was reported, and I quote a portion of it: "There is no place more attractive in the ripe days of spring than the Lombardy plain. The old Roman road as direct as the truth and a straight, though broad, way intersects it as though a great master road builder with the power of a czar had laid down a hundred-mile rule and, drawing a single line at an angle of twenty degrees north of west, declared the survey complete and the route fixed. "The road is built above and overlooks the plain. No pains in the original construction of twenty-odd centuries ago, nor since in its remodification or repair, has been spared towards making it an eternal highway down which as a vast speedway a half-dozen cars might race abreast. "The Po and its tributaries are spanned by great arched bridges of stone, seemingly cut and placed by Titans of past ages who spent their full days and plenteous strength and skill in placing stone on stone.