By the first weeks of 1918 the population had shrunk to less than 60,000, and at night one could walk through miles and miles of stilled and empty streets, darkened against the peril of air raids, or could travel by gondola along lonely canals rippled only by the Winter wind, with the cold moonlight silvering a deserted fairyland. Two months later the population was further reduced by sending away 20,000 women, children, and old men with a view to eliminating useless mouths to feed and preventing unnecessary slaughter. By that time Austro-German ingenuity had invented a new system of dropping bombs; instead of scattering them over the city the missiles were grouped in large numbers in a very limited space so that the destruction on that area was complete. LIKE A DEAD CITY An English war correspondent who visited Venice in the Winter drew this word picture: "Shuttered palaces face each other across silent canals. A footstep ringing down those narrow alleys, which are like deep, dark slits in a close-crowded mass of many-storied houses, starts echoes that die undisturbed away. The black gondola glides through a dead city more beautiful in the silence and stillness of this war trance of hers than ever in the fullness of her vivacious life. At each corner of the narrow water lane the white-haired gondolier raises his mournful cry, but by long habit, for he knows that no answer will ring out from beyond the angle of the dark stone wall, and no tapering prow glide out to be avoided by a turn of his skillful oar. "The Grand Canal is a green and gleaming vista of desertion. The scream of seagulls, beating its tranquil surface with their wings, is the only sound that disturbs the quiet of its reverie. A pleasing melancholy invests the deserted quays, and in remote corners of little lost canals you can almost hear the whispering of innumerable spirits of the Venice of long ago who have been drawn back to their old home by this strange peace that lies upon the city. "Venice, without tourists, without guides, without postcard sellers and hotel touts, is a close preserve of beauty for the few who have the fortune to be here. The atmosphere and the dignity of the days when she was a ruling city are here as they have never been before in modern times, nor ever will be again." THE WORST AIR RAID