There was a trio of blithe rock-breakers that furnished me with one of the most grimly amusing impressions of my visit. It was toward the end of December, and Captain P----, the indefatigable young officer who had me in charge, arranged a special treat in the form of a visit to a magnificent observation-post on the brink of a hill which the Italians had wrested from the Austrians in one of their late advances. We picked our way across some miles of this shell-churned and still uncleared battlefield, and ate our lunch of sandwiches on the parapet of a trench from which one could follow, with only a few breaks, the course of the Austrian lines in the hills beyond Gorizia, to where they melted into the marshes fringing the sea. “There’s only one objection to this vantage-point,” remarked the captain, directing his glass along the lower fringe of the clouds that hung low on the opposite hills. “Unless the weather is fairly thick one is under the direct observation of the Austrians over there for close to an hour, both going and coming. It would hardly be pleasant to come up here if the visibility were really good.” And at that psychological moment the clouds began to lift, the sun came out, and, taking advantage of the first good gunnery weather that had offered for a long time, the artillery of both sides opened up for as lively a bit of practice as any really sober-minded individual could care to be mixed up with. I have seen quieter intervals on the Somme, even during a period when the attack was being sharply pushed. A hulking “305,” which swooped down and obliterated a spiny pinnacle of the ridge a few hundred yards farther along, also swept much of the zest out of the sharpening panorama, and signalled, “Time to go!” A large-calibre high-explosive shell is a far more fearsome thing when rending a crater in the rock of the Carso than when tossing the soft mud of France. Work was still going on in the half-sheltered _dolinas_ or “sink-holes” that pock-marked the grisly plateau; but on the remains of a cart-road which we followed, and which appeared to be the special object of the Austrians’ diversion, none seemed to be in sight save a few scattered individuals actively engaged in getting out of sight. It was an illuminating example of the way most of the “natives” appeared to feel about the situation, and we did not saunter any the more leisurely for having had the benefit of it. We stepped around the riven body of a horse that still steamed from the dying warmth of the inert flesh, and a little farther on, there was a red puddle in the middle of the road, a black, lazily smoking shell-hole close beside it, with a crisply fresh mound of sod and rock fragment just beyond. A hammer and a dented trench helmet indicated that the man had been cracking up stone for the road when _his_ had come.