As we drove from the station, past the Baths of Diocletian, we met the regiment, whose measured tread we had heard, and recognized, marching gallantly at the head of his company, a young captain whom we had often watched drilling his men in the great field across the Tiber. We called him Philippus for that soldier of Crotona the Segesteans found slain among their foes after the battle, and to whose memory on account of his superhuman beauty a temple was erected. Philippus was our neighbor; now that he was leaving it seemed he was almost our friend. The barracks where he and his soldiers lived were near our house. It was their bugle that every night at halfpast ten sounded the call we too obeyed, “Go to bed, go to bed, put out the lights.” The soldiers were most of them mere boys with beardless faces. When we should meet again they would not look so young. Those who went down to the earthquake region aged fast as men do in battle. I haunted the station in those days, watching the departure of the bands of engineers, firemen, doctors, medical students that went down from Rome by every train that left for Naples. From Milan, from Turin, from Florence, from every city or town of northern Italy, help poured down towards the stricken country. The Knights of Malta sent a field hospital and a corps of doctors and nurses. Food, clothes, medicines, tents, nurses, doctors, the great stream of help flowed steadily towards the south. The railroads were not equal to the tremendous strain put upon them, and the congestion of traffic was one of the hardest of Italy’s trials. Her people were starving, dying of cold and hunger, while the whole railroad system was congested and the good food and the warm clothes, instead of reaching the poor victims, were shunted on side-tracks or delayed in freight houses for weeks, even months. It was inevitable that this should have happened; the same thing would have happened in any country. But everything was against Italy. The unheard-of severity of the winter was not the least element of danger and difficulty. The railroad is managed by the Government, that poor overburdened Government that tries its best to carry the great weight put upon it. The strain of carrying south the vast stream of provisions and supplies and of carrying north the enormous numbers of the refugees flying from Sicily was too much for it. What nation, what railroad system could have handled such a situation? One sinister commodity took precedence of all others--quicklime; already the menace of pestilence was in people’s minds, for now we knew that in Messina, a city of 200,000 souls, more than half the inhabitants had perished. On Saturday, the second of January, Athol asked me to visit one of the first families of refugees who had arrived in Rome. I found them in a gaunt new barrack of a house in an arid street of one of the ugliest quarters of new Rome.