There was a great deal of street fighting before the invaders were driven out and back to the hills, and in several places were hastily erected barricades formed with broken furniture and other miscellaneous articles. Barbed wire entanglements of a novel construction were also placed in some of the streets in case the Italian cavalry attempted to force a way through. So Asiago was very closely connected with the stirring events that were taking place, and from being an unheard of little frontier town, had become one of the most spoken of places in Italy. The fact that the _communiqués_ referred to it almost daily is proof of the importance attaching to this point, and it required ceaseless vigilance on the part of the Italians to retain their foothold in its ruined streets. But no attempt has been made to fortify the place, its defences are the trenches on the hills beyond, and which, at the time I was there, were gradually being pushed forward. Any troops in the town itself were only there _de passage_ for a few hours. It would have been risking unnecessary sacrifice of life to have kept them there for any length of time. We were in about as exposed a position as could probably have been found on any front, but for the moment there was an ominous lull which portended no good, and so it turned out. The respite was not to last long; the Asiago plateau is far too important a sector of the front to be left long in quietude. The little town must have been a delightful place before the war, and even now, destroyed though it mostly is, there are a few picturesque corners which the bombardment has spared. There were comparatively very few soldiers about, and the deserted, ruined streets looked unutterably sad; but right in the centre, on an open piece of waste ground, sheltered by some tall houses and a roughly made “screen” of odd pieces of corrugated iron, a regiment was waiting for nightfall to proceed to the trenches outside the town. I had a good look through an aperture in the screen: the men were noticeably subdued in their demeanour, as well they might be, considering that at any moment they might be under a hail of projectiles and with no means of escaping it. They had evidently been on the road for some time, as they all looked grimy with dust and dirt and tired out, judging from the way most of them were lying about sleeping. It was an extremely sad spectacle, and I had no inclination to make a sketch of it, novel though it was.