We got a splendid view of Gorizia from here—it looked a beautiful white city embowered in foliage, with no sign at all of destruction at this distance. On the high hills beyond, which one knew to be Monte Santo and Monte San Gabriele, little puffs of smoke were incessantly appearing—these were Italian shells bursting—the booming of the guns never ceasing. The Austrian trenches commenced a few hundred yards beyond Lucinico, and we were now walking along a road that for fifteen months had been “No man’s land.” The spectacle we had before us of violence and death is indescribable. Everything had been levelled and literally pounded to atoms by the Italian artillery. The ground all around was pitted with shell-holes, and strewn with every imaginable kind of _débris_: the remains of barbed-wire entanglements in such chaotic confusion that it was frequently a matter of positive difficulty to pass at all; broken rifles, unused cartridges by the thousand, fragments of shell-cases, boots, first-aid bandages, and odds and ends of uniforms covered with blood. We had to pick our way in places along the edge of the communication trenches, which were very deep and narrow, and looked very awkward to get into or out of in a hurry. We had to jump across them in places, but otherwise we endeavoured to give them as wide a berth as possible, as the stench was already becoming overpowering under the hot rays of the summer sun. It only needed a glance to see for yourself what caused it. The Austrian dead were literally lying in heaps along the bottom. They were so numerous in places, that had it not been for an occasional glimpse of an upturned face, or a hand or a foot, one might have thought that these heaps were merely discarded uniforms or accoutrements. It produced an uncanny sensation of horror walking alongside these furrows of death, and this was heightened by the fact that at the time we were the only living beings here; the troops having advanced some distance, we had the battlefield quite to ourselves. I recollect I had the strange impression of being with a little band of explorers, as it were, in an unearthly region. Shells were coming over pretty frequently, but it was not sufficiently dangerous for us to think of taking cover, though I fancy that had it been necessary we should all have hesitated before getting down into one of these trenches or dug-outs. Curiously enough, there were very few dead lying outside the trenches. I imagine the intensity of the fire prevented any men from getting out of them. The railway line traverses the plain on a very high embankment just before Podgora is reached, and the roadway passes under it by a short tunnel.