The Austrians had cleared out the cellars and larder effectually before taking their departure. I am, however, somewhat overdrawing it when I state there was nothing to be got in the way of liquid refreshment. The proprietor discovered that he happened to have by him a few bottles of a sickly sort of fruit syrup, and also some very brackish mineral water to put with it, and there was coffee if you didn’t mind its being made with the mineral water. It appeared that the Austrians had thoughtfully destroyed the water supply of the city when they left, indifferent to the fact of there being several thousand of their own people, mostly women and children, still living there. It makes me smile when I recall how we ordered the Austrian proprietor about, and with what blind confidence everyone drank the syrup and mineral water, and the coffee. They might easily have been poisoned; it would only have been in keeping with the Austrian methods of warfare. [Illustration: Two infantry regiments, the 11th and 12th, forded and swam across the river (_see page 216_) _To face page 222_] The big saloon of the café was quite that of a first-class establishment; there were cosy corner seats in the windows looking on the Carso, and as you sat there and listened to the thunder of the guns so close by, it was difficult to realise what a wonderful thing it was being there at all; and also that at any moment the Austrians might make a successful counter-attack and get back into the city. Our lives, I fancy, would not have been worth much if this had happened. A somewhat curious incident occurred whilst a little party of us was seated at one of these tables. A very shabbily-dressed civilian, wearing a dirty old straw hat, and looking as if he hadn’t had a square meal or a good wash for weeks, came in a furtive way into the café and, seating himself near us, tried to enter into conversation. With true journalistic _flair_ Barzini encouraged him to talk, and it turned out that he was an Italian professor who had lived many years in Gorizia, where he taught Italian in one of the colleges. When the war broke out the Austrians called on him to join the Austrian Army. He could not escape from the city, so rather than fight against his own countrymen, he determined to hide till an opportunity presented itself for him to get away. An Italian lady, also living here, helped him to carry out his resolve, and for fifteen months he never once moved outside the little room he slept in. His friend would bring him by stealth food and drink once a week, and so cleverly did she manage it, that no one in the house even knew he was still there. Of course it would have meant death for her if she had been caught helping him to evade fighting in the Austrian Army. His feelings, he told us, were indescribable when he learned that at last the Italians were approaching and his deliverance was at hand.