I therefore had an opportunity of judging for myself what had been accomplished in five days. The village of Lucinico had now been so cleared of _débris_ that there was no longer any occasion to leave the car. We found to our surprise that the road was quite open all the way to Gorizia, across the battlefield round by Podgora and through Grafenberg. The Austrians were still busy sending big shells over at intervals, and a car just ahead of us had a very narrow escape; it was little short of a miracle it was not blown to pieces, and it makes me feel cold when I think of it. The change everywhere was positively bewildering; if I had not seen it for myself I should never have believed it possible. With the exception of the ruined houses and the shattered trunks of the trees there was no trace remaining of the battle. The trenches had been filled in, thus forming ready-made graves for the dead; the wreckage of barbed-wire entanglements; the shell-holes, the gruesome litter of blood-stained garments; all had disappeared as though by magic. Perhaps, though, the most startling transformation was to be seen at the archway under the railway I described in a previous chapter. It was positively unrecognizable. Everything had been cleared away. Unless you had seen it before, you would never have believed that this very commonplace tunnel for the road under the embankment, such as one sees everywhere and through which we drove without stopping, was less than a week before the elaborately fitted-up Headquarters and domicile of an Austrian General and his staff. The store-house in which I had seen the ghastly array of human packages was now but an ordinary empty shed, the kitchen close by only a simple wooden hut, the very last place one would have expected to find an elaborate cuisine in. To my companion this meant nothing, as it was the first time he had come this way, but I must confess to a slight feeling of disappointment that there should have been so much haste to remove all traces of Austrian Military Kultur. I felt I should have liked to see it all again, though I suppose had I been able to, the impression would not have been the same as it was on that morning when the place had only just been vacated by the Austrians and the battlefield was, as it were, still red-hot. There was nothing to stop for in Grafenberg, so we drove straight on till we came to a wooden bridge which brought us right into Gorizia. This was one of the bridges which had been partially destroyed on the day of the battle, but was now repaired.