It was the more interesting to me as I knew that these men were fully aware that in a couple of hours or so they would be in the thick of the hottest fighting. Nevertheless, I could see no trace of any nervous excitement, though the guns were booming in the distance; they might have all been case-hardened old warriors, so far as you could outwardly judge from their stolid demeanour. Many were taking advantage of the halt to snatch a few minutes sleep, whilst others were writing letters. There was very little of the grouping together or chatting one would have expected to see. The Italian of to-day is becoming a “thinker.” But what struck me perhaps most of all was the quite noticeable absence of smoking. Probably every other man in an English or French regiment under the circumstances would have had a pipe or a cigarette in his mouth, and would have considered the hardships increased tenfold if he hadn’t been able to enjoy a smoke. Here the men in the field don’t seem to look upon tobacco as an absolute necessity; so far as I could judge; and one seldom sees them smoking on the march, like the French _poilu_, or the English Tommy. About a mile and a half past Fogliano we took a road that went by an archway under the railway embankment, and brought us a few hundred yards on to a heap of rubble that had once been a little village named Redipuglia, if I remember rightly. On our right was the much talked of Monte Cosich, a hill that had been the scene of innumerable desperate fights, and facing us was the commencement of the Carso. I shall never forget my first impression of this shell-swept waste; for what I had already seen of it was only from a distance, and though through powerful binoculars, one was not really able to form any conception of what it is like in reality. I had been prepared to see Nature in its most savage mood, but the scene before me was so terrible in its utter desolation as to inspire a sense of awe. Imagine the Brighton downs covered from end to end with colourless stones and rock instead of turf; no sign of vegetation anywhere; ribbed in every direction with trenches protected by low, sand-bagged walls; bristling with wire entanglements, and everywhere pitted with huge shell-craters. Even then you have only a faint conception of what war means on the Carso, and the awful character of the task the Italians have had before them for the past eighteen months. There is certainly nothing to compare with it on any of the other Fronts; for here nature appears to have connived at the efforts of man, and every hollow and every hummock form as it were potential bastions. The incessant thunder of the guns in the distance seemed, as it were, to be in keeping with the utter desolation of the scene. The road gradually ascended for about a couple of miles, till we at last arrived on the plateau of Doberdo, and close to all that remains of the village.