eleven on the previous night Mihailov ordered the captain to come to see him; he wanted to know by whom this expedition had been authorized. The captain answered that Mešica was in his district, and that he had no animus against Roumanians but only against plunderers. After his arrival at Mešica the trouble was brought to an end. Nor was it long before the Serbian troops, riding up through their own country at a rate which no one had foreseen, crossed the Danube and occupied the Banat, in conjunction with the French. The rapidity of this advance astounded the Roumanians; they gaped like Lavengro when he wondered how the stones ever came to Stonehenge.... When the Serbian commandant at Veršac invited these enterprising Roumanian officers to an interview he was asked by one of them, Major Iricu, whether or not they were to be interned. "What made you print that placard?" asked the commandant; and they replied that their object had been to preserve order. They had not imagined, so they said, that the Serbs would come so quickly. "I will be glad," said the commandant, "if you will not do this kind of thing any more." THE ITALIAN FRAME OF MIND Italy was not in a good humour. She was well aware that in the countries of her Allies there was a marked tendency to underestimate her overwhelming triumphs of the last days of the War. Perhaps those exploits would have been more difficult if Austria's army had not suffered a deterioration, but still one does not take 300,000 prisoners every day. Some faithful foreigners were praising Italy--and she deserved it--for having persevered at all after Caporetto. That disaster had been greatly due to filling certain regiments with several thousand munition workers who had taken part in a revolt at Turin, and then concentrating these regiments in the Caporetto salient, which was the most vulnerable sector in the eastern Italian front. How much of the disaster was due to the Vatican will perhaps never be known. But as for the uneducated, easily impressed peasants of the army, it was wonderful that all, except the second army and a small part of the third, retreated with such discipline in view of what they had been brooding on before the day of Caporetto. They had such vague ideas what they were fighting for, and if the Socialists kept saying that the English paid their masters to continue with the War--how were they to know what was the truth? The British regiments, who were received not merely with cigars and cigarettes and flowers and with little palm crosses which their trustful little weavers had blessed, but also with showers of stones as they passed through Italian villages in 1917, must have sometimes understood and pardoned. Then the troops were in distress about their relatives, for things were more and more expensive, and where would it end? In face of these discouragements it was most admirable that the army and the nation rallied and reconstituted their _morale_.