One of the voluntary drivers was bringing down, over an especially difficult piece of road, an ambulance full of wounded from a lofty sector of the Alpine front, when he encountered a soldier in a desperate condition from a gaping bullet-wound in the throat. Realising that the man was in imminent danger of bleeding to death, the driver lifted the inert body to his seat, propping it up the best he could next to where he sat behind his steering-wheel. Driving with his right hand, while with a finger of his left he maintained a firm pressure on the severed carotid artery, he steered his ambulance down the slippery, winding mountain road to the clearing station at the foot of the pass. The laconic comment of the astonished but highly pleased Italian doctor on the incident was direct but comprehensive. ‘Well, young man,’ he said, as he took hasty measures further to staunch the gushes of blood, ‘you’ve saved his life, but in five minutes more you would have throttled him.’ It will hardly be necessary to enlarge on the effect upon the Italian wounded of the devoted care they have received while in charge of the British Red Cross Ambulance and Hospital Units; nor yet on the admiration awakened throughout the Italian army by the presence in their midst of these quietly energetic and modestly brave workers of mercy. Reciprocally, too, it has given to hundreds (to be passed on to thousands) of Britons an experience of Italian courage and fortitude which could never have been gained except through the medium of hospital and ambulance work. I do not believe I have heard a finer tribute of one Ally to another than that which a member of the British Red Cross Mission paid to the Italians as he had observed them under the terrible trial of the especially aggravated Austrian gas attack of June 30, 1916. ‘The gas employed on this occasion,’ he said, ‘was the deadliest of which there has been any experience; much deadlier than the Germans employed against us at Ypres. It was, as General Cadorna’s dispatch admitted, very destructive of life, although the valour of the Italian soldier prevented the enemy from reaping any military advantage from the foul sowing. Our cars were summoned early, and we worked all night at Sagrado. The trenches on the Carso were at that time close at hand, and the soldiers who were not overcome at their posts came staggering into the hospitals for many hours after the horror was released. Several hundred of them died that night in the court and garden.