The German troops, drunk with the wine from our cellars, and fattened with the rich products from our fertile fields, were in a few instances, held back without aid of munitions, as without support of artillery, by mere stones and rocks hurled upon them by our men inexorably determined not to let the enemy pass. Again I took courage. I had never doubted the fate of our army, but in the rarer and more hazardous moments, had none the less been compelled to question my own convictions, since events scarcely justified my boundless optimism. This optimism depended in some measure upon the fact that I was an officer of the Third Army, the army which, under the command of the Duke of Aosta, had numerous times endeavored to open up a way toward Trieste, and which had occupied, little by little, the land of the Dolina and the rocky regions of the Carso. We of the Third Army had never considered ourselves beaten; we had been compelled to submit to inevitable events; we had been compelled to withdraw, against our wishes, lest we had been surrounded, and to the end that the stream of Germans which had penetrated from Caporetto, might not cut off our road to the Piave. But the heroes of Faiti, the heroes of Hermanda, even on the day when the retreat was determined upon, repulsed more than thirty attacks of the enemy, and in a final magnificent play, in defiance of the enemy pressing them on all sides, made a desperate assault in which they conquered new trenches and made several prisoners. Those soldiers wept as they abandoned their huts. On our front the enemy had always been held back, and when it did advance, its journey was slow and costly. We aviators, who had been absolute masters of the air over the Isonzo, who had traversed with unswerving flight the enemy sky where hostile machines had in vain attempted our territory, who a thousand times had brought a greeting to the City of Grief, Trieste, seeming ever to be waiting for us there at the end of the Gulf at the foot of the hills—we aviators of the Third Army had even in our retreat inflicted such great damage on the enemy, that our troops, our ordnance, our supplies were enabled to move slowly on the muddy, congested roads, without fear of any harm from the wings of the enemy. Although the enemy planes were supported on land by the slow, persistent advance of their troops, they never dared nor risked firing on our slowly retreating column. A feat which but for us would have been easy, and would have shaken seriously the morale of our soldiers.