I led a laborious, tranquil life with the command of the eighth Bersaglieri which held the line from Fagare to Molino della Sega. Every now and then there were slight surprise attacks at night and small bombardments. During the day there was a little isolated shooting upon the roads most frequented by our wagons, but otherwise there was nothing abnormal, almost no indication that we were at war. So for many weeks on many fronts this calm subsisted yet beneath its stillness what great griefs, what sufferings, what trepidations lay hid! The willow-trees put forth their first buds; spring came on apace. A hawthorn bush about which the wire entanglements were twined, foamed, snow-tinted, under the pale sky. A warm breeze, the lightest of March, breathed from the South, and at the first cascades of song from larks, singing as it seemed just beneath the low clouds, we felt faintly calling in our hearts the echoes of the distant springtimes, now—save in the moments of this brief episode of war—vanished from the memory of a child grown man. In the afternoon we heard the first rumblings of thunder, followed by large warm drops of rain which filled the air with the smell of fresh earth newly trenched and with the fragrance of primroses and violets sprouting among the first green leaves. Far off in the background where the irate mountain seemed to support a curved garland of clouds, I beheld, illumined by a slanting ray of light, the cypresses which surround the castle of Conegliano, near which my house stands. Everything proclaimed the unhinderable beauty of nature, the joy of youth, were it yet possible even to sense this beauty and this youth in the great cataclysm which surrounded us. That view and those cypresses renewed within me the ardent desire to reach the other side. I pointed out to Bottecchia the steeple of his village church, which veiled itself far away among the distant vapor of clouds. And by this sign we became two bosom companions joined by a firm bond of love and friendship. We became two comrades, dedicated to the same cause, two comrades whom nothing can stay in the fulfillment of their chosen duty. Very slowly, so it seemed to me, the days passed by, perhaps because I slept little at night. For then it was that many small details took shape, many new angles of sight were discovered, many definite ideas were formulated. In the morning my soldier and I met and communicated to each other the experiences and thoughts of the previous night.