I shall ever be able to visualize the spectacle of that retreat; I shall ever remember that throng of men with heads bent low, with an air at once so grim, and so surly, that the collective countenance seemed scarcely human. Yet there were not a few encouraging ones among them. I shall always remember a corporal of the Alpini whom I met in the village of Pordenone. He was lying exhausted beside his machine gun which he had carried on his shoulder from summit to summit, from hill to hill, for seven consecutive days, until he had reached the plain. For food he had eaten bits of musty bread chanced upon along the road. When I stopped he first begged me for a bit of bread, then anxiously inquired on what line our command had decided to halt. He desired to shoulder his gun thither, again to set it up against the enemy where the need of halting their advance was greatest. The soldiers of the new Italy were being re-born! Without a tear I had left the countryside endeared to me by memories of my childhood, the place where I was born, the place where for several centuries my ancestors had lived. On the last night, when I had a clear vision of the inevitable, after I had learnt from a superior officer that our next stand would be on the Piave, and that all the region in which lay my properties, my houses, my villas, all I possessed, was to be ceded to the enemy, I rushed in an automobile borrowed from headquarters to my father’s dwelling that I might persuade him to depart. I was certain that he would not believe me, and it was not without a prolonged struggle that I succeeded in convincing him. Indeed he would have preferred on that day to hear that we, his two boys, had fallen in battle, rather than learn from one of us that we had been unable to stop the enemy. At last becoming resigned to the cruel reality, giving no thought to the salvation of any of our belongings, since even the dearest personal thing lost all significance when the entire country was in danger he decided to leave. Even now I can see his tall, straight figure on the threshold of the house, as he turned to cast a final look upon the scene of all our memories; a scene which he would never again observe as he left it that night. The women servants in the house, convulsively weeping, threw themselves at his feet that they might express in a last desperate farewell all the strength of their love. I could not shed a tear. I had given all my tears when I had seen our soldiers retreating from the Carso. I had never feared death, yet then I prayed God with all my strength and faith, that I might live; that I might not die with that vision of defeat in my mind. A thousand times I had hurled myself where danger seemed the greatest, where death was reaping a rich harvest, not asking God to spare me. But at the Carso I prayed for life. I could not die defeated.