that they may know it better, the officers and men of the infantry regiments live on its slopes and in its caverns, and each one tries to know his own sector stone by stone, sod by sod. Every peak, every topographical detail, every gully, every tiny watercourse, every irregularity has its own fancy name, conferred on it by the soldiers on account of some fancied resemblance or remembrance--_Il Pane_ (bread), _Il Capello di Napoleone_ (Napoleon’s hat), _La Graziosa_ (the gracious one), _L’Albero isolato_ (the lonely tree). Curiously enough, the figure whereby the hill is known is inaccurate; it is called Hill 1050 owing to an error in the original triangulation, and is in fact considerably higher. But as that figure appeared on the first maps of the area it has always been maintained. Seen from a distance, the hill looks like an enormous tooth, and indeed it is a poisoned tooth, which pierces and kills. For the soldiers it has acquired a character of almost diabolical malignity. Other positions on the sector--the Piton Brûlé, the Piton Rocheux--are no less terrible, but none exercises the same baleful fascination as the 1050. The Italian sector is not all on 1050; it begins at the extreme western end of the Cerna loop in the plain. The loop encircles a chain of rocky heights, arid and broken, which are an extension of the Prilep mountains, constituting what is known as the Selechka Planina, rising here and there to the height of 1,500 metres. The Cerna, which has its source in the mountains north of Monastir, flows across the plain in a southerly direction, broadening out at certain points into a marshy lake; south-east of Monastir it makes a conversion towards the east at the foot of the Kaimakchalan, passing Brod and Skochivir, and then turns northward through a narrow mountain gorge to its confluence with the Vardar. The slopes of the Selechka Planina, high and steep in the eastern part of the loop, decline towards the west, and all the western part is flat. The Monastir-Prilep plain is one of the rare gaps through the rugged mountain chains extending across the country from east to west, a passage through which innumerable hordes and armies have made their way since the dawn of history. It is, however, dominated by the heights within the Cerna loop. The possession of those heights was therefore indispensable for dominating the Monastir corridor; and as half of them were in the hands of the Allies and half in those of the enemy, neither side could be regarded as master of the plain and of the passage. Had we lost our positions, the road would have been open to the enemy towards Greece; if we had succeeded in capturing the whole of the range all the enemy’s communications in the Vardar valley would have been menaced. That is the meaning of the long-protracted struggle for the possession of those arid rocks.