During the early days of the campaign there was a tendency, as on all other fronts, to concentrate the largest possible number of men in the front line defences, but later the opposite tendency prevailed, viz. that the first lines should be held by an indispensable minimum of troops only, the rest of the forces being kept in reserve in well-protected shelters, ready to hasten forward at the moment of attack, and that powerful second and third lines of main resistance should be constructed. In this way the constant drain of small losses when there was no real fighting going on was avoided, and at the same time the consequences of a possible break-through in the first line were guarded against, as the enemy, in attacking the second lines would have been exposed to the fire of batteries which could easily find their range on ground perfectly well known to them. It was General Mombelli who reconstructed and reinforced the second line and created the third, which was the most powerful of the three, _ex novo_. The enemy knew very little about these defences behind the first line, and, in fact, on a German Staff map found on a prisoner, whereas the first line is represented with a fair amount of accurate detail, the second is barely sketched and in an inaccurate manner, while the third is merely hinted at with the indication “old Bulgarian trenches.” This is one of the signs that the enemy was less well-informed about the Allied armies than was generally supposed. The Italian front in Macedonia had, as we have seen, an extension of 15 km., afterwards reduced, with the diminution of strengths, to about 12. Several times, especially during Sarrail’s régime, the C.A.A. tried to induce the Italian Command to extend the line towards the right, but all the three generals who successively commanded the Italian expeditionary force refused to do so, there being no reason for making the 35th Division occupy a sector wholly out of proportion to its strength as compared with those held by other Allied forces; the fact that the sector in question was one of the hardest and had the most difficult communications, so that all movements from one point to another were anything but simple, had also to be considered. The C.A.A., in fact, ended by dropping the matter.[20] It was not until the summer of 1918 that we again somewhat extended our front in view of the coming offensive. As compared with conditions in Italy the Italian front in Macedonia was certainly less deadly, but in some respects it was one of the most objectionable. Unlike the troops in Italy, those in Macedonia were to a very large extent precluded from leave, and at the time of the Armistice there were no less than 30,000 men, out of a total of 50,000, who, although entitled to leave, were unable to avail themselves of the privilege; among them there were 6,000 who had been at the front for twenty-five months on end without leave. When General