"When I had the honor of being received by the King of Italy I found his majesty in a little villa which only held four people, and the king was working in a room of which the only furniture which I can recall consisted of a camp bed close to the ground and of exiguous breadth, a small table, and two chairs of uncompromising hardness. The only ornament in the room was the base of the last Austrian shell which had burst just above the king's head and has been mounted as a souvenir by the queen. "When a prince of the House of Savoy lives in the traditions of his family, and shares all the hardships of his troops, it needs must that his people follow him. And so they do. "The hardy Alpini from the frontiers, the stout soldiers of Piedmont, the well-to-do peasantry of Venetia, the Sardinians, who are ever to the front when there is fighting to be enjoyed, the Tuscans, Calabrians, and those Sicilians once so famous amongst the legionaries, are all here or at the depots training for war. Mobilization must have affected two and a half million Italians at least. There have been fairly heavy losses, and fighting of one kind or another is going on in every sector that I have visited, and every day, despite the great hardships of fighting on the Alpine frontier, the moral of the army remains good, the men are in splendid health, and Italy as a whole remains gay and confident, less affected on the whole by the war than any other member of the grand alliance. "There are certainly more able-bodied men of military age out of uniform in Italy than there are in France, or than there are now with us. Except volunteers, no men under twenty are at the front. There are large reserves still available upon which to draw. The army has been more than doubled since the war began. "The Italian regular officers, and the officers of reserve, are quite excellent. The spirit of good comradeship which prevails in the army is most admirable, and the corps of officers reminds me of a large family which is proverbially a happy one. Those foreign observers who have seen much of the Italian officers under fire tell me that they have always led their men with superb valor and determination, while, though Italy has not such a professional body of N. C. O.'s as Germany, I believe that most of these men are capable of leading when their officers fall. "But there are not enough of good professional officers and N. C. O.'s to admit for the moment of a considerable further expansion of the army. Existing formations can be, and are being, well maintained, and this is what matters most for the moment.