Considerable light is thrown upon the organization of the Italian army, which made it possible to carry on successfully these operations, in the following article from the pen of the special correspondent of the London "Times": "I have been allowed to visit the offices of the general staff at army headquarters and those of the administrative services at another point within the war zone. This is not a favorable moment for describing how the army machinery works; but there is no harm done in saying that all these services appear to run smoothly, have good men at their head, and produce good results. "I was particularly struck by the maps turned out. They do great credit to the Military Geographical Institute at Florence, and to the officers at headquarters who revise the maps as new information pours in. All the frontiers have been well surveyed and mapped on scales of 1:25,000, 1:50,000, 1:100,000, and 1:200,000. These maps are very clear and good. I like best the 1:100,000, which is issued to all officers, and on which operation orders are based. The photographs are also very fine, and the panoramas excellent, while the airmen's photographs, and the plans compiled from them, are quite in the front rank. "The service of information at headquarters also appears to me to be good. There are more constant changes in all the Italian staffs than we should consider desirable, and officers pass very rapidly from one employment to another, but in spite of this practice the information is well kept up, and the knowledge of the enemy's dispositions is up to standard, considering the extraordinary difficulty of following the really quite chaotic organization of the Austro-Hungarian forces. "I am not sure that I like very much the liaison system in Italy. The comparatively young officers intrusted with it report direct to army headquarters, and on their reports the communiques are usually based. These officers remind us of the _missi dominici_ of the great Moltke, but on the whole I confess that the system does not appeal to me very much. "All the rearward services of the army are united under the control of the intendant general, who is a big personage in Italy. He deals with movements, quarterings, railways, supply, munitions in transit, and, in fact, everything except drafts and aviation, both of which services come under the general staff. There is a representative of the intendant general in each army and army corps. An order of movement is repeated to the intendant general by telephone and he arranges for transport, food, and munitions.