That evening the restaurant windows were covered tight with shutters and heavy screens before the doors. The waiter put a candle in a saucer before your plate and you ate your food in this wavering light. There was not the usual temptation to linger in the piazza after dinner, for the cafés were all sealed against a betraying gleam of light and the Venetian public had taken to heart the posted advice to stay within doors and draw their wooden shutters. As I entered my room, the moon was rising behind the Salute, throwing its light across the Canal on to the walls of the palaces opposite. The soft night was full of murmuring voices, for Venice is the most vocal of cities. The people were exchanging views across their waterways from darkened house to house, speculating on the chances of another aerial raid tonight. They were making salty jokes about their enemies in the Venetian manner. The moonlight illuminated the broad waterway beneath my window with its shuttered palaces as if it were already day. A solitary gondola came around the bend of the Canal and its boatman began to sing one of the familiar songs that once was bawled from illuminated barges on spring nights like this, for the benefit of the tourists in the hotels. To-night he was singing it for himself, because of the soft radiance of the night, because of Venice. His song rose from the silver ripple of the waves below, and in the little garden behind the nightingale began to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of this morning and opened his heart in the old way to the moonlight May night and to Venice? * * * * * The enemy did not return that night, the moon gave too clear a light. But a few evenings later, when the sky was covered with soft clouds, there was an alarm and the guns mounted on the palace roofs began again bombarding the heavens. This time the darkness was shot by comet-like flashes of light, and the exploding shells gave a strange pyrotechnic aspect to the battle in the air. Again the enemy fled across the Adriatic without having done any special damage. Only a few old houses in the poorer quarter near the arsenal were crumbled to dust. Since that first week of the war the aeroplane attacks upon Venice have been repeated a number of times, and though the bombs have fallen perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo frescoes in the Scalsi church were ruined, no great harm had been done. The military excuse--if after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an excuse--is the great arsenal in Venice. The real reason, of course, is that Venice is the most easily touched, most precious of all Italian treasure cities, and the Teuton, as a French general said to me, wages war not merely upon soldiers, but also upon women and children and monuments. It is vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts the Austrian aeroplanes across the Adriatic--the essential spirit of the barbarian which the Latin abhors.