Let me speak of Milan and Venice as I saw them in intervals of visits to the mountaintop fighting fronts. At Milan my first care was to study the precautions taken against the destruction of art treasures. Always the Latin, who creates, is forced to protect and defend his works from the German, who destroys. The cathedral, all in stone, risks little from fire, all the glass and precious objects having been taken to places of safety, and it remains intact and marvellous under its mantle of lace, intact in spite of the Austrians and marvellous in spite of Ruskin. At Santa Marie del Grace the "Last Supper" of Leonardo is protected by a wall of sandbags and by a fireproof curtain. Churches and museums have been emptied of their riches. In the streets I watched the crowds--a people astonishing in purity of line and proportion, moving always with grace and harmony. Here lies for me the secret of their artistic superiority, for it is well known that the artist, in spite of himself, reproduces in his work his physical perfections and faults. In Venice the same precautions are taken as at Milan. The Scaliger tombs are covered with sand and the more important ones are enclosed in stone turrets. All statues are shrouded in a preparation of straw and plaster sufficient to protect them from fragments of bombs, but what a wonderful mark for some aerial bandit San Zeno and St. Anastasia, with their wooden ceilings, would be. In the middle of the night I disembarked in Venice, where two carabinieri conducted me to a hotel hermetically sealed so that no ray of light escaped. And here I stayed in the pitch dark with a prospect of being lodged under the Piombi of the Ducal Palace if I betrayed the slightest evidence of having a light.