It is an hour of anticlimax. There is nothing to do, and one has to "make work" in a hundred silly, ingenious ways. Next week some of the men who have been out of England for 19 months will go on leave. Then, after a fortnight in England, unless something tremendous and unexpected happens, they will all come back again. And there will still be nothing to do. Was it Wordsworth who said that poetry is "emotion remembered in tranquillity"? Wordsworth would undoubtedly have written much poetry here. Our chief delight is Leary's musical voice. He sings to us in the evenings after dinner, "_La Campana di San Ginsto_" and "_Addio, mia bell', addio_" and choice _stornetti_, and "_Come to Ferrara with me_," a cheerful song of his own composing, set to a music-hall tune which was famous three years ago, and "_We'll all go a-hunting to-day_," an old song with a superb chorus. And so the days pass, one very like another. I dreamed last night that a regular soldier of high degree and uncertain nationality appeared to me and said, "Do you not see now, young man, that peace is degeneracy, and that war is an ennobling discipline?" And I, chancing my luck, replied, "Yes, the great von Moltke himself said that peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream." Whereupon my visitor changed into a white owl and vanished with a hoot. And I awoke, and found that I had overslept myself and that the nine o'clock parade, which I was due to attend, was already falling in outside. Then said I to myself bitterly, "At any rate we here have all survived, and, therefore, since war is the greatest of all biological tests, we must all be very fit to have survived, especially that most fit young man, who came out to the Battery from England a day or two before the armistice was signed, after three years at Shoeburyness, and the fittest of all must be those whose survival, apart from such dangers as influenza and air raids, has never been in doubt, the valuable people who have been kept in England, because they were members of concert parties or football teams at the depôts, or officers' servants to influential _imboscati_, or influential _imboscati_ themselves." And then, with a great and well-disciplined effort, I pulled my thoughts together, and said to myself, "Enough of these musings of the peace-time soldier!" CHAPTER XLII LAST THOUGHTS ON LEAVING ITALY On the 3rd of December I passed out of Italy, after eighteen months spent as a soldier within her borders. These eighteen months will always be lit up for me by the memory of a great comradeship between men of Allied nations. We have lived together through the dark days and the sunshine, through sorrow and joy, through uncertainty and defeat to final victory.