great was the tension existing in Klagenfurt that a commission had been
sent by the Peace Conference to study the question on the spot, its
members communicating with the Supreme Council in Paris by means of
American couriers, slim young fellows in khaki who wore on their arms
the blue brassard, embroidered with the scales of justice, which was the
badge of messengers employed by the Peace Commission.

A few miles outside of Klagenfurt my attention was attracted by an iron
paling, in a field beside the road, enclosing a gigantic chair carved
from stone. My curiosity aroused, I stopped the car to examine it. From
a faded inscription attached to the gate I learned that this was the
crowning chair of the Dukes of Carinthia, in which the ancient rulers of
this region had sat to be crowned. There it stands in a field beside
the highway, neglected and forgotten, a curious link with a picturesque
and far-distant past.

Our route from Klagenfurt led back through Villach to Tarvis and thence
over the Predil Pass to the Friuli plain and Udine, a journey which we
expected to accomplish in a single day; but there were delays in
re-crossing the Line of the Armistice and other and more serious delays
in the mountains, caused by torrential rains which had in places washed
out the road, so that it was already nightfall when, emerging from the
gloomy defile of the Predil Pass, we saw before us the twinkling lights
of the Alpini cantonment at Caporetto, that mountain hamlet of black
memories where, in the summer of 1917, the Austro-German armies, aided
by bad Italian generalship and Italian treachery, smashed through the
Italian lines and forced them back in a headlong retreat which was
checked only by the heroic stand on the Piave. The Caporetto disaster
would have broken the hearts and annihilated the resistance of a less
courageous people than the Italians. Yet the Italian army, shattered and