The
shoulders droop. The very outline is a note of interrogation. They look
up as the privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or
the reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge,
passes--importantly. One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say:
"Perhaps _you_ understand....
"In which case---...?"
It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what makes
everyone collect "specimens" of the war. Everywhere the souvenir forces
itself upon the attention. The homecoming permissionaire brings with
him invariably a considerable weight of broken objects, bits of shell,
cartridge clips, helmets; it is a peripatetic museum. It is as if he
hoped for a clue. It is almost impossible, I have found, to escape these
pieces in evidence. I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought
home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an Austrian
shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is worth half a franc
within the confines of Amiens. But a large heavy piece of exploded shell
that had been thrust very urgently upon my attention upon the Carso I
contrived to lose during the temporary confusion of our party by the
arrival and explosion of another prospective souvenir in our close
proximity. And two really very large and almost complete specimens of
some species of _Ammonites_ unknown to me, from the hills to the east
of the Adige, partially wrapped in a back number of the _Corriere
della Sera_, that were pressed upon me by a friendly officer, were
unfortunately lost on the line between Verona and Milan through the
gross negligence of a railway porter.
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