The change everywhere was positively bewildering; if I had not seen it for myself I should never have believed it possible. With the exception of the ruined houses and the shattered trunks of the trees there was no trace remaining of the battle.
The trenches had been filled in, thus forming ready-made graves for the dead; the wreckage of barbed-wire entanglements; the shell-holes, the gruesome litter of blood-stained garments; all had disappeared as though by magic.
Perhaps, though, the most startling transformation was to be seen at the archway under the railway I described in a previous chapter. It was positively unrecognizable.
Everything had been cleared away. Unless you had seen it before, you would never have believed that this very commonplace tunnel for the road under the embankment, such as one sees everywhere and through which we drove without stopping, was less than a week before the elaborately fitted-up Headquarters and domicile of an Austrian General and his staff.
The store-house in which I had seen the ghastly array of human packages was now but an ordinary empty shed, the kitchen close by only a simple wooden hut, the very last place one would have expected to find an elaborate cuisine in.
To my companion this meant nothing, as it was the first time he had come this way, but I must confess to a slight feeling of disappointment that there should have been so much haste to remove all traces of Austrian Military Kultur.
I felt I should have liked to see it all again, though I suppose had I been able to, the impression would not have been the same as it was on that morning when the place had only just been vacated by the Austrians and the battlefield was, as it were, still red-hot.
There was nothing to stop for in Grafenberg, so we drove straight on till we came to a wooden bridge which brought us right into Gorizia. This was one of the bridges which had been partially destroyed on the day of the battle, but was now repaired.
With the exception of soldiers, the streets were deserted; there was not a civilian to be seen anywhere, and the shops were still closed, the inhabitants, it appeared, only being allowed out of doors a few hours during the daytime. I think it was for two hours in the morning, and the same in the afternoon; after dark no inhabitant was allowed in the streets under any pretext. This system saved a lot of difficult policing, and gave the troops greater freedom of movement.
We found that two cafés were open now, the “Grosses” and another next to the Theatre, but they were practically deserted. Coffee was about all you could get to drink; wine and beer being quite out of the question, and food also, as we discovered later.