The Italian guns were now getting busy, and the noise was deafening, but still there was no response from the enemy; it was evidently true that he worked to time, and it was not yet eleven o’clock.
Although only a mile and a half, the walk seemed longer because one could see nothing on either side, the walls of the trench being quite six feet high; but at last we came out on the bank of what looked like a broad canal. This is part of a waterway constructed to connect up the port with the railway.
The communication trench now took the form of a sunken pathway winding along the bank under the trees, and was quite picturesque in places.
At last we reached the end, and facing us was the Adriatic as calm as a lake, and away on the horizon one could see the hills that guard Trieste.
We crossed the mouth of the canal by a pontoon bridge, which I believe had been abandoned by the Austrians when they evacuated Monfalcone at the beginning of the war.
A short distance ahead, towering above a conglomeration of long sheds on the low-lying ground, was an immense red structure, the outlines of which recalled something familiar. As one got nearer one saw that it was the unfinished steel hull of a gigantic ocean liner, and that the red colouring was caused by the accumulation of rust from long exposure.
We soon reached the entrance to a vast shipbuilding establishment. There were no bolts or bars to prevent our walking in.
The whole place was deserted, and all around us was a spectacle of ruin and desolation that was more impressive than actual havoc caused by bombardment.
In the immense workshops the machinery was rotting away; on the benches lay the tools of workmen; strange metal forms, portions of the framework of big ships lay here and there on the sodden ground like huge red skeletons of ante-deluvian animals.
Many vessels had been in the course of construction, mostly for the Mercantile fleet of Austria, though there were some destroyers and war-craft on the stocks as well. Rust, of a weird intensity of colour. I had never seen before, was over everything like a strange blight.