It is just daybreak, and we are going through the Strait of Messina. At our side, instead of the French cruiser, which has left us upon our entering Italian territorial waters, is now the imposing mass of an Italian warship, the Vittor Pisani, anchored in the bay.
On the Sicilian coast Messina smiles, surrounded by woods of oranges loaded with golden fruit. After the terrible catastrophe of four years ago, the former monumental town has assumed the quiet, modest, village-like look of a Japanese seaport.
How far removed we are from those moments when the brute forces of Nature made all nations on earth meet here to relieve the sorrow of the stricken country in the noblest of competitions, and gave the world the momentary illusion of a wide sense of brotherhood amongst all peoples.
Still, even now, by the side of the Union Jack which floats over the English relief-fund building, the tricolour of Germany waves to the morning breeze.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Where I had the fortune to come across the man who had never heard of the war.
CHAPTER V MY SECOND WAR-TIME VISIT TO BERLIN
December 22.