were removed at that time from their pedestals above the main entrance to the church, and stabled under an archway on the ground floor of the Doges' Palace. When the new peril came with the invasion, however, they were conveyed by a battleship to a safer refuge in Rome. The precious equestrian statue of Colleoni, so much admired by Ruskin, with other treasures familiar to the tourist, also has been removed to a place of security. The bells of St. Mark's campanile and those of every church in the city have been taken away.
By the first weeks of 1918 the population had shrunk to less than 60,000, and at night one could walk through miles and miles of stilled and empty streets, darkened against the peril of air raids, or could travel by gondola along lonely canals rippled only by the Winter wind, with the cold moonlight silvering a deserted fairyland. Two months later the population was further reduced by sending away 20,000 women, children, and old men with a view to eliminating useless mouths to feed and preventing unnecessary slaughter. By that time Austro-German ingenuity had invented a new system of dropping bombs; instead of scattering them over the city the missiles were grouped in large numbers in a very limited space so that the destruction on that area was complete.
LIKE A DEAD CITY
An English war correspondent who visited Venice in the Winter drew this word picture:
"Shuttered palaces face each other across silent canals. A footstep ringing down those narrow alleys, which are like deep, dark slits in a close-crowded mass of many-storied houses, starts echoes that die undisturbed away. The black gondola glides through a dead city more beautiful in the silence and stillness of this war trance of hers than ever in the fullness of her vivacious life. At each corner of the narrow water lane the white-haired gondolier raises his mournful cry, but by long habit, for he knows that no answer will ring out from beyond the angle of the dark stone wall, and no tapering prow glide out to be avoided by a turn of his skillful oar.
"The Grand Canal is a green and gleaming vista of desertion. The scream of seagulls, beating its tranquil surface with their wings, is the only sound that disturbs the quiet of its reverie. A pleasing melancholy invests the deserted quays, and in remote corners of little lost canals you can almost hear the whispering of innumerable spirits of the Venice of long ago who have been drawn back to their old home by this strange peace that lies upon the city.
"Venice, without tourists, without guides, without postcard sellers and hotel touts, is a close preserve of beauty for the few who have the fortune to be here. The atmosphere and the dignity of the days when she was a ruling city are here as they have never been before in modern times, nor ever will be again."
THE WORST AIR RAID
The greatest air raid of all the forty-five which Venice had endured since the war's beginning was that of the night of Feb. 26-27, 1918. It lasted eight hours—from 10:20 to 6:15 A. M.—and there was not a single interval of more than half an hour during all that time of brilliant moonlight in which bombs were not falling on the city. There were 300 in all. Thirty-eight houses were smashed, the Royal Palace was struck, one wing of an old people's home was blown to pieces, and three churches were damaged, including that of St. Chrysostom, in which an altar with one of Cellini's last landscapes was wrecked. Fifteen bombs fell near the Doges' Palace, one barely missing the Bridge of Sighs and falling into the narrow canal which it spans. Ten bombs fell around the Rialto Bridge. About fifteen civilians were wounded seriously, including two women. Only one man was killed, thanks to the promptness with which the Venetians now take shelter.
According to the official account at least fifty airplanes took part in the raid, and some of these returned again and again, bringing fresh cargoes of bombs throughout the night. The Austrian lines are so near that the trip to the bomb bases and back again requires only twenty-five minutes, and this was the average length of the intervals between the bombardments. G. Ward Price, a war correspondent, in describing the experiences of that night, wrote: