Chapter Twenty.
A Message from the Herrengasse.
I have here put into narrative form a number of astonishing facts taken from information read and testimony given at the court-martial subsequently held upon the guilty parties. The facts which I assisted in establishing will, I believe, be found of considerable interest to readers as further revealing the subtle methods of the enemy.
For obvious reasons I have been compelled to disguise certain names so as not to bring eternal dishonour upon a great and noble family.
“And if I revealed the truth to your dear affectionate husband?” whispered the soft-voiced, well-dressed Italian. “What then—eh, Elena?”
“Madonna mia! No,” cried the dark-haired, handsome young woman, who sat at her tea-table in a great, elegantly furnished salon in one of those old fourteenth-century palazzi close to the port of Sarzana, the Italian naval station on the Adriatic.
It was a bright afternoon in the summer of 1916; Sarzana, the old city in Ferrara, to which I had gone with Madame Gabrielle, a lazy, sun-blanched place, with its white houses and green sun-shutters, had of late been electrified into naval activity against those hated Tedeschi, those Austrians which every Italian had been taught to hate at his mother’s knee.
Things were going well with Italy. On that day the Corriere had published a long dispatch from General Cadorna, reporting a smashing defeat of the Austrians in the Alps, and an advance in the direction of Trieste. The whole kingdom of Italy, from Ravenna to Reggio, was in a state of highest enthusiasm, and in Sarzana the excited populace were agog in the cafés and in the narrow, old-world streets.