But the phase of my visit which I enjoyed the most was when Admiral Piazza took us across the bay, on a Detroit-built submarine-chaser, to a Franciscan monastery dating from the fifteenth century. We were met by the abbot at the water-stairs, and, after being shown the beautiful Venetian Gothic cloisters, with alabaster columns whose carving was almost lacelike in its delicate tracery, we were led along a wooded path beside the sea, over a carpet of pine-needles, to a cloistered rose-garden, in which stood, amid a bower of blossoms, a blue and white statue of the Virgin. The fragrance of the flowers in the little enclosure was like the incense in a church, above our heads the great pines formed a canopy of green, and the music was furnished by the birds and the murmuring sea. Here we seemed a world away from the waiting armies and the great gray battleships, from the quarrels of Latin and Slav. It was the first real peace that I had known after five years of war, and I should have liked to remain there longer. But Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, all the unhappy, war-torn lands of the Near East lay before me, and I turned reluctantly away. But my thoughts keep harking back to the little town beside the turquoise bay, to the restfulness of its old, old buildings, to the perfume of its flowers, and the whispering voice of its turquoise sea. So some day, when the world is really at peace and there are no more wars to write about, I think that I shall go back to where
"Far, far from here, The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay Among the green Illyrian hills."
We stood on the forward deck of the _Sirio_ as she slipped southward, through the placid waters of the Adriatic, at twenty knots an hour. Less than a league away the Balkan mountains, savage, mysterious, forbidding, rose in a rocky rampart against the eastern sky.
"Did it ever occur to you," remarked the Italian officer who stood beside me, a noted historian in his own land, "that four great empires have died as a result of their lust for domination over the wretched lands which lie beyond those mountains? Austria coveted Serbia--and the empire of the Hapsburgs is in fragments now. Russia, seeing her influence in the peninsula imperiled, hastened to the support of her fellow Slavs--but Russia has gone down in red ruin, and the Romanoffs are dead. Germany, seeking a gateway to the warm water, and a highway to the East, seized on the excuse thus offered to launch her waiting armies--and the empire reared by the Hohenzollerns is bankrupt and broken. Turkey fought to retain her hold on such European territory as still remained under the crescent banner. To-day a postmortem is about to be held on the Turkish Empire and the House of Osman. Think of it! Four great empires, four ancient dynasties, lie buried over there in the Balkans. It is something more than a range of mountains at which we are looking; it is the wall of a cemetery."