Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard to realize the fact of war in Italy, to remember that just over the low line of the Lido the hostile fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic, that a few miles to the north the attack had begun all along the twisting frontier, that the first caravan of the wounded had started for Padua. As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact, to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation of the ages of the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal destruction. Venice rose from the green sea water like the city of enchantment that Turner so often painted. Venice was never so lovely, so wholly the palace of enchantment as she was then, stripped of all the tourist triviality and vulgarity that she usually endures at this season. It was Venice left to her ancient self in this hour of her danger. She was like a marvelous, fragile, still beautiful great lady, so delicate that the least violence might kill her! In this dying light of the day she was already something unearthly, on the extreme marge of our modern world....
That evening the restaurant windows were covered tight with shutters and heavy screens before the doors. The waiter put a candle in a saucer before your plate and you ate your food in this wavering light. There was not the usual temptation to linger in the piazza after dinner, for the cafés were all sealed against a betraying gleam of light and the Venetian public had taken to heart the posted advice to stay within doors and draw their wooden shutters. As I entered my room, the moon was rising behind the Salute, throwing its light across the Canal on to the walls of the palaces opposite. The soft night was full of murmuring voices, for Venice is the most vocal of cities. The people were exchanging views across their waterways from darkened house to house, speculating on the chances of another aerial raid tonight. They were making salty jokes about their enemies in the Venetian manner. The moonlight illuminated the broad waterway beneath my window with its shuttered palaces as if it were already day. A solitary gondola came around the bend of the Canal and its boatman began to sing one of the familiar songs that once was bawled from illuminated barges on spring nights like this, for the benefit of the tourists in the hotels. To-night he was singing it for himself, because of the soft radiance of the night, because of Venice. His song rose from the silver ripple of the waves below, and in the little garden behind the nightingale began to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of this morning and opened his heart in the old way to the moonlight May night and to Venice?