Your excellency will please to note that, commissioned by his highness the King of Spain, I set out with two small ships, on May 18, 1499, on a voyage of discovery to the southwest, by way of the great ocean, and steered my course along the coast of Africa, until I reached the Fortunate Islands, which are now called the Canaries. Three of these designs he had effected before the death of Alexander, and had made every necessary arrangement for availing himself of the fourth. At Mestre, the junction for the Front, all the Italian officers got out, and I went on to Venice. But in this first month I was lucky in being able to multiply and vary my impressions of the Eastern Veneto. We fed and put up for the night an Italian officer, whose Battery used to be here, but had moved north yesterday. I heard this from a gunner, who was officer's servant to one of the Staff and witnessed the scene. With the tractor and guns were Winterton, Darrell, and Leary, also the Battery Quartermaster Sergeant and two of our lorries. That morning, he said, he had heard General Pettiti, who was our Army Corps Commander, give the order that all the British Batteries must first be got across the river and only then the Italian. This had been selected as the Base for the British Forces in Italy, and I was to get in touch with the Ordnance people there, to give them a list of our really urgent requirements and try to hasten their delivery, so as to get us back into action as soon as possible. My only pleasant recollection of Ascot where can i get my free annual credit report that once, about midnight, as we were keeping watch together, a young Italian gunner from the Romagna sang to me.
The roadside was dusty, but along all the hedges the acacias still showed a most delicate and tender green. They look very ornamental in their new coats of credit and with a high polish on their unpainted metal parts. And then my steps went back in fancy to the battlefields, where our guns had been in action.