Austria fought literally till she was all in. When we were being brought down in the ambulance we passed many batches of prisoners without guards who had come over in the hope of securing at least a prisoners ration of food. Some of them were driving carts and wagons drawn by the shadows of horses or mules. Honestly I have never seen horses in such a stage of starvation. The skinniest cab horses that you could imagine had nothing in it with these. It is pathetic to see half-starved prisoners lining the roads but to see a procession of wholly starved horses just managing to get along under the guard of a huge prancing British cavalry horse in the primest of condition is much more pathetic. I collected a number of souvenirs but owing to my illness I have left them all in various places between here and the Tagliamento and my hopes of seeing them again are pretty slim. When the Austrians captured the Venetian plain they issued a paper currency neither Italian nor Austrian but good only in the conquered provinces. I was carrying a Besagliere soldier one day and he produced a whole roll of these notes from 1 to 20 lire. I asked him where he had gotten them and he very expressively pointed to his bayonet at his side and I was left to infer how some poor Austrian soldiers had been intimidated. All the Austrian trucks have iron wheels owing to the scarcity of rubber but there weren't many left behind for us to see what they were like. Only a few that broke down and most of them were burnt. We captured some Austrian gasoline and of all the awful stuff that we ever used it was the worst. Some of the cars absolutely refused to run on it and those that it did didn't act very healthily.