I
There was something just a bit ominous in the brooding warmth of the
soft air that was stirring at the base of the towering cliffs of the
Marmolada, where I took the _teleferica_; and the tossing aigrettes of
wind-driven snow at the lip of the pass where the cable-line ended in
the lee of a rock just under the Italian first-line trenches signalled
the reason why. The vanguard of one of those irresponsible mavericks
of mountain storms that so delight to bustle about and take advantage
of the fine weather to make surprise attacks on the Alpine sky-line
outposts was sneaking over from the Austrian side; and somewhere up
there where the tenuous wire of the _teleferica_ fined down and merged
into the amorphous mass of the cliff behind, my little car was going
to run into it.
“A good ten minutes to snug down in, anyhow,” I said to myself. And
after the fashion of the South Sea skipper who shortens sail and
battens down the hatches with his weather eye on the squall roaring
down from windward, I tucked in the loose ends of the rugs about my
feet, rolled up the high fur collar of my _Alpinio_ coat, and buttoned
the tab across my nose.
But things were developing faster than I had calculated. As the little
wire basket glided out of the cut in the forty-foot drift that had
encroached on its aerial right-of-way where the supporting
cables cleared a jutting crag, I saw that it was not only an
open-and-above-board frontal attack that I had to reckon with, but
also a craftily-planned flank movement quite in keeping with the fact
that the whole affair, lock, stock, and barrel, was a “Made in
Austria” product. Swift-driven little shafts of blown snow, that tried
hard to keep their plumes from tossing above the sheltering
rock-pinnacles, were wriggling over between the little peaks on both
sides of the pass and slipping down to launch themselves in flank
attack along the narrowing valley traversed by the _teleferica_ and
the zigzagging trail up to the Italian positions. Even as I watched,
one of them came into position to strike, and straight out over the
ice-cap covering the brow of a cliff shot a clean-lined wedge of
palpable, solid whiteness.
One instant my face was laved in the moist air-current drawing up from
the wooded lower valley, where the warm fingers of the thaw were
pressing close on the hair-poised triggers of the ready-cocked
avalanches; the next I was gasping in a blast of Arctic frigidity as
the points of the blown ice-needles tingled in my protesting lungs
with the sting of hastily-gulped champagne. Through frost-rimmed
eyelashes I had just time to see a score of similar shafts leap out
and go charging down into the bottom of the valley, before the main
front of the storm came roaring along, and heights and hollows were
masked by swishing veils of translucent white. In the space of a few
seconds an amphitheatre of soaring mountain peaks roofed with a vault
of deep purple sky had resolved itself into a gusty gulf of spinning
snow blasts.
My little wire basket swung giddily to one side as the first gust
drove into it, promptly to swing back again, after the manner of a
pendulum, when the air-buffer was undermined by a counter-gust and
fell away; but the deeply grooved wheel was never near to jumping off
the supporting cable, and the even throb of the distant engine coming
down the pulling wire felt like a kindly hand-pat of reassurance.
“Good old _teleferica_!” I said half aloud, raising myself on one
elbow and looking over the side: “you’re as comfy and safe as a
passenger lift and as thrilling as an aeroplane. But”--as the picture
of a line of ant-like figures I had noted toiling up the snowy slope a
few moments before flashed to my mind--“what happens to a man on his
feet--a man not being yanked along out of trouble by an engine on the
end of a nice strong cable--when he’s caught in a maelstrom like that?
What must be happening to those poor Alpini? Whatever can they be
doing?”
And even before the clinging insistence of the warm breeze from the
lower valley had checked the impetuosity of the invader, and diverted
him, a cringing captive, to baiting avalanches with what was left of
his strength, I had my answer; for it was while the ghostly draperies
of the snow-charged wind-gusts still masked the icy slope below that,
through one of those weird tricks of acoustics so common among high
mountain peaks, the flute-like notes of a man singing in a clear tenor
floated up to the ears I was just unmuffling from a furry collar:--
“Fratelli d’Itali, l’Italia, s’è desta;
Dell’ elmo di Scipio s’è cinta la testa!”
It was the “Inno di Mameli,” the Song of 1848--the Marseillaise of the
Italians. I recognised it instantly, because, an hour previously my
hosts at luncheon in the officers’ mess below had been playing it on
the gramophone. Clear and silvery, like freshly minted coins made
vocal, the stirring words winged up through the pulsing air till the
“sound chute” by which they had found their way was broken up by the
milling currents of the dying storm. But I knew that the Alpini were
still singing,--that they had been singing all the time, indeed,--and
when the last of the snow-flurries was finally lapped up by the warm
wind, there they were, just as I expected to find them, pressing
onwards and upwards under their burdens of soup-cans, wine-bottles,
stove-wood, blankets, munitions, and the thousand and one other things
that must pass up the life-line of a body of soldiers holding a
mountain pass in midwinter.