As regards the spirits of the Alpini, song is a barometer; as regards
their health, a thermometer. An experienced officer will judge the
mental or physical condition of one of his men by noting the way he is
singing, or refraining from singing, just as a man determines his
dog’s condition by feeling its nose to see if it is hot or cold. I
remember standing for a half-hour on the wind-swept summit of a lofty
Trentino pass with a distinguished major-general who had taken me out
that afternoon in his little mountain-climbing motor to give me an
idea of how the winter road was kept clear in a blizzard. The wind was
driving through the notch of the pass at fifty miles an hour; the air
was stiff with falling and drifting snow; and it was through the
narrowed holes in our _capuchos_ that we watched a battalion filing by
on its way from the front-line trenches to the plains for a spell of
rest in billets. Packs and cloaks were crusted an inch thick with
frozen snow, eyebrows were frosted, beards and moustaches icicled;
but, man after man (though sometimes, as a wind-blast swallowed the
sound, one could only guess it by the rhythmically moving lips), they
marched singing. Now and then, as the drifts permitted, they marched
in lusty choruses of twos and threes; but for the most part each man
was warbling on his own, many of them probably simply humming
improvisations, giving vocal expression to their thoughts.
Suddenly the general stepped forward and, tapping sharply with his
Alpenstock on the ice-stiff skirt of one of the marchers, brought him
to a halt. The frost-rimmed haloes fringing the puckered apertures in
the two hoods came close together and there was a quick interchange of
question and answer between wind-muffled mouths. Then, with a clumsy
pat of admonition, the general shoved the man back into the passing
line.
“That boy wasn’t singing,” he roared into my ear in response to my
look of interrogation as he stepped back into the drift beside me.
“Knew something was wrong, so stopped him and asked what. Said he got
thirsty--ate raw snow--made throat sore. Told him it served him quite
right--an Arab from Tripoli would know better’n to eat snow.”
Three or four times more in the quarter-hour that elapsed before the
heightening storm drove us to the shelter of a _rifugio_ the general
stopped men whose face or bearing implied that there was no song on
their lips or in their hearts, and in each instance it transpired that
something was wrong. One man confessed to having discarded his flannel
abdominal bandage a couple of days before, and was developing a severe
case of dysentery as a perfectly natural consequence of the chill
which followed; another had just been kicked by a passing mule; and a
third had received word that morning that his newly-born child was
dead and its mother dangerously ill. The two former were shoved none
too gently back into line with what appeared to be the regulation
prescription in such cases: “Serves you right for your carelessness”;
but I thought I saw a note slipped into the third man’s hand as the
general pressed it in sympathy and promised to see that leave should
be arranged for at once.
I was no less struck by the efficacy of this novel system of diagnosis
than by the illuminative example its workings presented of the
paternal attitude of even the highest of the Alpini officers toward
the least of the men under them.
But it is not only the buoyant Alpini who pour out their souls in
song. The Italian soldier, no matter from what part of the country he
comes or on what sector of the front he is stationed, can no more work
or fight without singing than he can without eating. Indeed, a popular
song that is heard all along the front relates how, for some reason or
other, an order went out to the army that there was to be no more
singing in the trenches, and how a soldier, protesting to his officer,
exclaimed, “But, captain, if I cannot sing I shall die of sadness; and
surely it is better that I should die fighting the enemy than that I
should expire of a broken heart!”
On many a drizzly winter morning, motoring past the painted Sicilian
carts which form so important a feature of the Italian transport on
the broken hills of the Isonzo front, I noted with sheer astonishment
that the drivers were far and away likelier to be singing than
swearing at the mules. To one who has driven mules, or even lived in a
country where mules are driven, I shall not need to advance any
further evidence of the Sicilian soldier’s love of song.
And on that stony trench-torn plateau of the Carso, where men live in
caverns under the earth and where the casualties are multiplied two-
or three-fold by the fragments of explosive-shattered rock; even
there, on this deadliest and most repulsive of all the battle-fronts
of Armageddon, the lilting melodies of sunny southern Italy,
punctuated, but never for long interrupted, by the shriek and
detonation of Austrian shells, are heard on every hand.
There was a trio of blithe rock-breakers that furnished me with one of
the most grimly amusing impressions of my visit. It was toward the end
of December, and Captain P----, the indefatigable young officer who
had me in charge, arranged a special treat in the form of a visit to a
magnificent observation-post on the brink of a hill which the Italians
had wrested from the Austrians in one of their late advances. We
picked our way across some miles of this shell-churned and still
uncleared battlefield, and ate our lunch of sandwiches on the parapet
of a trench from which one could follow, with only a few breaks, the
course of the Austrian lines in the hills beyond Gorizia, to where
they melted into the marshes fringing the sea.
“There’s only one objection to this vantage-point,” remarked the
captain, directing his glass along the lower fringe of the clouds that
hung low on the opposite hills. “Unless the weather is fairly thick
one is under the direct observation of the Austrians over there for
close to an hour, both going and coming. It would hardly be pleasant
to come up here if the visibility were really good.”
And at that psychological moment the clouds began to lift, the sun
came out, and, taking advantage of the first good gunnery weather that
had offered for a long time, the artillery of both sides opened up for
as lively a bit of practice as any really sober-minded individual
could care to be mixed up with. I have seen quieter intervals on the
Somme, even during a period when the attack was being sharply pushed.
A hulking “305,” which swooped down and obliterated a spiny pinnacle
of the ridge a few hundred yards farther along, also swept much of the
zest out of the sharpening panorama, and signalled, “Time to go!” A
large-calibre high-explosive shell is a far more fearsome thing when
rending a crater in the rock of the Carso than when tossing the soft
mud of France.
Work was still going on in the half-sheltered _dolinas_ or
“sink-holes” that pock-marked the grisly plateau; but on the remains
of a cart-road which we followed, and which appeared to be the special
object of the Austrians’ diversion, none seemed to be in sight save a
few scattered individuals actively engaged in getting out of sight. It
was an illuminating example of the way most of the “natives” appeared
to feel about the situation, and we did not saunter any the more
leisurely for having had the benefit of it.
We stepped around the riven body of a horse that still steamed from
the dying warmth of the inert flesh, and a little farther on, there
was a red puddle in the middle of the road, a black, lazily smoking
shell-hole close beside it, with a crisply fresh mound of sod and rock
fragment just beyond. A hammer and a dented trench helmet indicated
that the man had been cracking up stone for the road when _his_ had
come.
“One would imagine that they had enough broken stone around here
already,” observed Captain P---- dryly, glancing back over his
shoulder to where a fresh covey of bursting shell was making the
sky-line of the stone wall behind us look like a hedge of pampas
plumes in a high wind. “Hope the rest of these poor fellows have taken
to their holes. A little dose like we’re getting here is only a good
appetiser; to stick it out as a steady diet is quite another matter.”
Half a minute later we rounded a bend in the stone wall we had been
hugging, to come full upon what I have always since thought of as the
Anvil Chorus--three men cracking rock to metal the surface of a
recently filled shell-hole in the road and singing a lusty song to
which they kept time with the rhythmic strokes of their hammers.
Dumped off in a heap at one side of the road was what may have been
the hastily jettisoned cargo of a half-dozen motor-lorries, which had
pussy-footed up there under cover of darkness--several hundred
trench-bombs, containing among them enough explosive to have lifted
the whole mountain-side off into the valley had a shell chanced to
nose-dive into their midst. Two of these stubby little “winged
victories” a couple of the singers had appropriated as work-stools.
The third of them sat on the remains of a “dud 305,” from a broad
crack in which a tiny stream of rain-dissolved high explosive
trickled out to form a gay saffron pool about his feet. This
one was bareheaded, his trench helmet, full of nuts and dried
figs,--evidently from a Christmas package,--lying on the ground within
reach of all three men.
The sharp roar of the quickening Italian artillery, the deeper booms
of the exploding Austrian shells, and the siren-like crescendo of the
flying projectiles so filled the air, that it was not until one was
almost opposite the merry trio that he could catch the fascinating
swing of the iterated refrain.
“A fine song to dance to, that!” remarked Captain P----, stopping and
swinging his shoulders to the time of the air. “You can almost _feel_
the beat of it.”
“It strikes me as being still better as a song to march to,” I
rejoined meaningly, settling down my helmet over the back of my neck
and suiting the action to the word. “It’s undoubtedly a fine song, but
it doesn’t seem to me quite right to tempt a kind Providence by
lingering near this young mountain of trench-bombs any longer than is
strictly necessary. If that Austrian battery ‘lifts’ another notch,
something else is going to lift here, and I’d much rather go down to
the valley on my feet than riding on a trench-bomb.”
The roar of the artillery battle flared up and died down by spells,
but the steady throb of the Anvil Chorus followed us down the wind
for some minutes after another bend in the stone wall cut off our view
of the singers. How often I have wondered which ones of that careless
trio survived that day, or the next, or the one after that; which, if
any, of them is still beating time on the red-brown rocks of the Carso
to the air of that haunting refrain!
I was told that the wounded are sometimes located on the battlefield
by their singing; that they not infrequently sing while being borne in
on stretchers or transported in ambulances. I had no chance to observe
personally instances of this kind, but I did hear, time and time
again, men singing in the hospitals, and they were not all
convalescents or lightly wounded either. One brave little fellow in
that fine British hospital on the Isonzo front, conducted with such
conspicuous success by the British Red Cross, I shall never forget.
An explosive bullet had carried away all four fingers of his right
hand, leaving behind it an infection which had run into gaseous
gangrene. The stump swelled to a hideous mass, about the shape and
size of a ten-pound ham, but the doctors were fighting amputation in
the hope of saving the wrist and thumb, to have something to which
artificial members might be attached. The crisis was over at the time
I visited the hospital, but the whole arm was still so inflamed that
the plucky lad had to close his eyes and set his teeth to keep from
crying out with agony as the matron lifted the stump to show me the
“beautiful healthy red colour” where healing had begun.
The matron had some “splendid” trench-foot cases to show me farther
along, and these, with some interesting experiments in disinfection by
“irrigation,” were engrossing my attention, when a sort of a crooning
hum caused me to turn and look at the patient in the bed behind me. It
was the “gaseous gangrene” boy again. We had worked down the next row
till we were opposite him once more, and in the quarter-hour which had
elapsed his nurse had set a basin of disinfectant on his bed in which
to bathe his wound. Into this she had lifted the hideously swollen
stump and hurried on to her next patient. And there he lay, swaying
the repulsive mass of mortified flesh that was still a part of him
back and forth in the healing liquid, the while he crooned a little
song to it as a mother rocks her child to sleep as she sings a
lullaby.
“He always does that,” said the nurse, stopping for a moment with her
hands full of bandages. “He says it helps him to forget the pain. And
there are five or six others: the worse they feel, the more likely
they are to try to sing as a sort of diversion. That big chap over
there with the beard,--he’s a fisherman from somewhere in the
South,--he says that when the shooting pains begin in his frozen feet
he has to sing to keep from cursing. Says he doesn’t want to curse
before the _forestiere_ if it can possibly be helped.”
* * * * *
On one of my last days on the Italian front I climbed to a
shell-splintered peak of the Trentino under the guidance of the son of
a famous general, a Mercury-footed flame of a lad who was aide-de-camp
to the division commander of that sector. Mounting by an interminable
_teleferica_ from just above one of the half-ruined towns left behind
by the retreating Austrians after their drive of last spring, we
threaded a couple of miles of steep zigzagging trail, climbed a
hundred feet of ladder and about the same distance of rocky
toe-holds,--the latter by means of a knotted rope and occasional
friendly iron spikes,--finally to come out on the summit, with nothing
between us and an almost precisely similar Austrian position opposite
but a half-mile of thin air and the overturned, shrapnel-pitted statue
of a saint--doubtless erected in happier days by the pious
inhabitants of ---- as an emblem of peace and goodwill. An Italian
youth who had returned from New York to fight for his country--he had
charge of some kind of mechanical installation in a rock-gallery a few
hundred feet beneath our feet--climbed up with us to act as
interpreter.
To one peering through the crook in the lead-sheathed elbow of the
fallen statue, the roughly squared openings of the rock galleries
which sheltered an enemy battery seemed well within fair revolver
shot; and, indeed, an Alpino sharpshooter had made a careless Austrian
gunner pay the inevitable penalty of carelessness only an hour or two
before. One could make one’s voice carry across without half an
effort.
Just before we started to descend my young guide made a megaphone of
his hands, threw his head back, his chest out, and, directing his
voice across the seemingly bottomless gulf that separated us from the
enemy, sang a few bars of what I took to be a stirring battle-song.
“What is the song the captain sings?” I asked of the New-York-bred
youth, whose head was just disappearing over the edge of the cliff as
he began to lower himself down the rope. “Something from _William
Tell_, isn’t it?”
Young “Mulberry Street” dug hard for a toe-hold, found it, slipped
his right hand up till it closed on a comfortable knot above his head,
and then, with left leg and left arm swinging free over a 200-foot
drop to the terraces below, shouted back,--
“Not on yer life, mista. De capitan he not singa no song. He just
tella de Ostrichun datta Italia, she ready fer him. Datta all.”
I looked down to the valley where line after line of trenches, fronted
with a furry brown fringe that I knew to be rusting barbed wire,
stretched out of sight over the divides on either hand, and where, for
every gray-black geyser of smoke that marked the bursting of an
Austrian shell, a half-dozen vivid flame-spurts, flashing out from
unguessed caverns on the mountain-side, told that the compliment was
being returned with heavy interest.
“Yes, Italy is ready for them,” I thought; and whether she has to hold
here and there--as she may--in defence, or whether she goes forward
all along the line in triumphant offence--whichever it is, the Italian
soldier will go out to the battle with a song on his lips, a song that
no bullet which leaves the blood pulsing through his veins and breath
in his lungs will have power to stop.