“Jolly good work, I call that, for a ‘basket on a string,’” was the
way a visiting British officer characterised an exploit of the
Italians in the course of which--in lieu of any other way of doing
it--they had shot the end of a cable from a gun across a flooded river
and thus made it possible to rig up a _teleferica_ for rushing over
some badly-needed reinforcements.
The name is not a high-sounding one, but I do not know of any other
which so well describes the wonderful contrivance which played so
important a part in enabling the Italians to hold successfully their
three hundred miles and more of high Alpine front during the first two
years they were in the war. And in this connection it should be borne
well in mind that the Austrians never were able to break through upon
the Alpine front, where--until the _débâcle_ upon the Upper
Isonzo--the Italians, peak by peak, valley by valley, were slowly but
surely pushing the enemy backward all along the line. Nor should it be
forgotten that up to the very last the Alpini had their traditional
foe mastered along all that hundred and fifty miles of sky-line
positions--from the Carnic Alps, through the Dolomites to the
Trentino--which ultimately had to be abandoned only because their rear
was threatened by the Austro-German advance along the Friulian plain
from the Isonzo. The loss of this line under these conditions,
therefore, detracts no whit from the magnificent military skill and
heroism by which they were won and held.
The Italians’ conduct of their Alpine campaign must remain a supreme
classic of mountain warfare--something which has never been approached
in the past and may never be equalled in the future. According to the
most approved pre-war strategy, the proper way to defend mountain
lines was by implanting guns on the heights commanding the main passes
and thus rendering it impossible for an enemy to traverse them. The
fact that these commanding positions were in turn dominated by still
higher ones, and these latter by others, until the loftiest summits of
the Alps were reached, was responsible for the struggle for the
“sky-line” positions which the Austro-Italian war quickly resolved
itself into.
This kind of war would have been a sheer impossibility two decades
ago, from the simple fact that no practicable means of transport
existed capable of carrying men, munitions, guns and food up to
continuous lines of positions from ten thousand to thirteen thousand
feet above sea-level. The one thing that made the feat possible was
the development of the aerial tramway, or the _teleferica_, as the
Italians call it, which gave transport facilities to points where the
foot of man had scarcely trod before. Regular communication with the
highest mountain-top positions would have been absolutely out of the
question without this ingenious device.
As I have said, the “basket-on-a-string” description fits the
_teleferica_ exactly, for the principle is precisely similar to that
of the contrivance by which packages are shunted around in the large
stores and factories. The only points which differentiate it in the
least from the overhead ore-tramways is the fact that--in its latest
and highest development--it is lighter and more dependable. For the
ore-tramway--always built in a more or less protected position--had
only the steady grind of the day’s work to withstand; the _teleferica_
has not only the daily wear and tear racking it to pieces, but is also
in more or less perennial peril of destruction by flood, wind, and
avalanches, to say nothing of the fire of the enemy’s artillery or of
bombs from his aeroplanes. That the Italians have evolved a
contrivance more or less proof against the ravages of these
destructive agents is, perhaps, the best evidence of their genius for
military engineering. Nothing more perfect in its way than the
_teleferica_ has been produced by any of the belligerents.
Theoretically, a _teleferica_ can be of any length, though I think the
longest on the Italian front is one of three or four miles, which
makes a good part of the eight-thousand-foot climb up to the summit of
the Pasubio, in the Trentino, and which--at the time of writing--is
still in Italian hands. The cable may run on a level--as when it spans
some great gorge between two mountain peaks--or it may be strung up to
any incline not too great to make precarious the grip of the grooved
overhead wheels of the basket. I was not able to learn what this limit
is, but I have never seen a cable run at an angle of over forty-five
degrees. Wherever a cable does not form a single great span it has to
be supported at varying intervals by running over steel towers to
prevent its sagging too near the earth.
A _teleferica_ has never more than its two terminal stations. If the
topography of a mountain is such that a continuous cable cannot be run
the whole distance that it is desired to bridge by _teleferica_,
two--or even three or four--separate installations are built. This is
well illustrated in the ascent of the Adamello, the highest position
on the Austro-Italian front. One goes to the lower station of the
first _teleferica_ by motor, if the road is not blocked by slides. At
the upper station of this two-mile-long cableway a tramcar pulled by a
mule is taken for the journey over three or four miles of practically
level narrow-gauge railway. Leaving this, a hundred-yard walk brings
one to another _teleferica_, in the basket of which he is carried to
its upper station, on the brow of a great cliff towering a sheer three
thousand feet above the valley below. Three hundred yards farther up
another _teleferica_ begins, which lands him by the side of the frozen
lake at Rifugio Garibaldi. Three more _telefericas_--with breaks
between each--and a dog-sled journey figure in the remainder of the
climb to the glacier and summit of the Adamello.
The engine of a _teleferica_--its power varies according to the weight
and capacity of its basket and the height and length of the lift--is
always installed at the upper station. The usual provision is for two
baskets, one coming up while the other goes down. As with the
ore-tramways, however, an installation can be made--if sufficient
power is available--to carry two or three or even a greater number of
baskets. As this puts a great strain on the cableway the Italians have
only resorted to it at a few points where the pressure on the
transport is very heavy.
The two greatest enemies of the _teleferica_ are the avalanche and the
wind--the latter because it may blow the baskets off the cable, and
the former because it may carry the whole thing away. As the tracks of
snow-slides--the points at which they are most likely to occur--are
fairly well defined, it is usually possible to make a wide span across
the danger-zone with the cable and thus minimise the chance of
disaster on this score. It is only when the dread _valanga_--as
occasionally happens--is launched at some unexpected point that damage
may be done to an aerial tramway. A great slide--perhaps the worst
which has occurred on the Italian side of the lines during the
war--which came down, a mile wide, from the summit of the Tofana
_massif_ to the Dolomite road in the valley five miles below, carried
away a block of barracks and a battery of mountain guns, in addition
to burying a considerable length of _teleferica_ a hundred feet deep
in snow and _débris_. Visiting this slide in December, 1916, a few
days after it happened, I saw--at a point where a cut had been run in
an endeavour to save some of the several hundred Alpini who had been
buried--the twisted tower of the _teleferica_, inextricably mixed up
with the body of a mule and a gun-carriage and overlaid with a solid
stratum of forest trees, two miles below the point at which it had
formerly stood.
Though the number of disasters of this kind from avalanches may be
counted upon one’s fingers, trouble from high wind is always an
imminent possibility. In the early days of the _teleferica_ accidents
traceable to the blowing off of the baskets were fairly common; in
fact, it was feared for a time that the difficulty from this source
might be so great as materially to limit the usefulness of the
cableway system. The use of more deeply-grooved wheels, however, did
away with this trouble almost entirely, so that now the only menace
from the wind is when it comes from “abeam” and blows hard enough to
swing the baskets into collision when passing each other in mid-air.
Though I have had many a _teleferica_ journey that was distinctly
thrilling--what ride through the air on a swaying wire, with a torrent
or an avalanche below, and perhaps shells hurtling through the clouds
above, would not be thrilling? --I have never figured in anything
approaching an accident, and only once in an experience which might
even be described as “ticklish.” This latter occurred through my
insistence on making an ascent in a _teleferica_ on a day when there
was too much wind to allow it to operate in safety. It was on the
Adamello in the course of an ascent which I endeavoured to make toward
the end of last July.
There was a sinister turban of black clouds wrapped around the summit
of the great peak, and before we were half-way up what had only been a
cold rain in the lower valley was turning into driving sleet and snow.
We ascended by the first _teleferica_--a double one--without
difficulty, but the ominous swaying of the cables warned us that the
next line, which was more exposed, might be quite another matter. This
latter is the one I have mentioned as running from an Alpine meadow to
the brow of a cliff towering three thousand feet above it. It was one
of the longest--if not the longest--unsupported cable-spans on the
whole Alpine front. It was also the steepest of which I had had any
experience. The fact that it was exposed throughout its whole length
to a strong wind which blew down from an upper valley was responsible
for putting it “out of business” during bad weather and thus made it
the weak link in the attenuated chain of the Adamello’s
communications.
As we had feared, we found this _teleferica_ “closed down” upon our
arrival at the lower station, ample reason for which appeared in the
fifteen or twenty-foot sway given to the parallel lines of cable by
the powerful “side-on” wind gusts which assailed it every few moments
from the direction of the glacier. Fortunately, as the storm was only
coming in fitful squalls as yet and had not settled down to a steady
blow, the _tenente_ in charge thought that it might be possible to
send us up in one of the quieter intervals.
“There’s no danger of the baskets blowing off the cable,” he said;
“it’s only a matter of preventing them striking one another in
passing, of which there is always risk when the wires are swaying too
much.”
As there were three of us and the carrying capacity of the basket was
limited to two hundred kilos, it was necessary to attempt two trips.
As the heaviest of the party, it was decided that I should ride alone,
starting after the two others had gone up. Taking advantage of a brief
quiet spell, my companions were started off. There was still a good
deal of sway to the cables, but a look-out above kept the engineer
advised as to conditions as the baskets approached each other, and
the passage was made without incident. When my turn came to start,
however, the storm had settled down to a steady gale, and the
_tenente_ said he did not dare take the responsibility of trying to
send me through. Ordinarily I should have been only too ready to
acquiesce in his ruling, but as my companions had just ’phoned
word that they were going on by the next _teleferica_--a
comparatively-protected one--to the Rifugio Garibaldi, where they
would await me before starting on the following stage of the ascent, I
realised at once that my failure to appear would throw out the whole
itinerary and make the trip (which had to be finished that day or not
at all) a complete failure. It was plainly up to me to get through if
there was any way of doing it, and I accordingly suggested to the
young officer that I would gladly sign a written statement taking the
whole responsibility for an accident on my own shoulders.
“That would not help either you or me very much if things happened to
go wrong,” he said, with a laugh. “If you really must go, you must;
that is all, and we shall simply do our best not to have any trouble.
I shall send one of the linemen along with you to fend off the other
basket in case it swings into yours in passing. There is a returned
American here who ought to be able to do the job and talk to you in
your native tongue at the same time.”
And so it was arranged. I took my place--lying on my back in the
bottom of the basket--as usual, after which Antonio--grinning
delightedly at the prospect of keeping watch and ward over a
“fellow-countryman”--climbed in and knelt between my feet, facing up
the line. Then the “starter” banged three times on the cable to let
the engineer at the top know that all was ready, and presently we were
off along the singing wire.
The ordinary motion of a _teleferica_ is not unlike that of an
aeroplane--though it is not quite so smooth and vastly slower. On this
occasion, however, the swaying of the cable furnished a new sensation
which, while mildly suggestive of the sideslip of an aeroplane on a
steep “bank,” was rather more like the “yawing” of a “sausage”
observation balloon in a heavy wind. The swinging of the basket itself
was also a good deal more violent than I had ever experienced before,
though at no time great enough to make it difficult to keep one’s
place. Both motions were, of course, at their worst out toward the
middle of the span, so that one had an opportunity to get used to
them gradually in the quarter of an hour which elapsed before that
point was reached.
I took the occasion to ask Antonio a question I had been making a
point of putting to every _teleferica_ man I had a chance to talk
with. “Is it really true,” I said, “that no one has been killed since
the war began while riding in a _teleferica_?”
“A large number of men have been injured,” he replied; “but no one has
been killed outright,” and he went on to tell of a friend of his who
had coasted down a thousand feet because the pulling-cable jerked
loose from the place where it was attached to the basket when the
latter had fouled a “down” basket in passing. He was badly injured
from the jolt he received when the basket brought up short at the
bottom, and it had taken three months in the hospital to put him right
again. He would never walk again without a stick, but he was so far
from being killed that he was the engineer of the very _teleferica_ on
which we were riding. He was a very careful man, said Antonio, for he
fully understood the consequences of letting two loaded baskets bump
in mid-air.
A chill current of spray began to enfold us at this juncture, and
Antonio was just in the midst of an explanation of how it was carried
by the wind from a thousand-foot-high quarter-mile-distant waterfall
coming down behind the curtain of the lowering clouds, when I suddenly
saw him bring the point of his alpenstock over the edge of the basket
and, with his eyes fixed intently ahead, hold himself poised in an
attitude of tense readiness. Just above our heads the descending
basket was swaying to and fro in the strong wind. A collision seemed
imminent when, with a quick lunge of his alpenstock, Antonio turned it
aside, and in that fraction of a second we passed it unharmed. It had
been easy this time, explained Antonio, because the engineer at the
top had slowed down the baskets to under half-speed at the moment of
their passing.
All sorts of freight--from ducks and donkeys to shells and
cannon--have been carried by the _teleferica_, and one of the best
stories I heard on the Italian front had to do with a pig--the mascot
of a battalion of Alpini holding a lofty position on a Dolomite
glacier--which found its way up there by means of the cable. He was a
sucking-pig, and was sent up alive to be reared for the major’s
Christmas dinner, when the _teleferica_ basket in which he was
travelling got stuck in a drift which had encroached upon one of the
steel towers. Twelve hours elapsed before it was shovelled free, and
the sucking-pig, when it finally reached the top, was frozen as hard
and stiff as one of his cold-storage brothers. It was only after he
had lain in the hot kitchen for several hours that an indignant grunt
revealed the astonishing fact that his armour of fat had kept
smouldering a spark of life. They reared him on a bottle, and at the
time I saw him he was a hulking porker of two hundred pounds or more,
drawing a regular ration of his own. They called him _Tedesco_--on
account of his face and figure rather than his disposition, they
said--but all the same, I would be willing to wager that, if that
brave battalion of Alpini were able to save anything more than their
rifles and their eagle-plumes in their retreat, he was not allowed to
fall into the hands of his brother _Tedeschi_ from the other side of
the Alps.
But the most noteworthy service of the _teleferica_ is the way in
which it facilitates the handling of the wounded at points where other
ways of transporting them are either too dangerous or too slow. It was
on a sector of the upper Isonzo, where at that time the Austrians had
not yet been pushed across the river. A rather wide local attack was
on at the moment, and to care the more expeditiously for the wounded
a very remarkable little mobile ambulance--the whole equipment of
which could be taken down in the morning, packed upon seven motor
lorries, moved from fifty to a hundred miles, and be set up and ready
for work the same evening--had been pushed up many miles inside the
zone of fire to such protection as the “lee” of a high ridge afforded.
“We have found,” said the chief surgeon, “that many wounds hitherto
regarded as fatal are only so as a consequence of delay in operating
upon them. This little hospital unit, which is so complete in
equipment that it can do a limited amount of every kind of work that
any base hospital can perform, was designed for the express purpose of
giving earlier attention to wounds of this kind, principally those of
the abdomen. From the first we saved a great number of men who would
otherwise never have survived to reach the base hospitals; but even so
we found we were still losing many as a consequence of the delay that
would often arise in transporting them over some badly exposed bit of
road on which it was not deemed safe to risk ambulances or
stretcher-bearers. Then we devised a special basket for wounded, to be
run on the _teleferica_ (as you see here), with the result that we
are now saving practically every man that it is humanly possible to
save.”
While he was speaking the _teleferica_, which ended beside the tent of
the operating theatre, began to click, and presently an oblong box,
almost identical in size and shape with a coffin, appeared against the
sky-line of the ridge and began gently gliding toward us along the
sagging cable. “In that box,” continued the surgeon, “there will be a
man whose life depends upon whether or not his wound can be operated
upon within an hour or so of the time he received it. He was probably
started on his way to us within ten minutes of the time he arrived at
the advanced dressing station, and if he was not left lying out too
long the chances are we will pull him through. All up the other slope
of the ridge he came across ground that is being heavily shelled (as
you can see from the smoke and dust that are rising), but that basket
is so small a mark that the Austrians might fire all day at it without
hitting it. One of them occasionally runs into the ‘pattern’ of a
shrapnel burst (with disastrous results, of course), but the only
danger worth bothering about is of having the _teleferica_ laid up
from a shell on the engine-house or one of the supporting towers.
Although the man is probably unconscious he is coming alone, you see.
No other life, and not even an ambulance, is risked in bringing him
here. Except for the _teleferica_, he could not have been sent over
until after dark, and the delay would have been fatal. We estimate
that from one to three per cent. of the men wounded on a battlefield
which, like this one, lies so exposed that they cannot be sent back at
once by stretchers or ambulance, owe their lives directly to the
_teleferica_.”
When the cover of the basket was lifted off in the station, the body
of a man swathed in a blanket was revealed. He was unable to speak,
but a note pinned to the blanket stated that he had been struck in the
stomach with a shell fragment just outside the engine-house, and that
nothing had been done save to wrap enough gauze around his middle to
hold the riven abdomen together and bundle him into the waiting
_teleferica_ basket. “He must have been wounded not over fifteen
minutes ago, and within less than a mile in an air-line from here,”
commented the chief surgeon. “We might have heard the detonation of
the shell that did it. Five minutes one way or the other in operating
may mean the difference between life and death in a case of this kind,
and the chances are that the _teleferica_ has given us the necessary
margin.”
Before I left the hospital, an hour later, the operation was over, and
the man was resting comfortably, with every hope of recovery.
On several occasions, going up by a _teleferica_, I have passed a
little Red Cross basket going down with a _ferito_, or wounded man
(indeed, the occupant of one of these to whom I endeavoured to shout a
few words of good cheer in Italian reported below that he had been
accosted by an unmistakable _Tedesco_); but by far the queerest
passenger it was my lot to “balance” against was one I encountered
during an attempt I made to get up the Pasubio on a stormy day last
January. It was snowing at the rate of four or five inches an hour,
and the air was thick with the driving flakes, when, as a consequence
(as I learned later) of a drift being piled right up against the cable
where the latter crossed a jutting ledge, the steady “tug-tug” of the
pulling wire ceased and my basket came to a quivering standstill. I
knew that I had been approaching the halfway point, but the first
evidence I had that the “down basket” had stopped near by was a sudden
pulsing blast which cut athwart the besom of the storm and assailed my
ears like the crack o’ doom. Except that it was ten times louder than
any human being could make, it was just such a wail of agony as would
be wrung from the throat of a man who was being stretched on the rack.
Again the throbbing blast came hurtling through the storm, and this
time I noticed that, starting with a raucous bass note, it kept on
rising in a sirenic crescendo until it was suddenly broken short, as
though the air which drove it was cut off rather than exhausted.
Turning down the high collar of my storm coat, I squirmed around and
peered back over my shoulder in the direction of the “Thing of
Terror,” but only an amorphous grey shape in the line of the opposite
cable indicated the position of the other basket. It didn’t seem
possible that a two-feet-wide-by-six-feet-long wire basket could
possibly hold anything large enough to make a sound like that, and yet
the fact that the cable at this point was five hundred feet or more in
the air made it certain that the sound could come from nowhere else.
A brisk shiver was running up and down my spine as I slithered down
again in the bottom of the basket, but I told myself that it was from
the cold and set my wits to work to find a “rational” explanation of
the weird phenomenon. A great bird--perhaps an eagle--roosting on the
cable? Impossible. Nothing on wings since the time of the
“pterodactyl,” or whatever it was called, could have the lungpower
for a wail like that. A fog-horn? Not a hundred miles from the sea.
A--ah, I had it now! I told myself--gas-alarm signal out of order;
Alpino taking it down to have that broken-off note put right--playing
it for his own amusement. “What a fool I had been not to think of it
before!” I said to myself as I settled back with a sigh of relief and
an easy heart to wait for the “train to start.”
When, after a half-hour wait, punctuated at pretty regular intervals
by the wail of the “gas alert,” the gentle “tug-tug” began again, and
the basket started on its way, I pulled myself up on my elbow to give
the indefatigable serenader a hail in passing. Presently the “down”
basket, filled with some sprawling shape, took form in the hard-driven
snow, but it was not until it was almost upon me that I saw that the
nose of a donkey, stretched a foot over the side, threatened to foul
the side of my swaying car in passing. The vigorous punch of my
mittened fist with which I fended it clear set another of those
air-shivering blasts going, and I had just time to see, before the
curtain of the snow dimmed down and swallowed up the fantastic sight,
that the sudden cut-off I noticed at the end was caused by the
swelling windpipe being brought into sharp contact with the side of
the basket as the beast’s neck was stretched out to establish the
proper air columns to form the sirenic higher notes.
The donkey, they told me in the engine-house at the top, had colic
from eating fresh snow on top of the contents of a box of dried figs
he had broached, and they had tied his legs and sent him down on his
way to the “Blue Cross” hospital to be put right. He was a plains
donkey, and didn’t have good “Alpine sense,” else they would have
driven him down by the path on his own legs. If they had known that a
guest was coming up, however, they said, they wouldn’t have sent down
an ass in the _teleferica_. It wasn’t quite safe for either passenger
on account of the way the animal sprawled. The last donkey they had
sent down got his hind legs tangled in a load of firewood that was
coming up, and they had lost a good deal of the precious fuel at a
time when they were at the bottom of their pile, with a storm coming
on. The “up” car always got the worst of a collision, but if they were
only warned that anyone of importance was coming, they took great care
that there shouldn’t be any collision. No one ever got much hurt on a
_teleferica_, anyhow.
It seems to be a plain fact that no man has yet lost his life on the
Italian front as a consequence of riding in a _teleferica_. Many have
been killed in constructing them, and even more in patrolling the
lines and keeping them in repair. Men have fallen or have jumped out
of the baskets, often from considerable heights, and men have been
brought in stiff with cold after two or three hours of exposure to a
blizzard in a stalled car. Stations and engines have been carried away
and buried, with all serving them, a hundred feet beneath an
avalanche; but in these, as well as in all other mishaps connected
with _telefericas_, inquiries which I pursued during the whole time I
spent on the Italian front failed to reveal a single instance in which
an actual passenger had lost his life. Hairbreadth escapes and rescues
I heard of by the score. The story of one of the most remarkable of
the latter was related by no less a personage than the brave and
distinguished Colonel--now General--“Peppino” Garibaldi, grandson of
the Liberator, and hero of the famous capture of the peak of the Coli
di Lano.
While I was staying with Colonel Garibaldi in the Dolomites last
winter the station of a _teleferica_ which I had been expecting to use
on the morrow in going up to the lines on the glacier of the
Marmolada was carried away by an avalanche, which also killed one of
the engineers. It was the receipt of the news of this disaster which
led my host to remark that one of the most spectacularly brave feats
he had ever heard of had been performed by an Alpino the previous
winter in connection with putting right a stalled car on this very
span of cableway which had just been destroyed.
“At this stage of the game,” said Colonel Garibaldi, who is fluent in
American idiom as a consequence of his many revolutionary campaigns in
both North and South America, “they were not grooving the wheels of
the _teleferica_ basket deeply enough, with the result that they were
occasionally blown off the cables by strong winds. So far as we could,
the carrying of passengers was suspended during blizzards, but of
course every now and then an occasion would arise when the chance had
to be taken. That was how it happened that a staff officer from the
Comando Supremo, who had never been on a _teleferica_ before, was in a
basket which was blown from the cable of the first Marmolada span at
the height of a heavy storm last March. The basket was within a couple
of hundred metres of the end of its journey when the derailment of its
two forward wheels occurred--in fact, it was a good deal nearer
‘land’ in that direction than downwards, where there was a clear drop
of three or four hundred metres on to frozen snow.
“If the air is quiet, a basket (going up, of course; the ‘down’ one
runs by gravity) with only one pair of wheels off can usually be
‘nursed’ along the cable by gentle tugs from the engine, and that was
what the engineers tried to do in this instance. The side pressure of
the wind was too strong, however, and within a metre or two the cable
wedged in beside the wheels and jammed hard. If there had not been a
man in the basket, they would simply have sped up the engine and gone
on pulling until either the basket came up or something broke. If the
former, all was well; if the latter, they picked up the pieces as soon
as the weather permitted, rushed their repairs, and started up again.
With a passenger--and especially a staff officer--to reckon with, it
was a different proposition.
“Luckily the chap kept his nerve, and between snow flurries they could
see him working hard trying to get the wheels on again. An expert
_teleferica_ lineman can, with luck, occasionally put a pair of wheels
back on the track alone; but unless one understands exactly how to
take his weight off the basket by hanging over the cable the job is
as hopeless as trying to lift yourself by your boot-straps. This chap
was anything but an expert, and, after fumbling with numbing fingers
for ten or fifteen minutes, he waved his hand with a gesture of
despair and sank back into the bottom of the heeled-over basket.
“The Alpino has lived among blizzards all his life, and is able to
figure pretty closely how much resistance is left in a man exposed to
wind and cold under any given conditions. They knew that a man tucked
in comfortably in a basket on an even keel waiting for engine repairs
is good for several times as long as one hanging on for dear life to
the sides of an apparently hopelessly stalled and half-upset basket.
Most of the men watching from the station gave the poor chap from
fifteen to twenty minutes; it was only the most optimistic who said
half an hour. In any case, there was only one thing to do--to send a
man down to the disabled basket; and a lineman who had shortly before
performed a similar feat successfully when a load of badly needed
shells was stalled on the cable volunteered to do it.
“Suspending the intrepid fellow from the cable in a hastily rigged
harness hung from a spare pair of wheels, they tied a long line round
his waist and let him coast down by gravity to the basket. The line,
paid out slowly, kept him from gaining too much momentum. The
journey--an easy feat for a man with a good head--was made without
mishap. The officer’s mind was still clear and his nerve unbroken,
but, numb with cold and on the verge of physical collapse, he was
unable to lift a finger to save himself. The most he could do was to
maintain his hold, and even that he could not be expected to do for
long.
“For some time the Alpino, still suspended in his harness, put forth
all his strength in an endeavour to lift the basket sufficiently to
allow the displaced wheels to slip back on to the cable, but there was
no way to bring enough force to bear to be of any use, and, after
nearly spilling out the man he was trying to save, he gave it up. Next
he tried to lighten the basket of the weight of the officer by passing
a couple of hitches of the bight of the line around him and tricing
him up to the cable immediately overhead. He succeeded in his
immediate end, but in doing so defeated his ultimate one. The body of
the officer swung clear of the bottom of the basket, but hung in such
a way that the Alpino could not himself get in the proper position to
lift from.
“By now it was evident to the would-be rescuer that nothing could be
accomplished unless the helpless officer were got clear of the car
entirely, and this could be effected only by changing places with him.
How the resolute fellow did it Heaven and the special providence which
always sees the Alpino through only know. They paid him out a couple
of metres more of line when they felt him tugging for it, and then
they had a snow-blurred vision of him scrambling about the tilted car
for three or four busy minutes. Finally they got the short, sharp,
double tug which was the signal he had arranged to give in the event
that he failed in his attempt and wanted to be drawn back.
“Not a little cast down over this development, they began hauling in
from the station, only to feel the more apprehension when they saw it
was a limp and apparently lifeless body that was coming up to them out
of the storm. A reassuring yodel rolled up from the misty depths at
this juncture, however, and the sharpest-eyed of them announced that
he could see his comrade ‘jack-knifed’ over the cable jerking the
basket straight. Even before the body of the swooned officer, with its
wind-blown arms and legs flopping like those of a scarecrow, was swung
on to the landing and released from its harness, the ringing bang of
a steel spanner on the cable gave the familiar signal of ‘Haul away!’
“He came up (so his captain told me later),” concluded Colonel
Garibaldi, “sitting on the rim of the basket with his eagle’s feather
rasping right along the sagging cable all the way, his hobnailed boots
drumming a tattoo on the steel bottom, and singing the Alpini marching
song in a voice that set the echoes ringing above the howling of the
storm.”
The expedient of shooting a _teleferica_ cable across an otherwise
unbridgeable space was not tried for the first time on the occasion
referred to in the opening paragraph of this chapter--when it was
resorted to in running a line across a flood-swollen river. The same
plan had been successfully followed a year previously in carrying
succour to a band of Alpini who, through the destruction of their
_teleferica_ by an avalanche, were left “marooned” on the side of a
glacier with only a few days’ supply of food and munitions. The one
path leading up to their eyrie had also been scoured away by the
slide, so that a month or more of labour would have been required to
open communications in this way. For the same reason even a longer
period would have had to elapse before the _teleferica_ could be
restored; that is, if the cable were to be carried up as when it was
first built. The mountaineering genius of the Alpini would undoubtedly
have been equal to the problem of finding their way back to safety by
letting each other down by ropes, but this would have involved the
abandonment of a position which it was vitally important to hold.
The expedient of shooting the cable up from a gun was the only one of
the many alternatives considered which promised any chance of success.
The first attempt nearly proved a “boomerang,” for the weight of the
cable deflected the chargeless six-inch shell to which it was attached
nearly sixty degrees and sent it crashing through a mule stable,
fortunately empty at the moment. A shell attached to a lighter cable
went almost equally wide of its mark; in fact, all attempts with
high-velocity guns were dismal failures, and it was not until one of
the new long-range trench-mortars was brought up that the experiment
took an encouraging turn, though success was not won until the
cable-line was displaced by a light manila rope. This was fired to its
goal--an eminence half a mile distant and a thousand feet high--at the
first shot, and afterwards served to drag up a light cable which, in
turn, dragged up the heavy one. The single-span _teleferica_ installed
at this time--quite free from the menace which had overwhelmed its
lower predecessor--was still in use when I visited this sector nine
months later.
Perhaps the most spectacular exploit ever carried out from a
_teleferica_ was that by which a troublesome nest of Austrian
machine-gunners were cleared off one of the pinnacles of the great
M---- _massif_ in the fall of 1916. At that time the lofty ridge was
divided between the Italians and Austrians. The latter had access to
one splintered pinnacle which, although there was no room to establish
a permanent position on, offered a splendid vantage from which to
observe all Italian movements in the valley beneath. The situation was
irritating enough for the Italians even when the activities of the
enemy were confined only to observation, but when he took to bringing
up a machine-gun and peppering--almost from its rear--the headquarters
of an Alpini battalion which held an important pass three thousand
feet below, it became well-nigh intolerable. What happened was related
to me some months later, when I asked the major of this battalion how
it chanced that the roof of the officers’ mess, in which we were
dining, was armoured with sheets of steel.
“Against machine-gun bullets,” was the reply; “there was a time of
accursed memory in which the enemy used to bring a gun out on a
little splinter of rock, not fifteen hundred metres from here in an
air line, and spray the whole of our little terrace with ‘dum-dums.’”
“It must have been a bit trying,” I observed. “How did you manage to
stick it?”
“By keeping out of sight as much as possible,” he replied; “that is,
until the day we went after him from the _teleferica_. After that he
left us alone until we had time to get a gun rigged up to make him
keep his distance.”
“Went after him from the _teleferica_!” I repeated, in surprise. “What
do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said,” he answered, with a smile. “We were working day
and night to excavate a gun-cavern, the fire from which would make
that troublesome position untenable for the Austrian machine-gunners.
In the meantime we had to stick it out as best we could, for the least
weakening of our force at this point would have been the signal for an
Austrian attack which might well have left them in possession of the
pass. By doing most of our moving about at night we were getting on
fairly well until, opening up at an unexpectedly early hour one
morning, they killed a good many more of us than I like to think of.
“It was at this juncture that Captain X---- over there, who had had a
bullet through his hat, came to me with a drawing in his hand, and
said that he had just figured out that, between the third and fourth
towers of the _teleferica_, there was a point from which the Austrian
machine-gun position could be enfiladed with deadly effect.
“If our position had not been really serious I should probably never
have listened to such a mad proposal. As it was, I entered into it
heart and soul. We hung the platform of the machine-gun on to the
cable at an angle which would make it easy to elevate and range on the
Austrian position above. Then--as a happy afterthought--we bent a
sheet of bullet-proof steel for a shield on the exposed side, erected
a low platform on which the gun would rest securely, and--the first
and last armoured _teleferica_ was complete. Between X---- and his
helper, the armour and the gun, the weight was about double that which
the _teleferica_ was supposed to carry, but I knew there was a wide
margin of safety allowed for, and had no misgivings on that score.
With X---- and his assistant crouched low on either side of the gun,
and with a black tarpaulin thrown loosely over the whole, she looked
as much like an ordinary load of junk going down for repairs as anyone
could wish.
“The Austrians, who had been busy for an hour peppering the zigzags of
the path up to the trenches at the lip of the pass, took no notice of
the innocent-looking load slipping down the _teleferica_. The relieved
men from above, dodging in quick rushes past the exposed stretches of
the zigzags, offered them far more exciting practice than a load of
old gear. The latter disappeared from our sight at the second tower,
reappeared at the third, and was in full view when X---- ‘unmasked’
and opened up. We could even follow the line of brown dust-spurts on
the face of the cliff as the bullets ranged upward to their mark. The
fire of the two Austrian machine-guns ceased instantly, and never
resumed. Probably the gunners were killed before ever they had a
chance to turn round their guns and reply to the sudden attack from
the air.
“After spraying the pinnacle for five minutes X---- signalled to be
drawn up. He arrived at the station to report his job finished.
Against possible further use for her, we improved our ‘aerial
dreadnought’ considerably in the next day or two, but there was never
occasion to send her into action again. When the Austrians _did_
venture up our big gun was in place, and we scoured them off the top
with high explosive.”