It was Christmas Eve, 1915, and we officers of the Royal Italian
Engineers were huddled together in a trench, doing our best, at that
chilly elevation of some seven thousand eight hundred feet, to keep
ourselves warm. Not a word had been spoken for fully a quarter of an
hour. We were all intent, in the semi-darkness of our subterranean
refuge, on the smoking of our pipes, turning over and over in our minds
meanwhile the problem which had faced us for months past.
Entrusted with the task, amidst that wilderness of mountains known as
the Dolomite Alps, of driving back the Austrians, we had been fighting
our way forward week after week, month after month. You say that you
have never done any climbing in the Dolomites? Then you can have but
a faint idea of how formidable our work was.
Imagine, since you have never been there, a seemingly endless
succession of ranges and peaks which have assumed the most
extraordinary and fantastic forms. The mountains are broken up into
every imaginable shape. Here and there they rise at a bound in the form
of slender peaks; elsewhere they assume the form of gigantic steps or
pyramids or indented crests, sometimes like a saw, at others like a
trident.
Through this land of towering, snow-clad summits, mighty gorges, rugged
precipices, and apparently bottomless abysses, into which the unwary
scout might at any moment find himself precipitated, we soldiers and
engineers of the Italian army had steadily fought our way. No one,
gazing on these summits held by our enemies, would ever have thought
it possible to dislodge them. And yet, one by one, they fell into our
hands--with the single exception of the Col di Lana, a supreme peak and
pass in the Upper Cordevole Valley which, at the altitude I have named,
commands the great highway through the Dolomites.
On this topmost peak the Austrians had found a last refuge.
Daily--almost hourly, indeed--they sent down upon us an avalanche of
boulders and hand-grenades. In spite of this we managed on one occasion
to gain a foothold, but only for a short time. A withering fire from
artillery and machine-guns, placed on the encircling heights, forced us
back to the security of our own trenches, some fifty yards below; and
there we had been, at the time my story opens, for many weeks, faced
with the eternal problem--how to dislodge the enemy from the steel-clad
crest of the mountain. Suddenly the meditative silence into which we
had fallen was broken by Don Gelasio Caetani, a young engineer who is
the son of the Duca di Sermoneta and an English lady. Well known for
his patriotism and professional ability, we knew that anything he might
have to say would be well worth listening to, so at the sound of his
voice we all looked up.
"_Ho un idéa!_" ("An idea occurs to me!") he said, slowly and
impressively. "I was day-dreaming of my native Naples and Vesuvius,"
he added. "To a Neapolitan, Vesuvius is everything. He regards it as
possessing almost a personality, endowed with life and thought. He
watches it, year after year, as I have done, and notes the changes
its form has undergone through successive eruptions. The thought of
Vesuvius gave me my idea. What do you say, _amici_, if we try and
convert the Col di Lana into an artificial volcano?"
Had Don Gelasio been other than what we knew he was--a man noted
for extreme fertility of invention and resource--we might have been
inclined to laugh at him. But we were all too well aware of his
seriousness of mind to treat his idea as an idle fancy, and as one man
we voiced a request for an explanation of the ways and means towards
the proposed end.
Don Gelasio's pencil and notebook were out in a trice and, crowding
round him, we were soon buried in the study of a sectional drawing
of the Col di Lana, with the respective positions of the invading
and invaded forces and the distance of one from the other accurately
marked. Lines and figures and calculations, as he explained the
scheme in detail, quickly covered the sides of the sketch, showing
theoretically and mathematically, whatever practice might prove, that
the scheme was feasible.
"It will be a long task," I ventured to remark, when he had come to the
end of his explanations and seemed to be waiting for our observations;
"but if it takes four months I'm your man. How long do you estimate
this tunnelling will take?"
"Not far short of the time you've named. If we can do it quicker by
putting a few extra men on to the job, all the better; but I calculate
there are three thousand feet of solid rock to be bored before we can
bring off our little surprise on the enemy. Well, my friend, then I
take it the scheme is agreed upon? We will begin to-morrow--Christmas
Day; 'the better the day the better the deed.'"
At an early hour on Christmas morning Don Gelasio Caetani and our corps
of engineers, numbering in all twenty-five, set to work to imitate
Nature--to make the long preliminary preparations for supplying the
bowels of the earth under the Col di Lana with a power similar to the
pent-up forces of an eruption.