Lewis R. Freeman

“ The “good little fellow” who sprang up from his map and report-littered desk to bid us welcome turned out to be six feet of vigorous manhood, with a powerful pair of shoulders, a face red-bronzed from the sun-glint on the snow, and a grip which fused my fingers in the galvanic pressure of its friendly clasp. The high, narrow forehead, the firm line of the mouth, the steady serious eyes—all were distinctly Garibaldian, recalling to me the words of his mother: “Ricciotti is my handsomest boy, but Peppino is the one most like the old General, his grandfather.” ”

“ The mood to talk did not seize Radovitch until after he had led me to the summit of the hill behind the Relief Camp, from which lofty vantage the eye roved eastward across a purple strait to the snow-capped peaks of Epirus and Albania, westward to where what was once the Kaiser’s villa of Achilleon stood out sharply against the sombre green of the backbone ridge of the island, northward to where its twin castles flanked to right and left the white walls and red roofs of Corfu town, and southward to the dim outlines of Leukas and Cephalonia, thinning in the violet haze of late afternoon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it still had bombs to drop its commander either had no time or no heart for the job. Never have I seen an inanimate thing typify terror—the terror that must have gripped the hearts of its palpably flustered (to judge by the airship’s movements) crew—like that staggering helpless maverick of a Zeppelin, when it finally found itself clutched in the tentacles of the searchlights of the aerial defences of London. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Presently the muffled boom of bombs fleeted to my ears, and then the sharper rattle of a sudden gust of gun-fire. This was quickly followed by a confused roar of sound, evidently from many bombs dropped simultaneously or in quick succession, and I knew that one of two things had happened—either the raider had found its mark and was delivering “rapid fire,” or the guns were making it so hot for the visitor that it had been compelled to dump its explosives and seek safety in flight. ”

“ So dead sure were those bees that our inoffensive little party was responsible for upsetting their homes that they divided themselves into just as many bands as we were men, and started, impartially and systematically, to sting us to death. My men were out of hand in an instant, and I really believe that, had not a modern miracle been wrought, another minute would have seen the whole pack of us, careless of such trifles as Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire, wallowing in the fifty-yard-distant Tigris. ”

“ The first glimmerings of sense (regarding the situation that I was going to have to face as a prisoner of war in Germany) was let into my rather thick head by the blow it got from that rifle-butt; the rest—enough to start me on the right course, at least—filtered in during my two weeks of solitary confinement on bread and water. I was of no use to myself or any one else in a German prison camp, I told myself. I had no chance there either to kill Huns or destroy Hun property. ”

“ THE GARIBALDI FIGHT AGAIN FOR FREEDOM
Once or twice in every winter a thick, sticky, hot wind from somewhere on the other side of the Mediterranean breathes upon the snow and ice-locked Alpine valleys the breath of a false springtime. The Swiss guides, if I remember correctly, call it by a name which is pronounced nearly as we do the word “fun”; but the incidence of such a wind means to them anything but what that signifies in English. To them—to all in the Alps, indeed—a spell of fun weather means thaw, and thaw means avalanches ”

“ The whole universe seemed to have resolved itself into one mighty roar, and I distinctly recall that the mainsail halyard by which I steadied myself vibrated to the beat of the pulsating grind from above. For a moment—sensing rather than seeing—I was aware of a great black bulk blotting out the stars above the river, and then, stabbing the darkness like a flaming sword, the yellow flash of a search light leapt forth from the dusky void and ran in swift zigzags back and forth across the marshes and canals beneath. ”

“ For perhaps a minute or a minute and a half [Pg 120] the air was vibrant with the roar of hard-pumped guns and the shriek of speeding shell, the great sound from below drowning the sharper cracks from the steel-cold flashes in the upper air.
It was guns that were built for the job—not the hastily gathered and wholly inadequate artillery of a year ago—that were speaking now, and the voice was one of ordered, imperious authority. Range-finders had the marauder’s altitude, and the information was being put at the disposal of guns that had the power to “deliver the goods” at that level. ”

“ Last night was clear, calm, and moonless—ideal Zeppelin conditions—and walking down from my hotel to the Coliseum at eight o’clock, I noticed that the searchlights were turning the dome of the sky into one great kaleidoscope with their weaving bands of brightness. The warming-up drill was over as I entered the music hall, and, returning home at the end of the “top-liner’s” act, I picked my precarious way by the light of the stars and the diffused halos of what had once been street lamps. ”

“ There are days, of course, when you are ‘off’, your machine ‘cranky,’ and the air all ‘heights’ and ‘hollows,’ and at such times there is pretty sure to be a ‘stormy passage,’ if nothing worse. Usually, however, it’s a fairly fit man and machine against indifferent air. But once or twice a year there comes a period, like the last eighteen hours, when the air is almost absolutely ‘homogeneous,’ and then, with his engine running ‘sweet,’ the man has spells of fancying himself an ‘air god’ in fact as well as in name, and acts accordingly,—invariably either to his own or his enemy’s sorrow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the guns I could get hold of I had emplaced in positions most favourable for concentrating on the real key to the summit—the exposed machine-gun post on the crown of the cliff—with the idea, if possible, of destroying men and guns completely, or, failing in that, at least to render it untenable for the reserves who would try to rally to its defence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why not let my strong man simply support the weight of the gun on his shoulder—acting as a sort of ambulant gun-carriage, so to speak—while a line of men pulled him along with a rope? We rigged up a harness to equalise the pull on the broad back, and, with the aid of sixteen ordinary men, the feat was accomplished without a hitch. I am sorry to say, however, that poor Samson was laid up for a spell with racked muscles. ”

“ Always a splash of lurid light preceded the sound of the explosion, in most instances to be followed by the quick leap of flames against the skyline. Many of these fires died away quickly,—sometimes through lack of fuel, as in a stone-paved court; more often through being subdued by the firemen, scores of whose engines could be heard clanging through the streets,—others waxed bright and spread until the yellow shafts of the searchlights paled against the heightening glow of the eastern heavens. ”

“ Just so—with a rough blue sleeve brushing against my own—had I leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hundred steamers ploughing a hundred sea-ways, and now, with the familiar breath of the sea in my nostrils and the familiar mist of the sea damping my hair again, old friends of other days strode down the corridors of memory and ranged themselves, one at a time, by my side. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the sledge threaded its way between deep-cut snow-banks up the narrowing gorge, Colonel Garibaldi spoke briefly of the difficulties of Alpine transport in midwinter.
“On the ordinary battle front, like those of France and Russia,” he said, “it requires rather less than one man on the line of communications to maintain one man in the first-line trenches. For the whole Italian front the average is something over two men on the communications to one in the first line; but at points in the Alps (as on this sector of mine) , it may run up to six, or even eight or ten in bad weather. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? [Pg 253] —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. ”

“ I was witness of a rather amusing incident illustrative of the difficulty that even the officer of Alpini experiences in denying himself vocal expression, not only when it is strictly against regulations, but even on occasions when, both by instinct and experience, he knows that “breaking into song” is really dangerous. It had to do with passing a certain exposed point in the Cadore at a time when there was every reason to fear the incidence of heavy avalanches. Your real Alpino has tremendous respect for the snow-slide, but no fear. ”

“ I’m rather afraid that it won’t stand much more weight, even if it doesn’t fall in of its own. But—ah” (we were out of the tunnel now, and a fluted yellow cliff of staggering sheerness loomed through the notch ahead) , “there’s the Marmolada! Doesn’t look like an easy place to dislodge the enemy from, does it? Well, my men—my brother, Major Ricciotti Garibaldi, leading them—took the most of the 13,000-foot massif from the Austrians with the loss of so few men that I am still being accused of having thrown my dead in the crevasses of the glacier and filling their places with smuggled recruits!” ”

“ The murky sheet of cumulonimbus seemed to pale and dissolve in the concentrated rays, and then, right into the focus of golden glow formed by the dancing light motes, running wild and blind as a bull charges [Pg 118] the red mantle masking the matador, darted a huge Zeppelin.
Perhaps never before in all time has a single object been the centre of so blinding a glare. It seemed that the optic nerve must wither in so fierce a light, and certainly no unprotected eye could have opened to it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 195] passenger lift and as thrilling as an aeroplane. ”