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.