III
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.