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.
II
This befell, as it chanced, during one of my early days on the Alpine front, and the incident of men singing in a blizzard almost strong enough to sweep them from their feet made no small impression on me at the moment. It was my first experience of the kind. A week later I should have considered it just as astonishing to have encountered, under any conditions, an Alpino who was not singing; for to him—to all Italian soldiers, indeed—song furnishes the principal channel of outward expression of the spirit within him. And what a spirit it is! He sings as he works, he sings as he plays, he sings as he fights, and—many a tale is told of how this or that comrade has been seen to go down with a song on his lips—he sings as he dies. He soothes himself with song, he beguiles himself with song, he steadies himself with song, he exalts himself with song. It is not song as the German knows it, not the ponderous marching chorus that the Prussian Guard thunders to order in the same way that it thumps through its goose-step; but rather a simple burst of song that is as natural and spontaneous as the soaring lark’s greeting to the rising sun.
Discipline of any kind is more or less irksome to the high-spirited Alpino, but he manages to struggle along under it with tolerable goodwill so long as it is plain to him that the military exigencies really demand it. But the one thing that he really chafes under is the prohibition to sing. This is, of course, quite imperative when he is on scouting or patrol-work, or engaged in one of the incessant surprise attacks which form so important a feature of Alpine warfare. He was wont to sing as he climbed in those distant days when he scaled mountains for the love of it; and, somehow, a sort of reflex action seems to have been established between the legs and the vocal chords that makes it extremely awkward to work the one without the other. If the truth could be told, indeed, probably not a few half-consummated coups de main would be found to have been nearly marred by a joyous burst of “unpremeditated melody” on the part of some spirited Alpino who succumbed to the force of habit.
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. He has—especially since the war—faced death in too many really disagreeable forms to have any dread of what must seem to him the grandest and most inspiring finish of the lot—the one end which he could be depended upon to pick if ever the question of alternatives were in the balance. In the matter of the avalanche, as in most other things, he is quite fatalistic. If a certain valanga is meant for him, what use trying to avoid it? If it is not meant for him, what use taking precautions? All the precautions will be vain against your avalanche; all of them will be superfluous as regards the ones not for you.