It chances, however, that this comforting Oriental philosophy entered not into the reckoning of the Italian General Staff when it laid its plans for minimising unnecessary casualties; and so, among other precautionary admonitions, the order went out that soldiers passing certain exposed sections, designated by boards bearing the warning Pericoloso di Valanga, should not raise the voice above a speaking tone, and, especially, that no singing should be indulged in. This is, of course, no more than sensible, for a shout, or a high-pitched note of song, may set going just the vibrations of air needed to start a movement on the upper slopes of a mountain side which will culminate in launching a million tons of snow all the way across the lower valley. The Alpino has observed the rule as best he could,—probably saving not a few of his numbers thereby,—but the effort is one that at times tries his stout spirit almost to the breaking point.
On the occasion I have in mind it was necessary for us, in order to reach a position I especially desired to visit, to climb diagonally across something like three-quarters of a mile of the swath of one of the largest and most treacherous slides on the whole Alpine front. There had been a great avalanche here every year from time out of mind, usually preceded by a smaller one early in the winter. The preliminary slide had already occurred at the time of my visit, and, as the early winter storms had been the heaviest in years, the accumulated snows made the major avalanche almost inevitable on the first day of a warm wind. Such a day, unluckily, chanced to be the only one available for my visit to the position in question. Although it was in the first week in January, the eaves of the houses in the little Alpine village where the colonel quartered had been dripping all night, and even in the early morning the hard-packed snow of the trail was turning soft and slushy when we left our sledge on the main road and set out on foot.
We passed two or three sections marked off by the “Pericoloso” signs, without taking any special precautions; and, even when we came to the big slide, the young major responsible for seeing the venture through merely directed that we were to proceed by twos (there were four of us), with a 300-metre interval between, walking as rapidly as possible and not doing any unnecessary talking. That was all. There were no dramatics about it—only the few simple directions that were calculated to minimise the chances of “total loss” in case the slide did become restive. How little this young officer had to learn about the ways of avalanches I did not learn till that evening, when his colonel told me that he had been buried, with a company or two of his Alpini, not long previously, and escaped the fate of most of the men only through having been dug out by his dog.
The major, with the captain from the Comando Supremo who had been taking me about the front, went on ahead, leaving me to follow, after five minutes had gone by, with a young lieutenant, a boy so full of bubbling mountain spirits that he had been dancing all along the way and warbling “Rigoletto” to the tree-tops. Even as we waited he would burst into quick snatches of song, each of which was ended with a gulp as it flashed across his mind that the time had come to clamp on the safety-valve.
When his wrist-watch told us that it was time to follow on, the lad clapped his eagle-feather hat firmly on his head, set his jaw, fixed his eyes grimly on the trail in front of him, and strode off into the narrow passage that had been cut through the towering bulk of the slide. From the do-or-die expression on his handsome young face one might well have imagined that it was the menace of that engulfing mass of poised snow which was weighing him down, and such, I am sure, would have been my own impression had this been my first day among the Alpini. But by now I had seen enough of Italy’s mountain soldiers to know that this one was as disdainful of the valanga as the valanga was of him: and that the crushing burden on his mind at that moment was only the problem how to negotiate that next kilometre of beautiful snow-walled trail without telling the world in one glad burst of song after another how wonderful it was to be alive and young, and climbing up nearer at every step to those glistening snow peaks whence his comrades had driven the enemy headlong but a few months before, and whence, perchance, they would soon move again to take the next valley and the peaks beyond it in their turn. If he had been alone, slide or no slide, orders or no orders, he would have shouted his gladness to the high heavens, come what might; but as it was, with a more or less helpless foreigner on his hands, and within hearing of his superior officer, it was quite another matter.
It was really very interesting going through that awakening valanga,—so my escorting captain told me when we rejoined him and the major under a sheltering cliff at the farther side—especially in the opportunity that the cutting through of the trail gave to study a cross-section of the forest that had been folded down by the sliding snow. Indeed, they had told me in advance of this strange sight, and I had really had it in mind to look out for these up-ended and crumpled pine trees. Moreover, it is quite probable that I did let the corner of an eye rove over them in a perfunctory sort of way; but the fact remains that the one outstanding recollection I have of that thousand-yard-wide pile of hair-poised snow is of the hunched shoulders and comically set face of my young guide as revealed to me when he doubled the zigzags of the tortuous trail that penetrated it.
Time and again, as his eyes would wander to where the yellow light-motes shuttled down through the tree-tops to the snow-cap on the brow of the cliff toward which we toiled, I would hear the quick catch of his breath as, involuntarily, he sucked it in to release it in a ringing whoop of gladness, only—recollecting in time—to expel it again with a wheezy snort of disgust. For the last two or three hundred yards, by humming a plaintive little love lilt through his nose, he hit upon a fairly innocuous compromise which seemed to serve the desired purpose of releasing the accumulating pressure slowly without blowing off the safety-valve. When we finally came out on the unthreatened expanse of the glacial moraine above, he unleashed his pent-up gladness in a wild peal of exultation that must have sent its bounding echoes caroming up to the solitary pinnacle of the massif still in the hands of the slipping Austrians.
That afternoon, as it chanced, the teleferica to the summit, after passing the captain and myself up safely, went on a strike while the basket containing the young lieutenant was still only at the first stage of its long crawl, and he had full opportunity to make up, vocally, for lost time. It was an hour before the cable was running smoothly again, and by then it was time, and more than time, for us to descend if we were to reach the lower valley before nightfall. I found my young friend warbling blithely on the teleferica terrace when I crawled out at the lower end, apparently no whit upset by the way his excursion had been curtailed.
“What did you do while you were stuck up there in the basket?” I hastened to ask him; for being stalled midway on a teleferica cable at any time in the winter is an experience that may well develop into something serious. I had already heard recitals—in the quiet matter-of-fact Alpini way—of the astonishing feats of aerial acrobatics that had been performed in effecting rescues in such instances, and, once or twice, grim allusions to the tragic consequences when the attempted rescues had failed.
“Oh, I just sang for a while,” was the laughing reply in Italian; “and then, when it began to get cold up there, I dropped over on to the snow and slid down here to get warm.”