“The tamping was effected with cement and with sandbags, with heavy wooden beams between the latter. It was made more effective by dividing into sections at right angles to each other. The theoretical length of the tamping was 25 metres.
“The charging of the mine chamber began July 3, 1916, at 5 p.m., and was completed at 3 p.m. of July 9 this work including tamping, priming, and laying of electric circuits. The final connections between the latter and the exploders, by means of wires suspended in the air, were made on July 10. The mine was sprung on July 11 at 3.30 p.m., and responded fully to our calculations and expectations.
“(Signed) L. Malvezzi,
2nd Lieut. 7th Regiment Alpini.”
A week of unspeakable weather went by—an interval the days of which I spent among the “Cave-men” of the Carso, and the nights of which were largely devoted to puzzling through the mysteries of the Castelletto report with the aid of my Italian dictionary—and then the unexpected miracle happened. Rain and snow ceased, the sky cleared, and a spell of sparkling days succeeded the interminable months of storm and lowering clouds. From the high Alps came word that the grip of the frost had paralysed the avalanches for the moment, and that rapid progress was being made in opening up the roads for traffic.
“Now is your chance to see the Castelletto,” they told me at headquarters. “If you start at once you ought to be able to get through without much trouble; and, if the weather holds good, you may even be able to get back without long delay, though on that score you’ll have to take your chances. Doubtless they will be able to get you out in some way whatever happens.”
And so it chanced that on a diamond-bright morning in early January I found myself, after a couple of days of strenuous motoring, speeding in a military car past the old custom-house and up into the heart of that most weirdly grand of all Alpine regions, the Dolomites. Already we were well over into what had once been Austrian territory, and the splintered pinnacles which notched the skyline ahead of us were, as my escorting officer explained, held in part by both the Italians and the enemy. As we coasted down into Cortina di Ampezzo—which in its swarming tourist hotels of motley design rivals St. Moritz or Chamonix—Capt. P—— pointed to where a clean-lined wall of snow-capped yellow rock reared itself against the deep purple of the western sky.
“That high mountain ridge is the Tofana massif,” he said, “and that partly isolated mass of lighter-coloured rock (crowned with towers like a mediæval stronghold) at its further end is what is left of the famous Castelletto. It is twenty kilometres or more away, but you can see even from here how it dominated the valley and road, the latter the much-pictured Dolomite road, which is also a route of great military importance.
“Now look at the end of the Castelletto toward the wall of the Tofana. Do you see where it seems to have been sliced off smoothly at an angle of about forty-five degrees? Well, that is the part they blew off last July. Up to then that end, like the other, was crowned with a lofty spire. That spire, the base from which it sprung, the Austrian barracks and munition depôts, together with the men stationed there—all were blown up and destroyed in the explosion.