As there were three of us and the carrying capacity of the basket was limited to two hundred kilos, it was necessary to attempt two trips. As the heaviest of the party, it was decided that I should ride alone, starting after the two others had gone up. Taking advantage of a brief quiet spell, my companions were started off. There was still a good deal of sway to the cables, but a look-out above kept the engineer advised as to conditions as the baskets approached each other, and the passage was made without incident. When my turn came to start, however, the storm had settled down to a steady gale, and the tenente said he did not dare take the responsibility of trying to send me through. Ordinarily I should have been only too ready to acquiesce in his ruling, but as my companions had just ’phoned word that they were going on by the next teleferica—a comparatively-protected one—to the Rifugio Garibaldi, where they would await me before starting on the following stage of the ascent, I realised at once that my failure to appear would throw out the whole itinerary and make the trip (which had to be finished that day or not at all) a complete failure. It was plainly up to me to get through if there was any way of doing it, and I accordingly suggested to the young officer that I would gladly sign a written statement taking the whole responsibility for an accident on my own shoulders.
“That would not help either you or me very much if things happened to go wrong,” he said, with a laugh. “If you really must go, you must; that is all, and we shall simply do our best not to have any trouble. I shall send one of the linemen along with you to fend off the other basket in case it swings into yours in passing. There is a returned American here who ought to be able to do the job and talk to you in your native tongue at the same time.”
And so it was arranged. I took my place—lying on my back in the bottom of the basket—as usual, after which Antonio—grinning delightedly at the prospect of keeping watch and ward over a “fellow-countryman”—climbed in and knelt between my feet, facing up the line. Then the “starter” banged three times on the cable to let the engineer at the top know that all was ready, and presently we were off along the singing wire.
The ordinary motion of a teleferica is not unlike that of an aeroplane—though it is not quite so smooth and vastly slower. On this occasion, however, the swaying of the cable furnished a new sensation which, while mildly suggestive of the sideslip of an aeroplane on a steep “bank,” was rather more like the “yawing” of a “sausage” observation balloon in a heavy wind. The swinging of the basket itself was also a good deal more violent than I had ever experienced before, though at no time great enough to make it difficult to keep one’s place. Both motions were, of course, at their worst out toward the middle of the span, so that one had an opportunity to get used to them gradually in the quarter of an hour which elapsed before that point was reached.
I took the occasion to ask Antonio a question I had been making a point of putting to every teleferica man I had a chance to talk with. “Is it really true,” I said, “that no one has been killed since the war began while riding in a teleferica?”
“A large number of men have been injured,” he replied; “but no one has been killed outright,” and he went on to tell of a friend of his who had coasted down a thousand feet because the pulling-cable jerked loose from the place where it was attached to the basket when the latter had fouled a “down” basket in passing. He was badly injured from the jolt he received when the basket brought up short at the bottom, and it had taken three months in the hospital to put him right again. He would never walk again without a stick, but he was so far from being killed that he was the engineer of the very teleferica on which we were riding. He was a very careful man, said Antonio, for he fully understood the consequences of letting two loaded baskets bump in mid-air.
A chill current of spray began to enfold us at this juncture, and Antonio was just in the midst of an explanation of how it was carried by the wind from a thousand-foot-high quarter-mile-distant waterfall coming down behind the curtain of the lowering clouds, when I suddenly saw him bring the point of his alpenstock over the edge of the basket and, with his eyes fixed intently ahead, hold himself poised in an attitude of tense readiness. Just above our heads the descending basket was swaying to and fro in the strong wind. A collision seemed imminent when, with a quick lunge of his alpenstock, Antonio turned it aside, and in that fraction of a second we passed it unharmed. It had been easy this time, explained Antonio, because the engineer at the top had slowed down the baskets to under half-speed at the moment of their passing.
All sorts of freight—from ducks and donkeys to shells and cannon—have been carried by the teleferica, and one of the best stories I heard on the Italian front had to do with a pig—the mascot of a battalion of Alpini holding a lofty position on a Dolomite glacier—which found its way up there by means of the cable. He was a sucking-pig, and was sent up alive to be reared for the major’s Christmas dinner, when the teleferica basket in which he was travelling got stuck in a drift which had encroached upon one of the steel towers. Twelve hours elapsed before it was shovelled free, and the sucking-pig, when it finally reached the top, was frozen as hard and stiff as one of his cold-storage brothers. It was only after he had lain in the hot kitchen for several hours that an indignant grunt revealed the astonishing fact that his armour of fat had kept smouldering a spark of life. They reared him on a bottle, and at the time I saw him he was a hulking porker of two hundred pounds or more, drawing a regular ration of his own. They called him Tedesco—on account of his face and figure rather than his disposition, they said—but all the same, I would be willing to wager that, if that brave battalion of Alpini were able to save anything more than their rifles and their eagle-plumes in their retreat, he was not allowed to fall into the hands of his brother Tedeschi from the other side of the Alps.
But the most noteworthy service of the teleferica is the way in which it facilitates the handling of the wounded at points where other ways of transporting them are either too dangerous or too slow. It was on a sector of the upper Isonzo, where at that time the Austrians had not yet been pushed across the river. A rather wide local attack was on at the moment, and to care the more expeditiously for the wounded a very remarkable little mobile ambulance—the whole equipment of which could be taken down in the morning, packed upon seven motor lorries, moved from fifty to a hundred miles, and be set up and ready for work the same evening—had been pushed up many miles inside the zone of fire to such protection as the “lee” of a high ridge afforded.
“We have found,” said the chief surgeon, “that many wounds hitherto regarded as fatal are only so as a consequence of delay in operating upon them. This little hospital unit, which is so complete in equipment that it can do a limited amount of every kind of work that any base hospital can perform, was designed for the express purpose of giving earlier attention to wounds of this kind, principally those of the abdomen. From the first we saved a great number of men who would otherwise never have survived to reach the base hospitals; but even so we found we were still losing many as a consequence of the delay that would often arise in transporting them over some badly exposed bit of road on which it was not deemed safe to risk ambulances or stretcher-bearers. Then we devised a special basket for wounded, to be run on the teleferica (as you see here), with the result that we are now saving practically every man that it is humanly possible to save.”