While he was speaking the teleferica, which ended beside the tent of the operating theatre, began to click, and presently an oblong box, almost identical in size and shape with a coffin, appeared against the sky-line of the ridge and began gently gliding toward us along the sagging cable. “In that box,” continued the surgeon, “there will be a man whose life depends upon whether or not his wound can be operated upon within an hour or so of the time he received it. He was probably started on his way to us within ten minutes of the time he arrived at the advanced dressing station, and if he was not left lying out too long the chances are we will pull him through. All up the other slope of the ridge he came across ground that is being heavily shelled (as you can see from the smoke and dust that are rising), but that basket is so small a mark that the Austrians might fire all day at it without hitting it. One of them occasionally runs into the ‘pattern’ of a shrapnel burst (with disastrous results, of course), but the only danger worth bothering about is of having the teleferica laid up from a shell on the engine-house or one of the supporting towers. Although the man is probably unconscious he is coming alone, you see. No other life, and not even an ambulance, is risked in bringing him here. Except for the teleferica, he could not have been sent over until after dark, and the delay would have been fatal. We estimate that from one to three per cent. of the men wounded on a battlefield which, like this one, lies so exposed that they cannot be sent back at once by stretchers or ambulance, owe their lives directly to the teleferica.”
When the cover of the basket was lifted off in the station, the body of a man swathed in a blanket was revealed. He was unable to speak, but a note pinned to the blanket stated that he had been struck in the stomach with a shell fragment just outside the engine-house, and that nothing had been done save to wrap enough gauze around his middle to hold the riven abdomen together and bundle him into the waiting teleferica basket. “He must have been wounded not over fifteen minutes ago, and within less than a mile in an air-line from here,” commented the chief surgeon. “We might have heard the detonation of the shell that did it. Five minutes one way or the other in operating may mean the difference between life and death in a case of this kind, and the chances are that the teleferica has given us the necessary margin.”
Before I left the hospital, an hour later, the operation was over, and the man was resting comfortably, with every hope of recovery.
On several occasions, going up by a teleferica, I have passed a little Red Cross basket going down with a ferito, or wounded man (indeed, the occupant of one of these to whom I endeavoured to shout a few words of good cheer in Italian reported below that he had been accosted by an unmistakable Tedesco); but by far the queerest passenger it was my lot to “balance” against was one I encountered during an attempt I made to get up the Pasubio on a stormy day last January. It was snowing at the rate of four or five inches an hour, and the air was thick with the driving flakes, when, as a consequence (as I learned later) of a drift being piled right up against the cable where the latter crossed a jutting ledge, the steady “tug-tug” of the pulling wire ceased and my basket came to a quivering standstill. I knew that I had been approaching the halfway point, but the first evidence I had that the “down basket” had stopped near by was a sudden pulsing blast which cut athwart the besom of the storm and assailed my ears like the crack o’ doom. Except that it was ten times louder than any human being could make, it was just such a wail of agony as would be wrung from the throat of a man who was being stretched on the rack.
Again the throbbing blast came hurtling through the storm, and this time I noticed that, starting with a raucous bass note, it kept on rising in a sirenic crescendo until it was suddenly broken short, as though the air which drove it was cut off rather than exhausted. Turning down the high collar of my storm coat, I squirmed around and peered back over my shoulder in the direction of the “Thing of Terror,” but only an amorphous grey shape in the line of the opposite cable indicated the position of the other basket. It didn’t seem possible that a two-feet-wide-by-six-feet-long wire basket could possibly hold anything large enough to make a sound like that, and yet the fact that the cable at this point was five hundred feet or more in the air made it certain that the sound could come from nowhere else.
A brisk shiver was running up and down my spine as I slithered down again in the bottom of the basket, but I told myself that it was from the cold and set my wits to work to find a “rational” explanation of the weird phenomenon. A great bird—perhaps an eagle—roosting on the cable? Impossible. Nothing on wings since the time of the “pterodactyl,” or whatever it was called, could have the lungpower for a wail like that. A fog-horn? Not a hundred miles from the sea. A—ah, I had it now! I told myself—gas-alarm signal out of order; Alpino taking it down to have that broken-off note put right—playing it for his own amusement. “What a fool I had been not to think of it before!” I said to myself as I settled back with a sigh of relief and an easy heart to wait for the “train to start.”
When, after a half-hour wait, punctuated at pretty regular intervals by the wail of the “gas alert,” the gentle “tug-tug” began again, and the basket started on its way, I pulled myself up on my elbow to give the indefatigable serenader a hail in passing. Presently the “down” basket, filled with some sprawling shape, took form in the hard-driven snow, but it was not until it was almost upon me that I saw that the nose of a donkey, stretched a foot over the side, threatened to foul the side of my swaying car in passing. The vigorous punch of my mittened fist with which I fended it clear set another of those air-shivering blasts going, and I had just time to see, before the curtain of the snow dimmed down and swallowed up the fantastic sight, that the sudden cut-off I noticed at the end was caused by the swelling windpipe being brought into sharp contact with the side of the basket as the beast’s neck was stretched out to establish the proper air columns to form the sirenic higher notes.
The donkey, they told me in the engine-house at the top, had colic from eating fresh snow on top of the contents of a box of dried figs he had broached, and they had tied his legs and sent him down on his way to the “Blue Cross” hospital to be put right. He was a plains donkey, and didn’t have good “Alpine sense,” else they would have driven him down by the path on his own legs. If they had known that a guest was coming up, however, they said, they wouldn’t have sent down an ass in the teleferica. It wasn’t quite safe for either passenger on account of the way the animal sprawled. The last donkey they had sent down got his hind legs tangled in a load of firewood that was coming up, and they had lost a good deal of the precious fuel at a time when they were at the bottom of their pile, with a storm coming on. The “up” car always got the worst of a collision, but if they were only warned that anyone of importance was coming, they took great care that there shouldn’t be any collision. No one ever got much hurt on a teleferica, anyhow.