“Not a little cast down over this development, they began hauling in from the station, only to feel the more apprehension when they saw it was a limp and apparently lifeless body that was coming up to them out of the storm. A reassuring yodel rolled up from the misty depths at this juncture, however, and the sharpest-eyed of them announced that he could see his comrade ‘jack-knifed’ over the cable jerking the basket straight. Even before the body of the swooned officer, with its wind-blown arms and legs flopping like those of a scarecrow, was swung on to the landing and released from its harness, the ringing bang of a steel spanner on the cable gave the familiar signal of ‘Haul away!’
“He came up (so his captain told me later),” concluded Colonel Garibaldi, “sitting on the rim of the basket with his eagle’s feather rasping right along the sagging cable all the way, his hobnailed boots drumming a tattoo on the steel bottom, and singing the Alpini marching song in a voice that set the echoes ringing above the howling of the storm.”
The expedient of shooting a teleferica cable across an otherwise unbridgeable space was not tried for the first time on the occasion referred to in the opening paragraph of this chapter—when it was resorted to in running a line across a flood-swollen river. The same plan had been successfully followed a year previously in carrying succour to a band of Alpini who, through the destruction of their teleferica by an avalanche, were left “marooned” on the side of a glacier with only a few days’ supply of food and munitions. The one path leading up to their eyrie had also been scoured away by the slide, so that a month or more of labour would have been required to open communications in this way. For the same reason even a longer period would have had to elapse before the teleferica could be restored; that is, if the cable were to be carried up as when it was first built. The mountaineering genius of the Alpini would undoubtedly have been equal to the problem of finding their way back to safety by letting each other down by ropes, but this would have involved the abandonment of a position which it was vitally important to hold.
The expedient of shooting the cable up from a gun was the only one of the many alternatives considered which promised any chance of success. The first attempt nearly proved a “boomerang,” for the weight of the cable deflected the chargeless six-inch shell to which it was attached nearly sixty degrees and sent it crashing through a mule stable, fortunately empty at the moment. A shell attached to a lighter cable went almost equally wide of its mark; in fact, all attempts with high-velocity guns were dismal failures, and it was not until one of the new long-range trench-mortars was brought up that the experiment took an encouraging turn, though success was not won until the cable-line was displaced by a light manila rope. This was fired to its goal—an eminence half a mile distant and a thousand feet high—at the first shot, and afterwards served to drag up a light cable which, in turn, dragged up the heavy one. The single-span teleferica installed at this time—quite free from the menace which had overwhelmed its lower predecessor—was still in use when I visited this sector nine months later.
Perhaps the most spectacular exploit ever carried out from a teleferica was that by which a troublesome nest of Austrian machine-gunners were cleared off one of the pinnacles of the great M—— massif in the fall of 1916. At that time the lofty ridge was divided between the Italians and Austrians. The latter had access to one splintered pinnacle which, although there was no room to establish a permanent position on, offered a splendid vantage from which to observe all Italian movements in the valley beneath. The situation was irritating enough for the Italians even when the activities of the enemy were confined only to observation, but when he took to bringing up a machine-gun and peppering—almost from its rear—the headquarters of an Alpini battalion which held an important pass three thousand feet below, it became well-nigh intolerable. What happened was related to me some months later, when I asked the major of this battalion how it chanced that the roof of the officers’ mess, in which we were dining, was armoured with sheets of steel.
“Against machine-gun bullets,” was the reply; “there was a time of accursed memory in which the enemy used to bring a gun out on a little splinter of rock, not fifteen hundred metres from here in an air line, and spray the whole of our little terrace with ‘dum-dums.’”
“It must have been a bit trying,” I observed. “How did you manage to stick it?”
“By keeping out of sight as much as possible,” he replied; “that is, until the day we went after him from the teleferica. After that he left us alone until we had time to get a gun rigged up to make him keep his distance.”
“Went after him from the teleferica!” I repeated, in surprise. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said,” he answered, with a smile. “We were working day and night to excavate a gun-cavern, the fire from which would make that troublesome position untenable for the Austrian machine-gunners. In the meantime we had to stick it out as best we could, for the least weakening of our force at this point would have been the signal for an Austrian attack which might well have left them in possession of the pass. By doing most of our moving about at night we were getting on fairly well until, opening up at an unexpectedly early hour one morning, they killed a good many more of us than I like to think of.