“Plainly a peak with a personality,” I said to the officer at my side. “What is it called?”
“It’s the Col di Lana,” was the reply; “the mountain that Colonel ‘Peppino’ Garibaldi took partially in a first attempt, and afterwards Gelasio Caetani, the Italo-American mining engineer, blew up and captured completely. It is one of the most important positions on our whole front, for whichever side holds it not only effectually blocks the enemy’s advance, but has also an invaluable sally-port from which to launch his own. We simply had to have it, and it was taken in what was probably the only way humanly possible. It’s Colonel Garibaldi’s headquarters, by the way, where we put up to-night and to-morrow; perhaps you can get him to tell you the story.”
Where his study window looks out on the yellow Tiber winding through the Rome for which his father had fought so long and so bravely, I had listened one afternoon, not long previously, to that fiery old warrior, General Ricciotti Garibaldi, while he spoke of the war and of Italy’s part in it. “All of my boys are fighting,” he had said, “and my daughters and my wife are nursing. Two of the boys are gone—killed in France—but the other five are with the Italian army. They are all good fighters, I think; but one of them—Peppino, the eldest—is also an able soldier. Or at least he ought to be, for he has been trained in the ‘Garibaldi’ school. There hasn’t been a war (save only that between Russia and Japan) or revolution in any part of the world in the last twenty years that he hasn’t drawn a sword, carried a rifle, or swung a machete. You must make a point of seeing him if you are visiting his part of the front, for he is a good little fellow, is our Peppino.”
“And you’ll fare well if you put up with Peppino, too,” his little English mother had added: “He is sure to have a good cook; and then the dear boy was always so fond of sweets that I can’t imagine his doing without them. Besides, Sante is with him, and Sante was running a co-operative creamery when the war broke out. You may be sure that he has foraged his share of the good things too.”
We found the grandson and namesake of the great Giuseppe Garibaldi quartered in a little string of an Alpine village which occupied the last bit of ground open enough to enjoy even comparative immunity from the snow sliding from either flank of the deep valley which the road followed up to the pass. The “good little fellow” who sprang up from his map and report-littered desk to bid us welcome turned out to be six feet of vigorous manhood, with a powerful pair of shoulders, a face red-bronzed from the sun-glint on the snow, and a grip which fused my fingers in the galvanic pressure of its friendly clasp. The high, narrow forehead, the firm line of the mouth, the steady serious eyes—all were distinctly Garibaldian, recalling to me the words of his mother: “Ricciotti is my handsomest boy, but Peppino is the one most like the old General, his grandfather.”
His greeting was warm and hearty, and only in the grave eyes was there hint of the terrible responsibility accumulating through the fact that a hot, moist wind was playing upon the heaviest fall of snow the Alps had known for many winters.
“I have sketched you out a tentative programme for the next twenty-four hours,” he said, speaking English with an accent which plainly revealed that it had come to its fluency under American—and probably Western American—skies “which is as far (and a good deal farther, in fact) ahead than there is any use in planning while this accursed weather lasts. There are still a couple of hours of daylight, so we will begin by taking sledges to the upper valley and making a survey of our lines from below. To-morrow—God willing!” (he said it with the same quick fervency with which the pious Mohammedan interpolates “Imshallah” into any outline of his future plans) “you and Captain X—— will go to the summit and glacier of the Marmolada, perhaps the most spectacular position on all our front. That will depend upon whether or not we can keep the telefericas going.”
As the sledge threaded its way between deep-cut snow-banks up the narrowing gorge, Colonel Garibaldi spoke briefly of the difficulties of Alpine transport in midwinter.
“On the ordinary battle front, like those of France and Russia,” he said, “it requires rather less than one man on the line of communications to maintain one man in the first-line trenches. For the whole Italian front the average is something over two men on the communications to one in the first line; but at points in the Alps (as on this sector of mine), it may run up to six, or even eight or ten in bad weather. It isn’t just keeping the roads clear from falling and drifting snow, it’s the valangas, the slides. And with the slides the worst trouble isn’t just the men you may lose under them (though that’s terrible enough, Heaven knows), but rather the men who are holding the lines up beyond the slides that have to be fed and munitioned whatever happens. By an unkind trick of fate (just as bad for the enemy as for ourselves, however), the snows of this year have been among the heaviest ever known. This means that the slides are also bad beyond all precedent, and especially that they are coming in unexpected places, places where they have never been known before. Slides in new places mean—what you saw where that swath was cut through the lower end of the little village down the valley, and problems like this!”
We had just come out of a narrowed section of the gorge where, to get through at all, the road had to run on a sort of trestle built above the now frozen river, and where the ice-sheathed walls above us interlocked like the jaws of a wolf-trap. Ahead of us the road was blocked by a towering barrier of crumpled snow, piled a hundred feet or more high from wall to wall. Rocks and snapped-off and up-ended pine trees peppered through the amorphous mass furnished unmistakable evidence that the avalanche which formed it had come down out of a “track.”