“We couldn’t go over it, and we couldn’t have shovelled it away in ten years,” said my companion; “so we simply had to follow the only alternative left and go through it. Here we go into the tunnel now. My great worry is as to whether the new slide that the next day or two—or the next hour or two, for that matter—may bring down upon this will crush in my little tunnel or only pile up harmlessly above. Hard-packed as it is, the snow” (I felt him lurch away from me in the darkness, and heard the soft swish of something brushing against the side of the tunnel) “is slushy even in under here. I’m rather afraid that it won’t stand much more weight, even if it doesn’t fall in of its own. But—ah” (we were out of the tunnel now, and a fluted yellow cliff of staggering sheerness loomed through the notch ahead), “there’s the Marmolada! Doesn’t look like an easy place to dislodge the enemy from, does it? Well, my men—my brother, Major Ricciotti Garibaldi, leading them—took the most of the 13,000-foot massif from the Austrians with the loss of so few men that I am still being accused of having thrown my dead in the crevasses of the glacier and filling their places with smuggled recruits!”
An Alpino passed singing, and the Colonel took up the air as he returned the salute.
“O Marmolada, tu es bella, tu es grana
ina in peo e forta in guerra.”
“It’s a song the men have made,” he said. “The Marmolada was famous even in peace time, but up to a year or two before the war it had never been climbed from this side. The Captain of Alpini in the post at that pass on the left was the first Italian to make the ascent. It took him two days, and cost him several hundred lira for guides. Well, it was from this very side that we took it (I can’t tell you exactly how, as we want to use the same method again), and now we are sending fuel and food and munitions up there every day. To-morrow, if the telefericas are still running, you will go up there to that snow-cap on the top in less than an hour.”
On the way back to the village in the gathering dusk I had an illuminative example of the famous Garibaldi sang froid. The conversation had turned—as it seemed to persist in doing during all of my visit—to common friends and haunts in South America, and I mentioned a meeting with Castro in Venezuela some years previously. “Just what month was that?” Colonel Garibaldi queried. “March,” I replied. “Then at that very moment,” said he, “I was chained to a ring in the wall of the jail at Ciudad Bolivar. A little later,” he continued, “I and a fellow-revolutionista chained up with me broke out and started to swim the Orinoco to——”.
At that moment the sledge chanced to be worrying by a long pack train on the trestle in the bottom of the overhung gorge I have referred to, and just as my companion reached this point in his story a big icicle, thawed loose somewhere above, came crashing down on the back of one of the mules. The pack-load of provisions was riven as by a knife, and the mule, recoiling from the sudden shock, shied back into the animal immediately behind him. This one, in turn, backed into the animal next in line, so that the impulse went back through the train by what I once heard an old Chilkat packer call “mu-leg-raphy.” The consequence was that the hundred yards of gorge (in passing through which one was cautioned even to lower one’s voice for fear of starting vibration that might break loose one of the thousand or so Damoclean swords suspended above) was thrown into an uproar that set the echoes ringing. The temperamental Alpini swore at the mules, and at each other from the depths of their leather lungs, while the mules simply did the mulish thing by standing on their forelegs and lashing out with their hind ones at whatever fell within their reach.
But, unruffled alike by the kinetic energy released below and the potential energy which menaced from above, the imperturbable scion of the Garibaldi simply leaned closer to my ear and went on with his story.
“Poor Y—— never reached the bank. Shark got him, I think. I headed off into the jungle——” That was about all the story I remember, except the finish, which had to do with racing a couple of Castro’s spies for a British steamer lying alongside the quay at La Guayra. This latter part, however, was related after we had come out from under the icicles and the heels of the mules to the open road beneath the awakening stars.
There were several interruptions during dinner that evening. Once a wayfaring Alpino, whose lantern had gone out, and who had turned in to the nearest house to relight it, appeared at the door. That he stumbled upon his Colonel’s mess did not appear to disturb him a whit more than it did the Colonel, who gave the smiling chap a box of matches and sent him on his way with a cheery “a rivederci.” A little later the door was opened in response to a timid knock, to reveal a little old lady who wanted to borrow a tin of condensed milk and five eggs. Her son was coming home on leave on the morrow, she said, and she was going to make a pannello for his dinner. The little village shop was out of eggs and milk for the moment, and as the Colonello’s cook had refused to lend them to her, she had come straight to the Colonello himself. She had heard he was very kind.