Part 15
“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.
“It was at this juncture that Captain X---- over there, who had had a bullet through his hat, came to me with a drawing in his hand, and said that he had just figured out that, between the third and fourth towers of the _teleferica_, there was a point from which the Austrian machine-gun position could be enfiladed with deadly effect.
“If our position had not been really serious I should probably never have listened to such a mad proposal. As it was, I entered into it heart and soul. We hung the platform of the machine-gun on to the cable at an angle which would make it easy to elevate and range on the Austrian position above. Then--as a happy afterthought--we bent a sheet of bullet-proof steel for a shield on the exposed side, erected a low platform on which the gun would rest securely, and--the first and last armoured _teleferica_ was complete. Between X---- and his helper, the armour and the gun, the weight was about double that which the _teleferica_ was supposed to carry, but I knew there was a wide margin of safety allowed for, and had no misgivings on that score. With X---- and his assistant crouched low on either side of the gun, and with a black tarpaulin thrown loosely over the whole, she looked as much like an ordinary load of junk going down for repairs as anyone could wish.
“The Austrians, who had been busy for an hour peppering the zigzags of the path up to the trenches at the lip of the pass, took no notice of the innocent-looking load slipping down the _teleferica_. The relieved men from above, dodging in quick rushes past the exposed stretches of the zigzags, offered them far more exciting practice than a load of old gear. The latter disappeared from our sight at the second tower, reappeared at the third, and was in full view when X---- ‘unmasked’ and opened up. We could even follow the line of brown dust-spurts on the face of the cliff as the bullets ranged upward to their mark. The fire of the two Austrian machine-guns ceased instantly, and never resumed. Probably the gunners were killed before ever they had a chance to turn round their guns and reply to the sudden attack from the air.
“After spraying the pinnacle for five minutes X---- signalled to be drawn up. He arrived at the station to report his job finished. Against possible further use for her, we improved our ‘aerial dreadnought’ considerably in the next day or two, but there was never occasion to send her into action again. When the Austrians _did_ venture up our big gun was in place, and we scoured them off the top with high explosive.”
THE GARIBALDI FIGHT AGAIN FOR FREEDOM
Once or twice in every winter a thick, sticky, hot wind from somewhere on the other side of the Mediterranean breathes upon the snow and ice-locked Alpine valleys the breath of a false springtime. The Swiss guides, if I remember correctly, call it by a name which is pronounced nearly as we do the word “fun”; but the incidence of such a wind means to them anything but what that signifies in English. To them--to all in the Alps, indeed--a spell of _fun_ weather means thaw, and thaw means avalanches; avalanches, too, at a time of the year when there is so much snow that the slides are under constant temptation to abandon their beaten tracks and gouge out new and unexpected channels for themselves. It is only the first-time visitor to the Alps who bridles under the Judas kiss of the wind called _fun_.
It was on an early January day of one of these treacherous hot winds that I was motored up from the plain of Venezia to a certain sector of the Italian Alpine front, a sector almost as important strategically as it is beautiful scenically. What twelve hours previously had been a flint-hard ice-paved road had dissolved to a river of soft slush, and one could sense rather than see the ominous premonitory twitchings in the lowering snow-banks as the lapping of the hot moist air relaxed the brake of the frost which had held them on the precipitous mountain sides. Every stretch where the road curved to the embrace of cliff or shelving valley wall was a possible ambush, and we slipped by them with muffled engine and hushed voices.
Toward the middle of the short winter afternoon the gorge we had been following opened out into a narrow valley, and straight over across the little lake which the road skirted, reflected in the shimmering sheet of steaming water that the thaw was throwing out across the ice, was a vivid white triangle of towering mountain. A true granite Alp among the splintered Dolomites--a fortress among cathedrals--it was the outstanding, the dominating feature in a panorama which I knew from my map was made up of the mountain chain along which wriggled the interlocked lines of the Austro-Italian battle-front.
“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.”
“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.
“See that she has all she wants; fill up her basket,” was the order sent out to the cook. And then, as the grateful little old dame backed, bowing, out of the door: “Feed him up well, _madre_; a man has to have something under his belt to fight in these mountains, doesn’t he?”
“Brother Sante usually looks after callers of this kind for me,” said my host with a laugh; “but Sante is away for a day or two, and I have no buffer. You will observe, by the way, that I am not quite at one with my distinguished grandfather in the matter of rations. What was it he said to the men who had assembled to follow him in his flight after the unsuccessful fight for the Roman Republic? ‘I offer neither pay, quarters nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst forced marches, battle, and death.’ Well, I too have plenty of fighting to offer my men, but no more of the other ‘inducements’ than I can possibly help. And when they have to die, I like to feel that it’s on a full stomach.
“Perhaps you heard,” he went on, “what a stir it made up here when I first asked for marmalade for my men. They started out by laughing at me. ‘Of course,’ they said, ‘we know that your mother is English; but that is no reason why, much as _you_ may crave it, your _men_ should need marmalade!’ Then they said that _marmellata_ would cost too much, and finally tried to prove that it would be bad for the men’s health. But I had seen what troops had done in South Africa on a generous marmalade allowance; also what they were doing in France. So I stuck to it, and--well, we took the Marmolada on _marmellata_, and a good many Austrians besides.”
We were still laughing over the little joke when the door opened, and the telephone operator from the room across the hall entered to report in a low voice some news that had just reached him. The Colonel’s face changed from gay to grave in an instant; but it was with voice and manner of quiet restraint that he asked a couple of quick questions and then gave a brief order, evidently to be transmitted back whence the news had come.
“It must have been either A---- or B----,” he said musingly, turning again to the big slice of caramel cake he had just cut for himself when the interruption occurred. “Oh I beg pardon; but I’ve just had word that the middle _teleferica_ serving the Marmolada has been carried away by an avalanche, and that one of the engineers is killed. I was just speculating as to which one it was. They were both good men--men I can ill afford to lose. This puts an end, by the way, to the trip we had planned for you for to-morrow. You will have to go to the position at the---- instead; providing, of course, _that teleferica_ doesn’t meet a like fate.”
South American revolution (in vivid reminiscence) had raised its hydra-head many times before I saw my way clear to turn the conversation into the channel where I was so interested to direct its flow.
“Won’t you tell me, Colonel,” I said finally, “something of how the young Garibaldi have carried on the tradition of the old Garibaldi in this war? Tell me how it came about that you all foregathered in France in the early months of the war, what you did there, and what you have done since; and, especially, tell me how you took the Col di Lana.”
“That’s (as you Americans say) rather a tall order,” was the laughing reply; “but I’ll gladly do what I can to fill it.”
He drained his glass of cognac, waited till the occult rite of lighting his “Virginia” over its little spirit-lamp was complete, and then began his story (as I had hoped he would) at the beginning. The narration which follows was punctuated by the steady drip of the eaves and the not infrequent rumble of a distant avalanche as the hot south wind called _fun_ breathed its relaxing breath on a half winter’s accumulation of hanging snow.
* * * * *
“My father--and even my grandfather--had foreseen that Europe must ultimately fight its way to freedom through a great war; that the two irreconcilable forces (fairly represented by what France, England, Italy, and the United States stood for, on the one hand, and what Prussia and its satellites stood for on the other) made no other alternative possible. The same feelings which led my father and grandfather to fight for France in 1870 led me and my brothers to offer ourselves to fight for France and her Allies in 1914.
“As the eldest of seven sons, and the namesake of my grandfather, my father felt that it was up to me to carry on the Garibaldi tradition, and when I was scarcely out of my teens he sent me out to train in the only school that the old General ever recognised--that of practical experience. ‘Some day you will be needed in Europe,’ he said. ‘Until then, see that you make yourself ready by taking part in every war that you can find. Learn how men follow, and then learn how men lead. If there is any choice between two causes, fight for the one you think your grandfather would have fought for; but don’t miss a fight because you can’t make up your mind on that score. The experience is the thing, and the only way you can get it is in real battles, not sham ones.’
“Well, I did the best I could, considering the day and age we live in, to follow out my father’s idea. With what success (so far as a comprehensive experience was concerned) you may judge from the fact that, up to the outbreak of the present war, I had--counting skirmishes--fought on 132 battlefields. That I had not been wounded was not, I trust, entirely due to not having been exposed to fire.
“The preparation of my brothers had been rather less drastic--less ‘Garibaldian’--than my own. In their cases, it was my father’s idea that it would be sufficient if they simply knew the world and how to get on with men; and to this end he encouraged them, as fast as they became old enough, to seek work abroad, preferably something of an outdoor character, such as that in connection with engineering projects. None of us was overburdened with book-learning or technical training, myself least of all. Indeed, I have often wished I had a bit more of both.
“So it was that it happened that the outbreak of the war found all but the two youngest of us scattered to the ends of the earth. I was in New York (not long before I had gone through the first Mexican revolution as Chief of Staff to General Madero), and with me was my second brother, Ricciotti, who had joined me there for a trip to South America. Menotti was in China, on the engineering staff of the Canton-Kowloon Railway, and Sante, also an engineer, was working on the Assuan Dam in Upper Egypt. Bruno was in a sugar ‘central’ in Cuba, and Costante and Ezia, the two youngest of us, were at their studies in Italy. My sister, Italia, was organising Red Cross work in Rio de Janeiro.