THE foothills of the Alps would be called a little more than foothills in the Rocky Mountains, but real mountains in Scotland or our Atlantic States. As we strode on, trotting at intervals to keep pace with the long, mountain-trained legs of our Lieutenant, they began to come one by one out of the dawn. In conformation, it occurred to me, they much resembled the American Catskills or perhaps the mountains of Scotland, only that they were more abrupt. The day broke in beauty ---clear skies, April and the Alps. It is not my purpose, however, to write here of scenery. And indeed, during the last part of our passage to the point where the communication trenches opened, I was indifferent to beauty. When you go down a path at a stooping run, dodging from side to side in order to dazzle a sniper, it is hard to remember that you are dodging through incomparable forest.

This is why we had come:

The Isonzo, near by, runs into a gorge. On both sides rise mountains with occasional cliffs. The Italians, advancing here as elsewhere toward the River of Promise. had swept the Austrians down the slope of the right bank and across the Isonzo. In face of deadly fire, they had themselves crossed. They had struggled on until they forced the enemy up near to the summit on the left bank. At the hamlet of Zagora the lines locked, and affairs came to a standstill. And in Zagora stood the strangest house in all Europe, where the two armies "had contact." This situation had existed since November. The Austrians were in the dining-room, the Italians in the kitchen. The Austrians were in mother's room, the Italians in the children's.

And that mountain-side on the conquered left bank, up which we were to climb---it was a litter, a mess, of military works. I say now that nothing has so exemplified to me the mighty labour of this war as that one hillside. It was as though one had started to put in a city, and had dug the cellars, the water-mains, the street gradings and the sewers all at once. And this labour had but one object---to feed, to arm, to protect a few hundred men doing the real fighting at the actual front. Everywhere that morning we met men digging and delving, passing timber, setting blocks, sawing wood, carrying boxes slung between poles, Chinese fashion. All proved the peril of the work by wearing steel trench helmets.

Now there comes in these positions a certain hour when you can count with fair certainty on a lull. The night has been hot and anxious, bringing one kind of deadly work. There will be work of another kind later in the day; but in this hour or so the armies, by a tacit truce---formal truces are unknown to this war---eat, clean guns, "tidy up" the trenches, and rest. One can never count absolutely on this truce, however; hence our nervousness as we came out, during one stage of our passage, into full view and rifle-range of the Austrians. An untoward incident may break it at any moment. We had timed our visit for this interval of comparative safety.

Every one thinks of modern war as a noisy business. It is, for the most part. But I had never before thought much of the cautious silences which come between action and action. That was the first thing which struck me as I came out on this hillside of workmen whose master is death. Men, men, men, a city of men dozing behind rocks or sandbags, carrying timbers, cleaning out ditches, passing with careful, stealthy feet--- and none spoke a word. A skylark was soaring on his fluttering, perpendicular flight, singing his heart out as he soared. A bird-chorus answered him from the herbage of the hillside. Theirs seemed the only sound for even the distant guns were still.

We picked our way in and out of the tangled walls, trenches, barricades, to a dug-out, set deep in the hill ad furnished with a door and a window. Before it lay a little garden-plot fenced neatly with bent willow branches, where new-sown grass was springing. Inside was hot coffee and a warm welcome. As we ate our cheese and our good, brown-yellow war bread, a young lieutenant entered. He had come up from headquarters that morning bringing the mail---letters from wives, sweethearts and daughters. The officers excused themselves and ripped through their letters with eager eyes. The Commander opened a fat packet.

"Look!" he said, snapping its contents across the table. It was sweet-pea seed for his little garden!

But time pressed; and, since it must be done, it were best to do it while the silence held. So now we pushed forward. The Commander, guiding us personally, stopped to ask a question about the route; and, from the cookshed, but softly

"Hello! I speak English."

He was chef of the officers' mess ; but he was also a cook at the Plaza, in New York! Ruffo was his name; a sprightly little Italian boy, with a joke for everything. "The Hudson," he said, pointing to the blue Isonzo; and "The Palisades " Also, he remarked that the baseball season was opening ; and then, I thought, there was pathos in his eyes.

"And now," said the Lieutenant, "our orders are to walk very gently and to whisper."

Do not think of this as an ordinary hill, this height which the Italians have won yard by yard. It was so steep, in its natural condition, that a man could not walk straight up, but must follow winding paths. Now, there were crude stairways everywhere. Before us lay the wreckage of the hamlet and of that strange three-story house. Its roof was gone, and much of its upper story. The buildings that once stood about it were down to the foundations ; but the lower story remained, and most of the second. We were approaching what had been the kitchen, I suppose---one of those half-cellar rooms which characterize hillside houses. Behind it was a kind of back-door yard. Everything was black with old smoke of battle and of conflagration, or grey with the heavy dust of powdered rocks.

I may not describe it minutely, although I remember it as I remember my own flat in New York. At last, I felt, I was clear beyond the world of humanly pleasant things and wholly in the world of war; for everywhere else there had been those little human touches like the latticed lawn before the dug-out. But here---only rifles, boxes of grenades, empty cartridge cases, clips trampled into the dust ; shell-holes ; newly-made graves; crude, battered works of war. And everywhere silence, so that the spring bird-songs came out sharply. Once the Lieutenant opened a canvas curtain. We looked in. A handsome little Italian boy grinned at us genially from over a pot of coffee boiling on a spirit lamp. We entered that cellar-kitchen. I laid my hand on the wall. A foot away, in the coal-cellar, was the enemy! Had I waited long in that silence I might have heard him stirring.

Just inside the entrance lay a covered man. I heard the whispered word Morto; and I thought that I was looking at a corpse until somebody stumbled over his foot. He gave a start and the grunt of the suddenly wakened man. A comrade clapped a hand over his mouth.

Somewhere without, a soldier climbed a ladder. He advanced slowly, taking a pause between each step. For all his heavy army boots, he was as soft-footed and sure-footed as a cat. A pleasant-spoken little soldier addressed us in Italian, and I made out that he was remarking on us as borghesi. No other soldier seemed especially curious about us. Everywhere else along the Isonzo front the men had lifted their heads from their work to regard us civilians, almost as miraculous, on this remote sector, as women; but not the men of Zagora.

A long time later, it seemed, we crept into the covered trenches of the first line. The approaches were deadened underfoot with sacking. We curved into a curious, dark tunnel, slashed with light from the loopholes, and from one ragged hole in the roof.

"That happened last night," whispered in French an officer who had joined us. "A hand grenade---careful---any noise may bring another." Here, too, there was sacking on the floor.

Between the loopholes, their rifles within handy reach, the men of the advanced trench, sleeping the sleep of an exhaustion which showed in pinched faces, in occasional uneasy mutterings and turnings. Here and there stood an alert man, on watch. One of them looked over.

"English ? " he asked, "or American ? I speak English. I work two years in Cleveland, United States."

But before we could talk more, the Lieutenant beckoned me on for a cautious peep through a loophole. That wall of rock which was the Austrian trench rose in my very face. Thirty feet away---it seemed scarcely ten. Two or three quick glances, drawing my head sharply back after each for fear of an alert sniper, was all the view they permitted me; and all I wanted.

This was a curious position at certain points, as you drew farther away from the strange House, you could see not only your own trenches running below you, but even a few yards of the Austrian. The Lieutenant and his confrère in command stopped and began to whisper. Their voices held all the expressiveness the Italian knows. I caught no intelligible word, but their tone conveyed disgust and hatred. I peered over their shoulders.

There, on the rough, rocky no-man's-land between the trenches, lay a man in an olive-grey uniform and a helmet. He was huddled up on his knees and face, his arms outstretched, as though he had prostrated himself in death. Just beyond, a cleft of the rocks revealed a pair of limp, inert legs. We looked through the glasses; there were other dead.

The Lieutenant began whispering in the academically correct English of the educated foreigner.

"Four days ago we made a little charge here," he said. "That is a lieutenant. He was killed; as were the others there. Our men have been trying to recover the bodies ever since. But whenever we try, the Austrians send up flares and fire. One was not killed at once. He was wounded in the legs, so that his life might have been saved but he died last night. This is not war!"

As we came down from the silent world of alert eyes, a grenade went off with its characteristic "bang" like a door slamming; a light film of smoke rose from the trench region above. I hope we did not attract that grenade Then guns began to sound far away. The silent world was silent no longer; and no longer was I aware of the birds. Men spoke again, above their breaths. The day's work had begun.

At a turn of the path, a cook knelt behind sand-bags, ladling appetizing chunks of stewed beef into the mess-tins of a work-gang, who squatted on their haunches while they waited, and scurried crouching to cover when their tins were full. A plump, dark, pleasant-eyed little man in the uniform of a field-chaplain stood watching them. He introduced himself, and fell to talking almost immediately on the blessings of war-views which sounded strange in this setting, since we had seen that morning if not the extreme horror of war, at least its extreme squalor.

"Gentlemen," he concluded, "it has done wonders for Italy. Many of these men here were out-and-out Socialists before the war; now they are fighting for the right with the best of us!" More bangs like slamming doors came from above; the guns sounded nearer; a rifle or so whipped in the distance but as we strolled back toward the dug-out the chaplain stopped to indicate leisurely a piece of battered ground, creased with tortuous military works, a few ragged sticks showing above the surface.

"Boys, boys to the last, these soldiers!" he said. "That was a little orchard and vineyard when we came. It was just beyond our trenches. The men used to creep out by night and risk their lives to get grapes and apples!"

Now remember again the position, as we saw it when we returned to the dug-out. A narrow cleft of the mountains, with peaks rising on either side, and we high up on one slope, looking back across the Isonzo at the other. The country we faced was now Italian territory the peaks behind us were still Austrian.

We were preparing to make our adieux, exchange cards and get away, when the great whistle of a great shell sounded overhead. I cannot describe that sound, though once heard it is never forgotten. It has been compared to the rush of a. fast express train, passing close ; but it has a sharper, more crackling quality. And near the crest of a mountain on the other side of the river rose a tremendous puff. A few seconds afterward, the sound of the explosion followed.

"A three-hundred-and-five," said the Commander.

This meant one of the giant guns. Again the air above us whistled, and again the smoke-puff with a flame-red lance in its heart rose from the crest. Then came a sharper though slighter explosion. Along the Isonzo below runs a railway. A puff, small beside those giant puffs on the hill, rose from near the embankment. It was only a few hundred yards away. Regularly, big shells and little shells whistled and burst. The Commander viewed the horizon with his glasses, took a long look to the rear, and turned to us.

"Gentlemen," he said in French, "I regret for your sake to tell you that you cannot go now. It is not safe. I must beg the honour of your company to luncheon."

We accepted with a grace which I for one did not feel. It is not pleasant for a civilian to know that he is bottled up indefinitely on a hillside at no point immune from violent death. In danger, I have observed, one is always happiest when he is going away. As I sat on a bench before the dug-out, watching the shells burst on the mountain beyond and the embankment below, listening to the slamming noise of the grenades, I felt a hollow in the pit of my stomach and a rusty-iron taste in my mouth. The emotion indicated by these symptoms would flash out; and, as the shells whistled and broke more and more heavily on hill or bank, interest in the thing as a spectacle would flash in.

Somewhat reconciled to the situation, we had retired to the dug-out and were listening to some Congo reminiscences of the Commander's aide-de-camp, when a new sound pierced the symphony---sharper and somewhat nearer. The officers listened a moment, and ran outside. Even before the Commander began to talk in voluble Italian and the Lieutenant to translate, I knew what was afoot. The Italian field-guns had opened from some where on those shell-scarred hills across the Isonzo. It was an artillery duel,

"Come! you will see something interesting," said the Commander, shifting from his native speech into French. We ran, sprawling on the steeper slopes of the hillside, to a point from which we could see an Austrian position, behind their trench-line, which lay above us and to the right. At the very crest of this position rose a wall of rook, which looked as though a gigantic brown-grey hand had thrust itself out of the mountain. Below it the earth was green with bushes and low trees. As we looked, a shell burst sharply against the rock.

"We have calculated," explained the Commander, that there is a concealed Austrian battery there"---he indicated a certain spot in the greenery below the cliff---"and our batteries are reaching for it. Basso! ---Low ! "---for another shell had burst, this time not very far away from the target. The Italians were firing fast; shell followed shell; and the commander of this post and our lieutenant marked each shot with quick exclamatives in their native tongue : Basso ! Basta !---Short!---Hell! " Sinistra!--- Basso !-Ahhh! ----Bravo! For a shell had burst squarely in the chump of bushes which concealed that Austrian battery, and burst with a different sound, somehow. You felt that it had struck, had lifted something. And the fire of the Italian battery ceased, as though the work were done.

We were about to turn away when one of the Italian officers looked at me and said:

"You are cold, are you not?

"No," I said; "not at all."

He looked at me narrowly.

"We had better go back, had we not? he said gently. Then I realised for the first time that I was trembling, and that he thought I was afraid. Now I had been afraid at intervals that morning, and most of all when the Commander announced that our exit was barred; but they had not observed it then. It was quite another emotion which made me tremble at this moment. I was in the throes of the same excitement that we of the sporting race feel when the half-back runs fifty yards to a touchdown or the star batsman makes a home run---only a hundred times multiplied. You who have practised athletics know that neat satisfaction of power which you feel when the curve slaps fair and true into your mitt, the smash shoots from your tennis racquet, the drop-kick springs from your toe. That is half the fascination of manly games, There was the same satisfaction in the punch with which those shells, propelled from miles away, drove into hillside or cliff---only again a hundred times multiplied. I dislike to call my emotion the sporting sense, for the last shell, as it struck and burst against its target, probably brought death into that green patch below the cliff ; but it was akin to the sporting sense.

No, with one enemy battery silenced as a beginning of the day's work, we went back to luncheon in the dugout. It was a delicious meal ; Ruffo turned out to be an artist, especially in the preparation of macaroni. We three guests made it a crowded table ; so the junior officers and the chaplain were served at a little table outside. The Austrian bombardment had grown more intense as the sun climbed higher; other batteries of heavy guns seemed to have opened on a road in the middle distance. It did not occur to me until afterward that the juniors had, for courtesy's sake, chosen a position more dangerous than ours---hospitality somewhat at the risk of life. I doubt if they themselves thought about it at all. As the officer remarked on the shell-pitted hill of the Carso, one simply goes about his business, feeling that it will come when it will come.

Our coffee-cups were of fine porcelain, our napkins were clean and fresh, the wine, if new, was good, and Ruffo and his assistant proved perfect, attentive waiters. They served in white aprons and trench helmets ; and between the cookshed and the dug-out they covered ground on the run, yet balancing plates and serving-dishes so expertly as to spill no morsel nor drop.

Now, as we sat down to luncheon and began to forget the whistling, bursting shells in the delights of good fare and lively conversation, we noted that the morning was growing misty and that a cloud was blowing across the sky behind the blue Italian mountains the sun was peeping and hiding. As we pushed back our black coffee-cups and lighted cigarettes or pipes, I was aware that rain had begun to beat on our window and that a mist trailed from the mountain-tops. Another great shell burst on the crest across the river, but the bombardment of little shells had ceased.

"Good luck for you, gentlemen," said the Commander; "there is no cover like mist " So he sped the parting guests, and we left the House at Zagora behind.

The world was almost silent again as we wound through a long communication trench---picturesque and interesting, but not to be described. Once, a rifle whipped from above us---perhaps some sniper had caught a movement in the trench, and was trying his luck. Once we had to stop for stretcher-bearers, carrying out a badly wounded man---first-fruit of the morning's work. We crossed the Isonzo on a pontoon, we travelled along a road which would have been perilous but for the mist, and called, finally, at a headquarters, where we exchanged cards, drank a glass of spirits to Italy, and begged a guide. The commander here, a Genoese with the shrewd, intelligent, powerful head and face so common in Northern Italy, spoke no English and only a little French. But he was avid for conversation with visitors from without ; we were the first strangers he had seen for many weeks. So, the Lieutenant interpreting, we chatted for half an hour. Best of all, I remember his remarks on human material.

Perhaps city men make the best soldiers in any nation---after they get used to hardship," he said. 'Nevertheless, there are no better soldiers, when well fed, than our Southern peasantry. They are superbly brave and willing; and they endure anything."

"You know," said another of the group, "though we're a Southern people, it was the Italian regiments who best endured Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, when the enemy wasn't powder and ball, but hunger and cold."

I heard this statement many times on the Italian front. I know not if it has sound historical basis, but I can easily believe it. Everywhere one feels the vitality in these muscular, thick-necked little people, who seem to store the sunlight of Italy in flesh and bone, for use when needed.

Our guide strung us out a hundred yards apart, as we shot the approaches to this front ; for a gunner hesitates to waste a shell on one man, where he will shoot instantly at a group. Presently we were beyond all signs of war, save the occasional distant rumble of a gun or the faint crack of a big shell. We were toiling through the rain up a hill-forest, with fern and violet and all pretty, tiny herbage springing from the fertile ground beneath. Dripping wet, and spent from a two-thousand-foot climb, we came at last to a plateau and found our automobile waiting. A foot-messenger in bersaglieri uniform had stopped to chat with our chauffeur.

"Say," he said, as the Lieutenant rummaged about the tonneau, putting things into shape, "you come from America, huh ? I work four years in America---I spik English good once, but I forget now---suah Dayton, Ohio! So long!"

Two days later, having asked and received permission to visit the highest theatre of operations in the Alps, I visited a headquarters for my final papers. An officer popped out from the inner office. He held a bunch of fresh dispatches in his hands, and he was a little excited.

"This will interest you!" he said and he began to translate.

President Wilson had called a joint session of our Congress to consider the submarine crisis growing out of the Sussex atrocity. An ultimatum was on its way. There were even the first, strong words of the President's message.

We were going, for a week, to a region far beyond the news. When we returned to the world of baths, sanitary plumbing, hotel meals and newspapers, we might find that the die had been cast. A black wave of homesickness rolled over me. Suddenly I understood why all those Italians who had been addressing me in English along that way of dangerous toil came scurrying back to Italy when they might have worked securely in America.

Something as strong as mother-love or love of woman draws your heart homeward when your own country goes to war.

It was market day, and about ten of a very fair spring morning, when the whistle blew the "Alerte"---a hostile aeroplane was coming. Two seconds before the whistle began, the marketplace was all colour, business and normal excitement. Peasant women with thick waists, powerful hands and heavy yet vivacious faces bargained and flirted and gesticulated with soldiers and agents of the regimental messes. Women of the buying class, their social position proclaimed by the fact that they wore hats and gloves, strolled from booth to booth, gravely considering radishes, cauliflowers, lettuce, or early cabbage, and then bursting into explosive Latin gestures when the bargain was found. It was all life, vivacity and sociability. Two seconds after the whistle began, the whole market was scattering, like chickens from the shadow of a hawk, to doorways and arcades. A few civilian stragglers, braver than the rest, tried to stand by their booths. The military police shoved them back under cover. A shop-keeper behind the arch where I stood rushed out in a sudden panic, gathered up his family and a few odd women, thrust and pulled and carried them inside his shop, and began to put up the iron shutters. A minute later, his panic going as fast as it came, he opened the shutters and let out his flock. While the people arranged themselves according to their personal courage----the braver on the edge of the sidewalk where they might see, the more timid in the doorways where they could be safe from shrapnel---there was babble and confusion. Then the noise of tongues died out ; except for the wail of the whistles and the boom of church-bells joining in the warning, there was unearthly silence. So we waited.

Through the whistle and the bells there pierced a series of sounds, distant but definite---a cannon-shot, another and another. A chorus of cannon followed, the explosions increasing in frequency and intensity. Still, no one spoke; men and women gazed into the quarter-sphere of sky before us, intent and pale. No one moved, either, except the military police; they ran from point to point, shoving back eddies of the crowd which stood in danger of our own shrapnel if the firing came our way. Now, the bells and the whistles stopped; we waited; the guns rolled like drums.

And now---it came into sight, an aeroplane travelling like the wind, growing from a speck to a tangible thing. Usually the sun catches the wings of an aeroplane, so that it shines and flashes like a minnow in the shallows. Somehow, there was no such effect this time ; it looked, with its deep, flat, grey war-paint, like a sinister, fat-bellied mosquito. And behind it trailed puff after puff of snow-white smoke. The guns were reaching, reaching ---and never touching. A puff broke out just below it, another just above, a whole trail of puffs to one side. It was heading toward us---no, it had turned! The fire had become too hot. It struck a course at right angle to our line of vision, it went on, it lost itself behind the ferreted old church at the end of the market-place. And at that instant, something like a gigantic bee buzzed overhead. We at the front edge of the crowd craned our necks upward. One of our own great armoured aeroplanes, its national device marked on the lower surface of its wings, had taken the air. It flew so near that we could see the vapour from its exhaust trailing behind it. At this new sign of reassurance, conversation suddenly bubbled out of the crowd like wine out of a bottle. We looked into each other's eyes and laughed, at first foolishly and then sociably. Gestures and jokes began to fly. A nun crossed herself with an air of great relief. and fell into animated conversation with another nun. A group of girls began to exchange badinage with the military police. A few boys tried to venture out into the square; the police seized them by their little waists and breeches and hurled them back into the crowd---for the whistle had not yet announced the end of danger. The mother of one of the boys indignantly shook her fist in the face of the police. The crowd, taking sides at once, began to banter the police or the mother with about equal humour and enthusiasm in both factions.

At this moment, I happened to look up and observe a proceeding which I had been seeing, without really observing, ever since the whistles opened. Across the square was an old building on its roof stood a kind of open shed. Three women in black shawls and wooden shoes were hastily but methodically taking in their washing. At this moment they tucked the last sheet into their basket, grabbed it by the handles, and scurried for the skylight.

The whistle wailed again---a succession of short toots---"Raid over." On this signal, the crowd broke from the arcades as runners break from the mark at the starter's pistol. It was a race, with wooden shoes scuffling and peasant shawls flying, for the booths and custom. Two minutes later, the buying and badinage were going on as merrily as before the raid. Only our great armoured aeroplane soared low above us, with a kind of insolent swagger in its glide.

"AND now," said our Lieutenant, whose English remains idiomatic even under excitement, "it is legs!"

He jumped down, skipping like a boy at the touch of his native mountain soil. The motor car, which had at last struck an impasse on the snowy road, whirred and coughed as the military chauffeur backed it out to a turning-place. The Lieutenant's military servant loaded himself like a pack mule with our knapsacks of Arctic clothing, and we crunched on. The spring snow had been wet and heavy all that day as we climbed by motor-car under the panoramas of the Alps. Our feet, in spite of our five-pound, hobnailed, grease-soaked Alpine boots and our two pairs of woollen socks, were churning water with every step. Now it had begun to blow up a little colder, and a wind whipped down a lighter and more piercing quality of snow from the peaks above.

We trudged on, trying to keep pace with the loose, easy swing of that exceptional mountaineer, our Lieutenant. For all that we were going into what might be battle and would surely be a good deal of hardship, we travelled with considerable light-hearted anticipation. For this was the afternoon of Easter Day, which is to the Italian a festival as important as Christmas, and there was to be a celebration of some kind in the advanced Alpine base just ahead.

Already, at the headquarters of the Commander in the valley below, we had eaten a sumptuous midday dinner. As part of his gigantic pack, Giacomo, the Lieutenant's servant, carried a thing like a bandbox inclosing an Easter plum cake of great size and richness, which we had bought in Brescia on Good Friday as a present for the officers. In the pockets of our overcoats we had bags of bon-bons, and there was a box of cigars in the knapsack. We intended, after dinner, to survey the military situation in these parts---a situation, at this season of the year, wherein the enemy is not the Austrian, but Nature---and, if all looked well, to try to reach the battlefields of the glacier from that point. The Lieutenant was quite determined about this glacier. We must set foot on it, he declared, with the simple resolution of a man who had been conquering mountain heights all his life but the approach did not look very favourable from this quarter.

What we had been seeing all day in the way of scenery, and what we were seeing now in the rifts of snow mist, I despair of describing. Mountains are mountains; but the Alps are more abrupt, altogether more perilous in every aspect, than any range we North Americans know. They do not rise gently, slope after slope, like our own Rockies or our Sierras. They shoot up in gigantic hogbacks and walls and pinnacles. It is all very well to say that Mount Massive, of the Rockies, is some 14,400 feet above sea level, and the more famous peaks of the Alps only 1,000 feet or so higher; the comparison is not fair to the Alps. The peaks shoot up from low valleys, not from wide, high plateaus. That same Mount Massive is 14,400 feet high, but the city of Leadville, at its base, is over 10,000 feet high. Here, Mount Adamello, king-peak in one of the highest Alpine glaciers, had been peeping at us all day through the rifts of the valleys and yet we had started that morning at a scant 2,000 feet. As a mountain-bred child, I had been hurt in my patriotism to hear a European say that there was no real mountaineering in the Alps of America; that climbing the Rockies was merely a matter of walking. I looked about me now, and understood. To left and right shot up great ridges, bristling with straight firs, dusted now with snow. Behind these ridges rose white precipices; behind them pinnacles of grey rock so abrupt that the snow clung only to the clefts; and farther up ... but that was lost in the whirling snow-mists.

It was clear, however, in one direction; and there, at the very top of the landscape, was a sheer wall of white. It seemed impossible that anything which travelled on legs could scale that wall; yet beyond its very top, as we knew, lay important positions, both Italian and Austrian. Not only had men scaled it, but they had dragged with them cannon; and somehow, every day, other men were carrying, to the fighters above, food, ammunition, all the heavy and complicated apparatus of an army in action.

The camp, when we crunched into it at last, wore what I took for a holiday air; I being unaware just then that work was going forward on this day as on every day, and that this was only the habitual gaiety of the Alpini. Officers in capes and grey Robin Hood hats, looking, as Alpine troops always do, like the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, came running down to greet their old comrade, the Lieutenant ; to pound him on the back; to wrestle with him in the snow.

Between the long barrack-sheds a squad of men in white were practising on skis. As I looked, one of them took an awkward, shambling run, leaped into the air from the top of the slope before the barracks, and brought up, a tangle of arms, legs and skis, in the snowdrift at the bottom. Another started ; and he, too, spilled himself before the first man could rise. They grappled; they wrestled, with their skis performing awkward evolutions in the air; and all the rest of the camp yelled loud encouragement. While we stood with the officers, getting acquainted, troops passed by in single file, lifting themselves by their wheel-tipped alpenstocks. They were not real Alpinists, as their caps showed, but infantry reservists---they who help feed and supply the fighters on the high cliffs above.

The tall, lean fellow in command packed a snowball and shot it into the midst of our group. Our officers, laughing, pelted him unmercifully. On a slope above, others who had just come into camp and delivered themselves of their packs caught the infection and opened a snow battle. Most Continental Europeans throw but awkwardly as compared with Americans and Englishmen, who have played baseball and cricket since childhood. These men threw well; and they learned it, I suppose, at snowballing, the sport universal of Northern peoples.

They had been all winter in this camp, and had made things comfortable and shipshape. The doctor's cabin, where I was quartered for the night, had a stove, less for warmth than for drying purposes. There was a tiny hunk of canvas slung from boards and furnished with a sleeping bag and a straw pillow; there were bookshelves ; there was even a little stand for a reading-lamp. What gave it the home touch to me, however, was the finish of the walls, in the miners' cabins of the Sierras and the Rockies, they were papered with newspapers and illustrated weeklies, stuck on by flour paste. The furniture here, as in the messroom and the offices, was made on the spot of pine boards, fashioned by soldiers glad of something to do during the long pauses of the winter storms.

When the orderly announced dinner and we plodded through a clearing atmosphere into the mess-room. I heard the Associated Press man who preceded me utter a whoop of surprise. There stood the plain board messtable, set out for the feast, And in the centre was the most original table decoration I ever saw. Some one had picked up the butt of an Austrian 305-calibre shell. In its centre was a hole just large enough to accommodate the inverted nose of a 75-calibre shell. This shell-nose made a bowl. The company cook had filled it with those white, lilylike edelweiss blossoms that were springing up wherever winter had melted from the hills. The Italians call this species "flower o' the snow." And in the middle of the flowers there roosted one of Rose O'Neil's whimsical little "Kewpie" figures. She had a tiny Alpine cap fitted on her bald baby head, and she smiled out upon us with foolish benevolence, recalling, in the midst of war, old studio days in Washington Square, New York.

We were a dozen at table---all except the Commander, the doctor, our volunteer lieutenant and us correspondents, in the merry, rebounding twenties. All spoke French more or less well. The hero of the party, who sat next to me, had lived in Manchester, and his English was excellent, if a little out of practice. Also, the pleasant, boyish chaplain had at least studied our native tongue. In three languages, therefore, we made very merry over an extra-special dinner, sparkling red wine, a cake with decorative frosting, and our bon-bons. We were far enough from the enemy, so that noise did not matter, and after dinner everyone burst spontaneously into song. They sang us the song of the Alpini; that "Death to Austria" chant which has grown popular in Italy since the war; and the rousing old Garibaldi Hymn, which yields only to the Marseillaise for spirit and fighting quality.

Then there were gay Neapolitan love-songs; and one merry young lieutenant, with a rich Italian tenor, sang a little Verdi by way of variety. After which, in compliment to the guests, they tried their voices at American ragtime. "On the Mississippi---they seemed to know from start to finish. It was eleven o'clock when we broke up---a late hour for men who must rise before dawn to fight the elements. But, as the Commander remarked before we separated, there is only one Easter in one year.

All that afternoon---in fact, all the way from headquarters---we had been hearing details concerning the life and organization of these Alpini, whom circumstances made a corps d'élite of the Italian Army in the first months of this war; and the Lieutenant told us still more as we strolled off to bed., The men of the Alpine regions, ---when the time comes to do their military service, are drafted into the Alpine Corps. Already most of them have had practice since childhood in mountaineering. They have been goatherds, following their flocks up and up, with the rise of the spring grass, to the very edge of the glaciers. They have been guides, making mountaineering records for hardy tourists who think they made the records themselves. They have tracked and killed the chamois among the higher peaks.

By the time he comes to the army the average Alpine infantryman is learned in the craft of the mountains, which requires special senses acquired only in childhood. During his two years of army service the Alpine infantryman finishes off his education as a mountaineer. He roughs it in all weathers, "hardening his meat" as the Indians say, and learning, under expert guidance, all that he has not known already concerning the conquest of Nature in her more cruel aspects. Though the Alpini now include many men of the lowlands, such are the backbone of the corps. Incidentally many natives of the Southern districts, who had never before seen snow, weathered the Alpine winter and came out in perfect condition. As I have remarked before, there is a marvellous vitality in your Italian.

In the theory of Italian Army organisation each regiment defends or extends that border lying nearest the district from which it is recruited. The men know that sector, with its peculiarities and tricks of weather, and they fight for their homes. In the practice of war the army has been obliged to relax this rule a little; but it still holds measurably true. Once I stood on a shoulder of the mountains talking to an Alpine infantryman.

"Where do you live "I asked.

"Down there," he said, and pointed.

Far below, in a cleft valley, lay a little village.

The officers of the Alpini, if not all mountain-born, are usually at least from Northern Italy---Milan, Turin, Brescia, Verona, Vicenza. From the time they enter service they follow with enthusiasm what, I dare say, is the noblest sport in the world---mountain scaling. As your cavalryman plays polo for practice in horsemanship, so do they, for practice in mountain fighting, try impossible peaks or new ways of getting at peaks already conquered.

At the valley base where we rested on Easter Eve, we waited dinner a few minutes for the Commandant, who had been "up" that day, and whose return to camp bad been announced by telephone. He arrived at last, a compact, round-headed little fighting man of forty-five or so with a fresh sunburn over his tan, and began to talk in animated Italian.

"It has been a quiet day up there," the Lieutenant translated; "and so he has performed a feat. He has climbed, for sport, to a point that no one else has been able to reach this winter!"

All their active lives these Alpine officers practise the sport as a part of business. So they learn the tricks of the treacherous mountains, such as avalanches, crevasses and hidden streams, against the time when such knowledge may mean life or death for a whole company.

They love the mountains, and they hate Austria. It is a border hatred for one thing; to Lombardy and Venetia, the old days of Austrian misrule remain a long memory. In Brescia they still show you, with hate in their eyes, the wall where the martyrs were shot during the abortive uprising, the false dawn of freedom, in 1849. All through the valleys they will point out this or that village where Garibaldi drove back the Austrians in 1866 ; and will describe to you, with much fire and many gestures, how Germany made her own peace and tricked them out of victory just when the Lion of Italy had Trent in his teeth.

The Italian Army stands perhaps next to the French for democracy, and in no corps is the relation between men and officers more fine and natural than among the Alpini. When, even in manoeuvres, an Alpine officer goes on a piece of far and hard mountain service with his men, he must live as one of them for days at a time ---wrapped in the same blankets, sheltered by the same sliver of rock. Officers save the lives of men and men of officers with equal recklessness and gratitude on both sides. It is hard to hold yourself superior to men with whom you have shared such primitive hardship and valour; and the distinction among the mountain fighters, I think, is less between men and officers than between Alpini and other people.

Italy, at the time of which I write, held a line of 650 kilometres---as long as the existing French line after the British extended their sector. Perhaps a bare third of it is merely high-hill fighting. All the rest is Alpine work. The front of that Alpine line belongs to these born mountain fighters. The infantry of the plains supports or reinforces them; the reservists feed them; the territorials dig and delve for them. The diagram of the human material in the Alpine war is a pyramid, its point the Alpini, who have been wriggling for a year into Austrian territory peak by peak.

When we went to bed in our sleeping-bags that Easter night the stars were out. On the way to quarters we asked the Commander if we might go forward in the morning. He reserved his decision. When, at sunrise, I woke and looked out, it had begun to thaw a little; and at breakfast the Commander put his foot down on our project. "It is dangerous; it is most dangerous," he said. For a sudden thaw, following a heavy snow, brings the avalanches ; and that, in the winter fighting, is the real enemy, taking toll from both sides. In those avalanche days the army transport service performs only the most necessary labour, leaving the heavy work for a less dangerous time. Just now we could not in ordinary prudence attack the glacier from this point. However, a party of officers and men was going forward to a place where the most dangerous avalanches began. We might accompany them if we wished.

It was a long, wind-trying climb. Four soldiers went with us, to carry our coats and to beat hand in emergency. Over their shoulders they had long skis, in case there should be work in loose snow. Although little fighting was afoot that morning, and although we heard no gun just then, the trail was lively all the way with soldiers, who trafficked back and forth, singing or calling out boyish jokes.

We mounted beyond the timber-line; mounted until those grey crags, so sharp that the snow could not cling, fenced us on both sides, and until that white wall which was the edge of the glacier glistened in our very faces. It was a great place to study the ways and the causes of avalanches. The rock walls were cleft to their top with gigantic runways. A little way below the summit of these creases the snow began it had found a slope just obtuse enough so that it might pile up. Thence it spread down towards us in great funnels and half-cones. You realised how, at any time, it might begin to start and slide, as it slides from a mansard roof in town.

At a certain point the officers stopped.

"We had better go no farther," said the chaplain. "There are brave men buried under there," he added, pointing to a great domed drift in the distance, "and we shan't get the bodies out until spring."

We turned back---I with relief. This trail had been carefully laid to avoid avalanches as much as possible. But no trail is entirely safe in such weather. Alpini from farther up passed us as we stood waiting to gather and go. When they entered the sector of the path which ran below the funnels, they would glance cautiously over their shoulders at the runways above and then scurry past the dangerous point. And we scurried after them.

Just before we turned back, one of the officers pointed upward to three of the funnels.

When one of them starts they all go," he said.

And now, having learned the signs, we saw that there had been two or three avalanches that morning. None, however, had been great enough to cross our path. You could mark their course by the break in the even, white surface; by gigantic, irregular snowballs; and even by rocks brought down from the crags.

Once more in the safe district, we took another climb. This brought us to a natural platform in the mountain, and to the foot of a curious piece of military work, devised since the war, and of immense use to these mountain fighters. The author of this enterprise, I believe, is a young engineer of Milan. He had seen an "aerial train" at work on the dump of a mine, and he adapted it to military use.

The Italians call it a teleferica; and as we have no name for the device I had better follow their tongue. A teleferica is nothing less than a gigantic cash-carrier such as we use in department stores. A carriage, perhaps four feet long by two feet and a half wide, depends from two wheels on a wire cable. Another cable draws it up, the power being furnished by gangs of men or by motor engines. We stood on this platform and looked up to a perilous crag above. From platform to crag, perhaps a third of a mile, ran the double thread of the teleferica---one strand for the upward journey, the other for the descent.

That crag, however, was only the first landing-place. From it another double wire stretched upward and lost itself in a cleft of the mountain. There were still other stages farther up, they told us ; and when the supplies had shot the last stage they were within comfortable reach, by man-back or sled, of the snow-covered advanced trenches.

How useful the Italians make this device only their army engineers know. Later, and in another place, I saw a teleferica which makes the trip in seven or eight minutes. From its first stage to its second there is also a mule trail, hewed out of the mountain-side. The mules take two hours and a half for the climb. In still another place I heard a commander boast that his series of telefericas did the work of thousands of men and, what was more important, did it more quickly in emergency.

This, however, was a small hand-teleferica, the motive power being a wheel propelled by the sturdy arms of three reservists. Piled in one of the semi-cylindrical black sheds were supplies such as no army ever employed before this war, devices whose uses I did not understand until the chaplain explained. For example, there were "trench boots" to wear in the snow huts of the glacier. Their soles were of thick wood, studded with sharp pikes. Their white felt uppers rose above the knee, and they were lined with the heaviest of rough wool. That tin bucket, as big as a ten-gallon oil can, was not a fireless cooker, as I supposed, but a gigantic vacuum bottle which would keep dinner for a squad warm all day. They cannot cook by ordinary means up there in the glacial trenches, where the snow drifts high over the sandbags, and where one lives like an Eskimo. That would betray the position.

Not only supplies go up that perilous cash-carrier, but men. By this means the high officers save time; by it the doctors ascend in case of emergency ; and by it they bring down the wounded. An army surgeon, who but a year before was a prosperous specialist in Milan, remarked to me one day that he did not reckon, when he volunteered, on becoming an acrobat.

As we walked down, he whom I have called the hero consented to give me a modest account of his exploit, for which, to the pride of his battalion, he was going to be decorated. He was just a slim, lean, agreeable boy in his early twenties---this hero. He told his story like a true soldier, without much detail. The wonderful thing about it was the way in which he and his party had refused to accept ill luck. They had started on skis to capture by surprise an advanced Austrian position on the glacier. The attack was timed for a certain hour when light and weather would be favourable. But the ski party lost its way in a tempest of snow. When they discovered their mistake they decided not to turn back. In spite of an unfavourable hour and unfavourable weather, they stalked the Austrian position, rushed it, made every man who survived their attack a prisoner.

The day had now come off bright and even warm---a favourable time for avalanches. And that morning I saw what the Italian officer meant when he told me that the avalanches went off all together. I was walking with the chaplain. There had been some artillery fire and one cannon-shot among the peaks reverberates like a salvo from echo to echo. Suddenly came a duller roaring, which I took for new guns.

"Avalanche!" said the chaplain. "Look!

I could see nothing until I used the glasses. From three clefts at once rocks, great snowballs, the snow surface itself, were racing down like an express train.

Just before luncheon, we drifted into the quarters of the Reservists---black, semi-cylindrical sheds, where the men lay close-packed on their bunks, enjoying a day of rest granted them by the avalanches. The band, practising outside, must have included some Italian-Americans, for suddenly it began Sousa's "Stars and Stripes" march. Also, two forms arose from the bunks, announcing, "I speak English---I work in America." From these men we got the first hint concerning the tragedy of that day. Had we heard about the Austrian deserter? they asked. Yes, a deserter was coming down soon from the snow-trenches above. I received this news with but languid interest, merely reflecting that in these quiet times a small incident created a great deal of excitement.

Now the night before, the officers had remarked with regret that two of their number could not join us at our Easter dinner. They were out in the trenches, on watch. Being merry with sparkling red wine, we drank their healths, toasting them in three languages.

At luncheon, some one made mention of them again; and just at that moment a sergeant entered the messroom, saluted, and began a report to the Commander. As he spoke, every tongue stopped and every eye darkened to a deep concern. The hero, beside me, began to translate. "The lieutenant up there---the very man we just mentioned---shot through the lung with a machine-gun bullet," he began, when the Commander stabbed him with his eye, stopped him. The sergeant finished his report, saluted, retired. Instantly a babble broke out. I could not catch any of the language, but the tone was indignant, He who had sung Verdi so beautifully at our Easter feast rose up and smote the table vehemently. I wondered again. In this war of great losses, where it is general etiquette not to mention those who have gone, why such concern, why so much talk, over one man, badly wounded though he were? The surgeon took a last gulp of wine, crumpled up his paper napkin, and started for the teleferica. The conversation went on, an indignant exchange to which I was a wondering outsider.

We had stepped outside when the soldiers began running from the barrack-sheds across the trail, pointing upward. "Le déserteur," explained someone in French, and about a crag which shielded the upper trail from view came a squad, formed hollow-square about a man in white who topped his guards by a head. They led him between the barracks and the mess-room, where the officers regarded him from one side, the men from another. For a moment, the Austrian stood alone; the officers were holding debate as to who should examine him. Not only in stature but in face he contrasted oddly with his captors. Burned, like them, to a deep brown, his features were chiselled with less grace but with rugged power. He looked curiously anxious or disturbed ; his eyes would wander, and then become fixed with brooding. Knowing how gallantly the Italians bear themselves toward prisoners, how gladly the typical deserter welcomes his capture, I wondered. This mystery was deepening.

I spoke to the Lieutenant in English. The deserter jumped on that, and faced me. In a perfect American accent, he said:

"Do you come from the United States?"

"I do---where do you come from ?"

"Buffalo," he said; and at the sight of a fellow countryman his eyes lost for the first time their wandering anxiety. "I've lived there twenty years. I work for the Lackawanna Mills---do you know Lackawanna?"

"How does it happen that you're here?" I asked. "Came home to volunteer?"

"Hell, no! I’m an American. Like a fool, I never got naturalized, though. But I'd gone back to Austria to see my mother---and they grabbed me. I've been trying to desert ever since. I want to go home." Then lie regarded the Italian officers, and his eyes grew uneasy again. At this moment an interpreter arrived, drew him into the shed for examination. I saw him no more.

Our Lieutenant followed him with his gaze.

"What are they going to do with him? " I asked. The sense of nationality had risen up, had given me a feeling of personal concern.

"Nothing, of course," said the Lieutenant; "we are not barbarians! But think of a fine young officer losing his life getting out a damned deserter! The lieutenant's dead---the message just came by telephone."

"So that's the trouble!" I said, comprehension dawning.

The Lieutenant nodded. "We'd held him all night," he said, "and a fog came up in the morning. So the officer tried to take him out over the snow. A wind blew a rift in the fog. The Austrians saw them and opened with a mitrailleuse. The deserter and the sergeant got away. The officer  . . . he threw out his hands with a gesture of finality.

The worst of the danger from avalanches would be over by night, the Alpini told us. Weather-sharps all of them, they squinted at the heavens and prophesied another fair day. The Lieutenant, telephoning to the valley-base where we had spent Easter Eve, learned that our friend the Commander, who had just been climbing for sport, was going, next morning, to visit a very high mountain base within easy touch of the glacier. Why not join him and go along? At a certain point on that glacier, he veritably believed, was the highest gun not only on the Italian front but in the whole war. With luck, we might make the trip in a day, because of the telefericas. They would take us over the worst stretches.

I had been enthusiastic until he mentioned the teleferica. That fatal word seemed to puncture my spirits and my enthusiasm spilled. For I am one of those persons born with the unreasoning dread of a sheer height. I found myself making excuses to stay where we were and await safer weather. However, the Lieutenant would listen to no meretricious pleas of mine. His motto was "forward" he was still determined that we should go where no journalist had gone before. A famous Alpine climber before the war, he still had the habit of records.

So we tramped back to our automobile rendezvous, and to that valley-base where we had rested on Easter Eve. The Commander there, he who made a record climb, "for sport," in the midst of war, was an old and close friend of our Lieutenant. Indeed, so quick and intense are the emotional contacts of war, so cordial and easy of approach is the Italian gentleman, that we correspondents felt ourselves already in the number of his friends. As he stood awaiting us in the doorway of that recently-built and banefully modern villa which his staff had commandeered for headquarters, he looked in all his meagre height the man and the fighter. he was little---not more, I should say, than five feet six inches tall. But he was as efficiently and compactly built as a battleship. Forty-five years of life had started the grey in his hair; twenty years of mountain sun, reflected from the snow, had trodden lines in his strong, able face. He had a firm but friendly light eye, a round head, as compact as his figure, a fine forehead. His movements were quick with controlled nervous force; but he showed in every step and gesture the absolute economy of motion. He was all intelligence, determination, leadership and nerve. Plainly, his staff adored him. Because he understood no English, our Lieutenant and two other officers who spoke my native tongue used to discuss him with me before his face. "The very climax of mountain strategy, his operations up here," they would say. "Such obstacles as he has met---and his engineering. " Or again---the final, perfect tribute in the Italian army---" his work is worthy of Garibaldi."

I write of him freely here because he is no more. Two months after we left him, and just when he had put on the chevrons of a general, he slipped away one night for a private reconnaissance ----something about the enemy's tactics had puzzled him, and he wanted to see for himself. When he did not return, searching parties went out for him. They found him lying in the snow, shot clean through the heart by a sniper. No martyr of the newer Italy carried to his grave so many loyal regrets.

As we sat at dinner, the subject of telefericas forced its way into the conversation; and the Commander, speaking French, grew epic concerning his own system. As he went on from detail to detail, illustrating by means of a table-knife slanted against a wine-bottle, he dropped the pleasing information that one flight of the teleferica ran a hundred and fifty metres above ground. That, I calculated off-hand, was about as high as the average New York skyscraper; and I had never looked with pleasure out of a skyscraper window.

Now I had better stop here and describe, in the general and hazy way permitted to war correspondents, what we were about to do. The advanced base, our first destination, was a small plateau high up on the mountain; from there, as luck served, we were going to try for the glacier. To achieve the advanced base alone would have been a big feat of Alpine mountaineering in time of peace. Alpinists distinguish between summer ascents and winter ascents; and to them April and May count as winter months. Before the war, this base plateau was seldom reached in winter. Then one must have guides; he must edge his way perilously round corners of rocks ; he must cut paths with an ice axe. At certain stages of the journey the party must travel linked together with ropes, after the immemorial practice of Alpine work.

War changed all that. Men by thousands, and even mule trains, are going up to that base plateau every day. It needs nothing but strong legs, wind and endurance of altitudes, together with a willingness to brave avalanches. Had we chosen to climb, however, we untrained civilians from sea level must have started at (lawn; and, even with luck, we could hardly have reached the plateau by dark. This mountain work is a great tester of flaws in middle-aged men. As it was, we should mount by mule to the foot of the teleferica, and take the very hardest part of the rise in a few dazzling minutes. After we reached the advanced base, our expert Lieutenant assured us, there would be no real Alpine work, unless luck and the weather enabled us to go forward to some of the front trenches on the glacier---only plain climbing.

Giacomo woke me at dawn from rapturously pleasant dreams induced by health and the clear mountain air. The couriers of the sun were staining the peaks with all colours of the spectrum ; a cool, bracing breeze puffed down upon us. What with the air and the night's rest, I found myself in better courage of telefericas. As we mounted the curious, elevated saddles which furnished our stolid, plodding, sure-footed little mountain mules, the party grew gay. We should be in the Arctic before noon; but now we were passing through a temperate spring. The herbs were shooting up everywhere the meadows were white with edelweiss ; peasant women, their heads bound with gay kerchiefs, ploughed and planted beside the way. Strung along the valley were little villages of grey granite, tinted violet by the morning sun. In each successive hamlet civilians became less frequent. We reached one, at last, where all houses and shops were closed or commandeered for the soldiers, save a little café where a dark young June of a girl was selling cigarettes and giving repartee to the soldiers. The next town, cocked on the edge of a ravine, had suffered terribly from an Austrian big-gun bombardment during the first rush of Italy. The broken granite of its buildings made heaps of ruin all along the main street. The wall of one house stood; its gaping window-frames opening on a pile of débris. Over its door was a crude picture in primitive colours-the village church, a kneeling peasant woman in a red kerchief, a figure of the Virgin with outstretched arms, and the date "March 19, 1885." It recorded, 1 suppose, some miracle of cure or conversion; there it had stood for six months, a reminder to the crawling armies which threaded this ruin. We turned aside, at a cross-roads marked by a great wayside Calvary, and mounted by a highway which edged a deep crease of the mountains. Presently, what had begun as a roadside slope became a precipice, on the rim of which our mules, after the confidently reckless habit of their kind, continually took desperate chances. The opposing wall of the cleft, which bristled with straight evergreen trees thrust sharply through a mottled field of half-melted snow, seemed only a stone's throw away.

The Commander, infected with the gaiety of the party, grew communicative and fell to talking about "his boys" and their war in the air. Men had never done anything like it before, he said. Hannibal and Napoleon crossing the Alps ? They crossed hundreds and hundreds of metres lower than even the artillery positions of his boys up there. Garibaldi's famous mountain campaign of 1866? It was fought below timber-line, and mostly without artillery. Here was the Italian army fighting, and winning too, on the very glaciers. And it was an artillery fight; mind that! So we brushed past long mule trains going down for fresh loads, past files of reservists plodding upward; and----

There was the teleferica !

I had been dizzy with imagination when, the day before, I saw the stretch of that little hand -teleferica; but my imagination had never conceived anything like this one. I should say it was at least half a mile long, and it sagged upward to a great cliff. A carriage had just started as I looked. It became a dot in the distance; it lost itself against the grey cliff ; a weary time later I could see it reappear, a speck on the snow crown at the top of the cliff.

We were in the motor shed now; what with the surroundings, it resembled nothing so much as a shaft-house in the little mines of the Colorado Rockies. Now the carriage had come down, and an orderly was packing it comfortably with blankets for the first passage. This carriage is just a box, perhaps four feet long by two broad, and a foot and a half deep. Two frames attach it to the wheels which run on that slender cable, and it has scant room for two men, sitting face to face and legs by legs, with their backs braced against the frames. It is like riding through the air in a bread-basket. The terrifying thing about this carriage, to prospective passengers, is the low side rails. They appear no more than a foot high. It seems as though the slightest jog would overturn its load.

Matt, the Associated Press maim, used to be a sailor; he is scornful of dizzy heights. To my acute disappointment---for I wanted to get the ordeal over---the Commander picked him as companion on the first trip. I watched them go, gesticulating over the edge of the basket as they talked, to a point above a certain tall rock that edged the deepest chasm. Presently I could make them out no more as individuals; and then the speck reappeared on the snow at the top of the cliff.

"Don't you think we'd better have some hot soup?" asked the Lieutenant suddenly.

Beside the shaft-house a cook was ladling soup into the grub-cans of a newly arrived mule train. We found spare cans and begged a ration. For the Lieutenant, as I understand now, was wise in the soldierly technic of holding men to their work. It is half the art of being an officer. He had perceived, without my telling him, that I did not like sheer heights---a very common form of personal fear---and he was about to carry me through. When we packed ourselves into the basket ; when, with an au revoir from the captain in command of the shaft-house, we made a slow, halting start, gathered speed and shot away, I was still taking scalding-hot soup from a tin spoon. Just then our Lieutenant began to talk.

"You call this broth, don't you?" he asked. "In London I found they made a distinction between the word broth and the word soup. Can you tell me the exact difference?"

I half perceived what he was doing, and I clutched at this device for closing imagination. All through that flight we talked as hard as we could talk---upon Italian cooking, American cooking, British cooking ; upon the lack of variety in English meat-dishes and the hundred Italian sauces for macaroni ; upon corn on the cob and polenta. Once the regular speed of our carriage slackened ; but, before my imagination had time to rush to the surface and picture what might happen in case it stopped altogether, it had gathered speed and gone on.

An object rushed by us in the air. It was the other basket, passing on its downward flight. The trip was only half over, then; I thought we had gone farther than that And now the Lieutenant removed his eyes from mine and began to cast cool glances to right and left. I had a secondary terror at this moment for fear lie would ask me to view the scenery, and I should not have the moral courage to refuse. But he put no such test to my nerve. He let his eyes jump back to mine and continued to talk on food, drink and good cheer.

I was facing forward; and, though I kept my gaze fixed on his, I could not help seeing what was behind him. That grey cliff seemed to be moving nearer.

Would it ever arrive?, It crept and crept. Now it seemed I could have reached out and picked a bunch of sage-grey lichen which hung just behind the Lieutenant. And now there was a little jar as the wheels ran over a brace like a trolly pole. We were travelling across the snowcap at the top of the cliff. I became aware for the first time that my fingers were cramped from clutching the rail of the basket.

With the good, solid earth again under us, we trudged a mile or so across an upland plateau.

All in a burst we had come from the tree-growth of timber-line to a place as devoid of life as the moon; from a temperate winter to an Arctic winter. We could not see the higher peaks from here, for round shoulders of mountains cut them off. There was not even the relief of snow-shedding crags. It was all a gigantesque, rolling, tumbling field of white. The day had come off bright and even warm; as we walked, the easy perspiration of the mountains started on our skins so that we shed our overcoats. The sky above seemed to have changed from the heavenly Alpine blue, which we had been marking with joy at the lower levels, to a cruel slate-grey. The diamond points on the snow began to beat on our unaccustomed eyes, so that, on the advice of our Lieutenant, we slipped the orange-tinted goggles down from our grey knitted caps.

And now the Lieutenant, born Alpinist that he is, began to grow epic in his enthusiasm at finding himself once more above timber-line---the world of his youthful adventures and his long night-watches under the stars. When he was a boy, he said, he used to climb as far up as man dares to go alone, with two days' provisions and some books in his knapsack; and up there he used to study and dream. He had first read our English poets, he had first acquired his passion for Shakespeare, here on the higher levels. Over yonder--we should see presently---was a peak which his party had been first to scale and to name.

We were approaching a shaft-house. Again, as the orderlies packed me into the basket, I must shut my imagination and control my breath.

Any soldier will tell you that the second time under fire is more trying than the first. I found that the same rule holds of telefericas. Moreover, this was longer than the first flight, and, as I learned later---I did not look to see---somewhat higher. It seemed, at the end, that the cliff would never crawl down to me. But the Lieutenant knew all this, and---tactful man---he sprang the best device in his bag of tricks, brought up his heaviest gun.

He got me to talk about myself.

He asked me what I had written; and l wallowed in shameful egotism. Then, somewhere at about the height above-ground of all but the tallest skyscrapers, he switched the conversation to English poetry. Did I like Shelley? A friend of his had translated "The Sensitive Plant" into Italian---and had kept the music of the original, Listen! And he quoted a few lines in sonorous, rolling Italian. Did I knew Shakespeare's Sonnets? And, taking my cue from that, I spouted::

(If you fell four hundred and fifty feet, would you be dead before you arrived? The theory to that effect seemed worthy of a passionate adherence).

(Anyway, if you hit soft snow, you wouldn't be so messy as though you hit a concrete pavement. It might be a gentle thump.)

(Still, if there were rock-pinnacles under that snow---good night!)

The cliff rushed to us, rushed under us; we were travelling again across a snowy ridge. That, as it happened, was the day after the Shakespeare tercentenary, In all the three hundred years of our everliving poet, I doubt if he was ever quoted under such circumstances!

There were more flights to follow, but I was growing inured; and I dared occasionally to look down. Once we passed 50 feet above a trail, The men of a mule train stopped to gaze up at us. I could catch the glint of white teeth in their open, gaping mouths. After the heights we had already shot, this 50 feet did not seem to disturb me at all. Yet had we been dumped out there we should have died as suddenly and as thoroughly as though we had been dropped from 450 feet. Of all human emotions, I dare say, none not even love is so illogical as fear.

Now I have described this Arctic landscape as lifeless, but that is reckoning without the array for all the way up, even before we abandoned the mules, we had been getting glimpses of a wonderful organization, trafficking back and forth, doing in orderly fashion a hundred diverse things. Sometimes, as you stood in a bowl of the mountains, the trails seemed alive with crawling men and mules.

It kept reminding me of that old rush to Leadville in '79, when all the adventurers of the Western world packed up and climbed across the snow to death or treasure. Only in those old days of the Rockies the crowds were colourful and picturesque flaming cowboy bandannas flashed at you along the trails; rumbling old stage-coaches stuck beside you in the mud ; there were jingling silver spurs, carved Mexican hatbands, and the crude finery of frontier women. Here all was sober olive-grey. At one point a gang of soldier labourers dug a new road with pick and crowbar and blasting powder. At another a gang cleared, with heart-shaped shovels, the way through an old road that had been smothered in an avalanche.

Once, in this day's wanderings or the next, I saw along a white mountain-side a long string of men, looking like flies gathered on a sugared cord. When I put the glasses on them, I found that they were dragging a gun, mounted on sledges. Up they went, making almost imperceptible progress, across a slope on which a man could scarcely stand without the help of steps. Everywhere were trains of mules packed with explosives, with shells, with food, with clothing, with that variety of supplies which civilized men need to live and fight in the Arctics of the Temperate Zone, lurching along the edges of the precipices.

You could see here the organization of an army as by diagram ; you cannot see it so in flat country like Belgium or French Flanders. You understand why, for every ten men on the firing-line, a hundred are working behind, and why the man behind is more important sometimes than the man on the line.

The organization seemed to my inexperienced civilian eyes a perfect thing. I could notice no hitches anywhere, no leisurely methods, no undue haste, and no jams in the traffic. Everywhere, even to the Roof of Armageddon, I was to find the men well fed, well equipped, lacking no necessity. I remarked this to a Florentine captain I met somewhere up on the higher mountain levels, adding that the Germans, so proud of their teamwork, should see what the Italians had done.

"Ah!" said my Florentine. "This efficiency of which the Germans are so proud---it is an attempt to conquer by mediocrity. It cannot be done. The one thing always better than efficiency---it is genius!"

He should know, this Florentine, having sprung from the little town which produced more genius in two centuries than many great nations in their whole history!

By mule, by teleferica, and by legs, we came at last to that point among the mountains where there was safety from avalanches, where many troops were gathered, and where we were to make our start against the glacier. We were near the higher peaks now, those grey pinnacles that shoot up above the very ice fields. To this point, as 1 have said, only the most hardy and expert mountaineers came in winter before the war; and they seldom and as a kind of special feat. Even in summer it was too hard and high a climb for the mountain goatherds; they kept their flocks lower down. Except for Alpinists, the only large form of higher animal life that put foot or hoof on the solitudes was the wild chamois. Shy though he be, that brave courser of the crags has not abandoned his peaks to the armies. He is still hiding and dodging, even among the batteries. Now and then an Alpine infantryman brings one down with his service rifle, and there is a feast at headquarters.

It was melting a little now, and along the path to camp we even trod on mud. But this path must have run across a ridge; for just behind it a soldier, starting a piece of military work, was boring through the snow, looking for a foundation. He rammed and rammed; and his steel went down for 6 or 7 feet before it rang on rock.

Men were coming our way---at first a group of officers, who greeted us after the fashion of the Italian Army, by saluting and giving their names; and then straggling files of soldiers, who had turned out from the bunk-sheds to view this unparalleled spectacle---civilians!

They might have been Gurkhas or Apache Indians, for their complexions. That glare of sun on snow, which was turning my own face a feverish lobster-red, had tinted them not only brown but almost black. The North Italian is not especially, dark; there are as many grey-eyed men among the Alpini as brown-eyed---as many brown-haired men as black-haired. But the sun spares no complexion on the roof of the world.

The camp was like other camps; it is better that I should not describe it. Here, as elsewhere in the real mountains, we saw no aeroplanes. The highest fighting in the Alps is almost at the extreme possible elevation of flight; the aviator who dared it would merely skim the peaks and passes, an easy target.

While we stood there, imparting news from Rome and General Headquarters a company of soldiers with packs on their backs and ice clamps over their shoulders raced down a snowy decline into camp. They were frolicking like boys---snowballing, washing one another's faces, coming on by great, vaulting leaps.

"They are just back from the trenches," said the officer in command.

Now I had seen many men of many armies "just back from the trenches," and the contrast here struck me at once. The others had shown the strain in pinched faces and weary movements; but the Alpini came back larking. The men of these peaks, fighting not only the enemy but Nature, weary leagues and heights away from civilization, are the most cheerful warriors I have seen in Armageddon. Why, I cannot guess---unless it be the nobility bred of the mountains.

When we had finished luncheon, which a sergeant cooked for us over a spirit-stove, our lieutenant inspected the kit and equipment of his little command and issued orders. Our great steel-barred Alpine boots were wet in spite of the thorough greasing Giacomo had given them that morning. It is hard to keep dry feet in thawing weather. Those boots must be greased again. We must put on two fresh pairs apiece of heavy woollen socks. Our big double sweaters, our mask-like knitted caps and our long woollen mittens had come up in our knapsacks by teleferica and soldier-back. Another squad of soldiers would carry them and our overcoats up to the point where we might need wraps badly.

"It is warm enough now," explained the Lieutenant; 'but you never know. And see!" He pointed upward.

From the higher peaks, in the direction of our coarse, tufts and whirls of white snow-mist were blowing. "There is wind and a tempest over there," he said.

Then he issued the orders of the day. The mountains rose above us, shoulder on shoulder, to the grey serrated crags which were the peaks. Between two of these crags dropped a kind of pass---an edge of the giant glacier. When we reached it we should be on the eternal ice. .A path tracked in the snow ran over the slopes of the ascent until we lost it completely in the distance. All along the way were men; up toward the pass they showed merely as the faintest specks. I noticed after a time that two of these specks were moving downward, and moving fast. I got them with the field glasses. They were ski-runners, cavalry of the mountains, coasting. As I looked, the foremost reached the top of a short slope. He rose with the grace and skim of an aeroplane "taking the air." He soared; he came down in a flurry of snow, and sped on.

Our Lieutenant mentioned that it was not perilous climbing, this. We should not even need the ice clamps, those devices like the spikes of a telephone lineman by which Alpinists make sure their footing on ice. But if was going to be hard work. When we reached the pass we should see. And so, our soldier bearers before and behind, we began the climb---up and up.

On the first level we passed more soldiers just back from trench work---the same larking boys. Always when I met a detachment of Italian soldiers I used to call out:

"Who speaks English here?"

It seldom failed to bring a response, and usually five or six. Then the English-speaking soldiers would come forward to tell me that they used to work in Buffalo or Dayton or New York or Chicago. However, the Southerner, not the Northerner, is the Italian of the United States; and when, this time, I gave my hailing call, I scarcely expected a response. But a voice replied in excellent English

"I do!"

"Where do you come from?" That was the second question in the formula.

"Leadville, Colorado," he said. "I work in the Johnnie Hill Mine."

Leadville! I was brought up in that town on the Roof of the Divide; and all day long these mountains had been recalling to me forgotten vistas of the peaks about Mount Massive.

His name was Joe Rossi. He had worked as a miner in many places, such as Ogden, Salt Lake and Ouray; but Leadville was the latest foothold in his wandering life. He liked the camp, he said; he had a good time there. As we squatted in the snow, the rest of the Alpini staring as though trying to catch our strange conversation, he showed himself pathetically eager to talk commonplaces about the old home. We spoke of how the through train stops at Malta now, and your car goes up to Leadville by a side line; of the new moving-picture shows; of the Elks' Opera House; of Boa Loeb's Pioneer Saloon. He was so avid of conversation about Leadville that he showed up later at my quarters for another talk.

As we pushed on, all our old sins of pipes and cigarettes began to be expiated in our middle-aged hearts. Soldiers climbed past us, a reproach to our feeble legs and lungs; more soldiers were coming down. We struck a very steep slope, where we must set our spiked boots carefully into the slippery trail. And here we were forced to dodge suddenly in order to escape a squad coasting without steels, They had simply drawn their army overcoats between their legs, sat down, and let themselves go.

They would coast thus until the speed grew dangerous, when they would turn their course into the loose snow, up half-buried, rise, shake themselves and start again. Our lieutenant yelled out something in emphatic Italian to the effect that the King, not they, had paid for those breeches; but before he finished they were out of hearing.

So we struggled on, the easy perspiration bathing our bodies. Hiatt was doing better than I, being younger and less guilty of cigarettes. Constantly he drew away from me. With that Anglo-Saxon instinct which makes of every sport a contest, I would force myself until I could go no farther; would stop; would droop over my alpenstock and pant like a netted fish. Always the Lieutenant was holding me back, and at last he came down sharply.

"I command here!" he said. "You must wait. We have come up more than two thousand metres since morning. The heart has to accommodate itself. I can take up invalids, even people with defective hearts, if they go slowly enough. You shall not advance until long after you have finished panting."

We seemed very near the summit of the pass now yet each time we surmounted a ridge there was another before us. The tempest was still raging above, whirling swift snow-clouds from the peaks. And, as we looked forward, we had a strange illusion. It seemed that we were crawling to the edge of a caldron, and that the speeding mists were not snow-clouds, blown horizontally, but fumes rising from the depths of the great kettle beyond.

When, at last, we had thrown ourselves on to a sled which happened to be standing at the summit of the pass; when the ski men of our escort had bundled us in our double sweaters, our coats and our long mittens, there seemed, at first, but little to see. We were looking simply on a snow-field with a snowstorm sweeping it here and there we could catch the rise of a grey rock pinnacle. Also, as the snow flew and settled at the mercy of the wind, we could catch glimpses through the glasses of spots where the Italians had set their trenches, or of incredible positions they had already taken and passed. Those positions looked very near; but to reach them, our escort informed us, would take many hours. Even then it would be an uncertain venture in such weather for soft civilians.

We spoke to our Lieutenant about trying again on the morrow ; strangely, considering his sportsman's enthusiasm for making records with his correspondents, lie remained unenthusiastic. At the time, I was a little puzzled. However, we had seen Italian front trenches on the Isonzo, and as we considered our condition of heart and lungs, we grew reconciled. After all, we said to ourselves, we were the first civilians to reach this place since the war began. We did not know the truth until later. Three days before, an Italian moving picture operator had reached not only the glacier but the front trenches. The swashbuckler of the camera is the adventurer without peer in these modern days.

The Adamello, spreading over a hundred square kilometres, is one of the great glaciers of the world. Now it has become a battlefield, the strangest on which man ever fought. I can give no better idea of its conformation than this homely comparison. Heap up a panful of loose, jagged, splintered rock, with many of the splinters sticking up in the air, and pour over it a pailful of white glue. The glue will settle, before it

hardens, into the spaces between the rook points; and here and there it will pour over the edge of the pile. The splinters of rock are the glacial peaks the glue is the eternal ice; the points of overflow are the passes, like the one which we had reached.

Underfoot it looked like a snow-field, no different from the others we had been traversing. However, the Lieutenant pointed to a spot, revealed now by a rift of the storm, where a series of glass-green cracks broke the flat surface. This was ice, Arctic and eternal.

"Crevasses," he said; "that is why we go roped together in Alpine work. Those crevasses will open unexpectedly under your feet, and if you are not roped to your party you cannot get out."

We rested, shivering under our double sweaters and our heavy ulsters. And when our hearts grew accustomed to the new altitude there were more climbing and some perilous scrambling, until at last, with little force left in us, we reached the gun---at that period the highest, probably, in Armageddon.

Concerning this piece of artillery and its surroundings I may not write in detail; courtesy and the censorship forbid. How the Artillery Reservists got it up to the glacier by sheer man-power---sometimes advancing only a hundred yards a day, sometimes stopped by a blizzard, sometimes following new roads blasted out by expert Italian dynamite workers from our Pennsylvania mines---that will make a great story when the war is done. To draw it within killing range of the Austrians, many a brave man had died in the avalanches.

The crew, quartered not far away, had all the comforts one could expect in Arctic conditions. Their avalanche-proof hut was built for compactness; in their bunks they lay like sardines. A caldron of sausages and potatoes was cooking for dinner, and the captain insisted on brewing tea, seasoned with condensed milk. An English-speaking soldier greeted us at the door---but he had learned our tongue in Australia.

However, the thing I remember best about the gun is the leaving of it. As we scrambled down, beyond sight of the glacial field, the storm increased. The gun was a black blotch against a background of whirling, drifting white. And on its breech stood a soldier singing ----singing with full voice, into the teeth of the blizzard, a gay love-ballad of Naples.

Though we did not see the advanced trenches, save at a distance and through a storm, we learned here and elsewhere something of the life out there. Of course in terrain like this a continuous trench line is impossible. With a choice of positions which only a military engineer would understand, the belligerents have laid trenches, sometimes only a few hundred yards long, between this pair of peaks, that set of crevasses. The opposing trenches seem nowhere to come very close together, as they do often on the Isonzo, in Flanders, or along the Aisne. From three to six hundred yards is a good average distance, I judge.

They have built the trench parapets of sandbags but even before the bags are set the barricades become snow trenches, what with the continual drift. The men live like Eskimos in an igloo, but without fire---though they have plenty of warm clothing, white for protection against enemy observation, and certain other rough comforts. Frozen feet, I may say, seem rarer here than in the lowlands. However, cold takes its toll of life in another way. A wounded man, because of lowered vitality, often freezes to death before they can get him out.

Though there are no fires for warmth, they use a little device adapted from the Japanese, to produce heat without flame. The suggestion, I believe, came from an Italian woman who has travelled in the Orient. This serves for hot tea. Also to points easy of access hot dinners come up in those giant vacuum bottles which I have described before. Otherwise the food is cold, but plentiful and heat-making. The ration includes a half-litre of wine a day.

When the great winter snowstorms rage over the glacier, they blot out all sight of landmarks. One might pass within a rod of his camp and never find it. However, the Italians have methods, not here to be described, for finding one's way in the blizzards. Still, men sometimes get lost. Once a party of four was found on the Adamello roped together and frozen to death-only one of them wounded. Sometimes, again, the weather and the state of military operations have cut off a trench or an advanced post from all touch with the rear.

Somewhere in this sector of the Alps, they told me, a detachment was isolated for forty days. All that time they lived Eskimo-fashion, on accumulated provisions, and fought like devils. They were only a few miles from the comforts of the base and only a few more from their homes in the valley below yet they might have been fighting at the Pole. Sometimes in that period the thermometer fell as far as 41° Fahrenheit, below zero. Yet they held the position and were relieved in the end.

When we emerged from the pass, on our return, we stepped at once from winter to spring. In two minutes of walking we felt the atmosphere change from arctic to temperate. Behind us, on the field of the glacier, the snow still whirled, while before us the sun was shining bright and hot in a cloudless sky. And now we could sit on a snow-bank and enjoy a view that not two men a year ever saw before this war, so perilous and difficult was the ascent to the Adamello---the winter-covered peaks of the Alps from above.

I do not know why I try to describe it. Some things are beyond words; when you look for the appropriate descriptive phrases you achieve only bombast. Far, far below us lay like a diagram on white paper the advanced base from which we had climbed. Before was a forest of peaks, ghost-white except for the grey pinnacles of stratified, pipe-organ rock. They stretched away, roll and rise after roll and rise, even to stately Mont Blanc, crowned now with the only clouds in this prospect. Although we were a little lower than the highest of these crags which are famous Alpine peaks, we seemed, by the illusion of distance, to be gazing down on them.

It appeared all white and grey as we first looked, our minds vibrating with the inexpressible. Then there came out the colour of it. That white wall just before us, across the fathomless valley, was already in the shadow of the lowering sun. It was not white, but violet-blue. Bluer still were the snowy eminences in the far distance. From behind the many-pronged peak in the near distance a light mist was rising. It was pale, yellowish green, like a tint which tinges sometimes the shallows of a tropical ocean. A glacier hooded a long crest in the middle distance. That glacier below our feet seemed all flat white. This one in the distance was of the same glittering drab grey as the sides of a military balloon---it looked like a deep-sea slug lying there out of its element.

And, even if you forgot the troops of men, crawling up and down everywhere as far as you could see man, the prospect no more appeared lifeless. It was not only the ravens, followers of battles, which soared and called above. It was not only the streams, beginning to break out here and there through the snow. There was a sense of life dwelling and bursting underneath it all--- life which was going to conquer when the lordly sun entered into his kingdom of summer.

So we walked and rolled and slid back to the camp. Our Lieutenant taught us the Alpine trick of descending slopes in loose snow-jump and slide on the trail until you find yourself going too fast, then turn aside and check yourself in a snow-bank. Heights whose ascent had taken weary hours we negotiated in minutes. Wrapped in every garment we had, and then tucked into wool-lined bags, we slept under a hut on a shelf of rock, Once, Alpini going forward awakened its by their singing, and once we heard the reverberation of guns.

I woke and packed not without apprehension of the teleferica. I had learned by now that I was not alone in my dislike of that device. Alpini officers had confessed to me that they preferred shell-fire to the damned thing." As one of them put it, in very good London English, "I don't mind any height so long as my feet are on ground; it's getting them off ground that bothers you." It struck me, too, that a descent, where you would feel yourself flying out into the empyrean, might be more trying than an ascent. But when we came out at daybreak into an overcast morning, our lieutenant informed us that we should walk down.

"The teleferica will be rather busy," he said. This---though descent in such weather involved avalanche-dodging---gratified me; but it puzzled me also. Suddenly, rumours I had heard from the men, together with the Lieutenant's easy renunciation of his designs on the front trenches, matched with this fact in my mind. An attack was coming. Our friend the Commander, energetic soldier that he was, intended to start the fighting-season early. That was the reason for the heavy transport through which we toiled the day before. As we breakfasted and made our packs, the signs multiplied. Not the least of these was the subdued determination of the officers when we bade them good-bye.

With short intervals when we trudged across a high plateau, we seemed to be threading precipices all the way. The transport had increased during the night; everywhere we quarrelled for footholds with the mule-trains. Once they caught us in a ticklish position---a train loaded with high explosive on one side of the road, a precipice on the other. We had to walk cannily, here and there edging round the nervous rump of a mule. We were past this, were walking for a space on free road, when I remembered with a start that some one had called out to me

"Look out, kid! That mule of mine has got a punch in both feet " Often the sound of your native speech in a foreign land brings no immediate surprise, so natural does it seem at first.

There were avalanches, too, hanging from the crags, ready at any moment to let go their hair-triggers. One road criss-crossed with a dozen turns down the lace of a mountain almost perpendicular; the snow-rifts in the grooved cliff which made its summit appeared fairly to shake and tremble. We travelled fast ; and the drivers of a mule-train, going up, lashed their beasts the while they eyed that summit. Below us, a waterfall had just begun to thaw out; its first spring waters were running over a gigantic icicle, and a skylark circled up, filling the gorge with music, until he came level with our eyes. But the snow still held in the runways at the summit.

As we reached the plateau below this slope and escaped from the menace of hanging snow, we met an officer, a slim, classic-featured little subaltern who wore his uniform like a Roman dandy and sported a gold bracelet, from which dangled his identification-badge and a jewelled luck-charm, formed like a twisted carrot, against the Evil Eye. He had just climbed from the valley-base; he was going forward to the attack, he told us. I have forgotten exactly how many hours and minutes the journey had taken; but the record, when he gave it caused our Lieutenant to stare and apostrophize the twenties, "when a man can do anything with his body."

"No one killed in the avalanches yesterday," he reported, speaking French out of courtesy, "but they got five mules. The drivers swam out."

"That's the only way to escape from an avalanche," said our Lieutenant as the boy saluted and went on---"swim. Throw yourself face down and swim the breast-stroke against it as hard as you can. If you go with it, or if you just struggle, you're dead." So we trudged on to the base of the teleferica and the mules.

That night after dinner our Lieutenant informed us that we must return to General Headquarters alone. "I have business here for a few days," he said. I guessed the business; but it was Giacomo who made conjecture certain.

He was unwinding my puttees that night when he said in French:

"Pardon, monsieur, is my master going back with you?"

"No," I said, over-bluntly, "he is staying here for a few days."

Giacomo stood still, a puttee trailing from his hand.

"Per Dio---per Bacco!" he said; and then, gripping his French again, "that means a fight---a very big fight!

Three days after we reached Headquarters, the news came from the communiqués: in the zone of the Adamello, the Alpini, by a series of daring manoeuvres, had taken five pinnacles. A fortnight later, I heard from our Lieutenant. "It was glorious " he wrote; "my commander's attack was worthy of Garibaldi. I am alive not by one miracle but by many, and we are three kilometres nearer Trent

The concierge of that flat-house in the Rue St. Martin was severe in looks, as these glorified janitors of Paris usually are. Whenever I passed upstairs to my daily French lesson she seemed to regard me as a burglar. Sometimes a younger woman peered through the lattice where the concierge kept guard, and I noticed two quiet, well-behaved little French boys playing in the area-way with an equally quiet and well-behaved French dog.

Madame, my teacher, upstairs, used to laugh at the suspicions of the concierge. "You are blond, monsieur," she said; "you have much hair, you are foreign, and you wear spectacles. Therefore you are a German spy! And sometimes they are very deeply distressed," she added. "There is much fighting about Arras, and Monsieur the Captain is there."

"The Captain?" I said.

He is a captain now," she answered. Then she told me the story as though there was nothing unusual about it. In the French army, promotion goes strictly by merit. The son-in-law of the concierge, in peace-time a small clerk in a wholesale cloth house, had entered the war a private in the Reserve. He had won his sergeant's chevrons at the battle of the Marne, had become a lieutenant at the Aisne, had risen to be a captain. France is full of such stories; men of humble station and small talents for the occupations of peace have everywhere discovered talent for war; and the French army recognizes and encourages talent wherever found.

The younger woman was his wife, come to live with her mother, the concierge, in this period of stress ; the two little boys were his children. After this I regarded the concierge with more interest; and by and by, having learned that I was only a monsieur Américain, she unbent. We used to discuss the war, and she told me herself about her son-in-law who was a captain. Plainly, she was as proud of him as though he had been her own son.

One day, after we had established acquaintance, the concierge barely spoke as she opened the window. There was a shade over her.

"Has anything happened to the concierge?" I asked madame. Madame's own soldier was still in Reserve, issuing clothing at Lyons. It was not unkind, therefore, to speak of casualties.

'Nothing---perhaps," said madame. "It is the communiqué." She picked up the copy of Le Matin from her work-table and pointed to this passage: "The enemy made an attack of moderate violence yesterday in the region of Arras. It was repulsed at all points."

"You see, when---anything---anything happens to a soldier," said madame, "it is four or five days before the letter of notification comes from the mairie. They know he is at Arras. When they hear of fighting there---figure for yourself

Three or four days passed; spirits and life came back to the concierge and her daughter. Nothing had arrived from the mairie. I took to watching the communiqués myself for that word "Arras." It occurred once again before I left Paris that time; and again the life went out of that little family group behind the lattice of the concierge.

Two or three weeks later I slipped into Paris again The concierge greeted me cheerfully. Yes, Monsieur the captain was still "par Arras." They had received a letter, full of things very amusing. Soon he might become a major.

The next day the communiqué said: ' Yesterday we gained three hundred metres of the enemy's trenches near Arras."

I went out of town over Sunday; and Monday morning I visited again the house in the Rue St. Martin.

No one came to the wicket. I looked inside. The daughter, in black, sat at a desk writing a letter. The concierge, also in black, was standing in the centre of the room. She had sunk her arms on the table and her head in her arms. The two little boys sat up very stiffly on the sofa in the corner, looking with wide and solemn eyes at their grandmother.

I reached through the lattice and opened the door myself. No one noticed me.