Juno 22, 1916 
LAND & WA T E R 
17 
The Roof of Armageddon 
By Will Irwin 
[This vivid description oj Italian fighting in the High 
Alps — a form 0/ fighting not at all realised in this 
country — is from the pen of the famous American 
xeiar correspondent, Mr. Will Irwin. Mr. Irwin, it 
ivill b: remembered, made a great reputation at the 
beginning of the war for his exceedingly graphic 
accounts of the early battles in France and Flanders^ 
*' )C ^^ now," said our Lieutenant, whose English 
/^k is idiomatic even under excitement, " it is 
/— .% le.es ! " He jumped down, skipping like a boy 
U, Jm-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 Lieuten- 
ant's military ser\-ant loaded himself like a pack mule 
with om- knapsacks of Arctic clothing and we crunched 
on. The spring snow had been wet and heavy all that 
day as we climbed by train and by motor under the pano- 
ramas of the Alps. Our feet, in spite of our five-pound, 
hob-nailed, grease-soaked Alpine boots, and our two 
pairs of wool 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, 
casj' swing of that exceptional mountaineer, our Lieuten- 
ant. 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 
were going to be doings of some kind in the advanced 
Alpine base just ahead. 
\\hat we had been seeing all day in the way of scenerj', 
what we were seeing now in the rifts of the 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. 
To left and right shot up great ridges bristling with 
straight lirs now snow-dusted. Behind these ridges rose 
white precipices, behind them pinnacles of grey rock so 
abrupt that the snow clung onlj' to the clefts, and further 
up — but that was lost in the whirling snow mist. It was 
clear, however, in one direction, where the snow had 
stopped momentarily. And there, at the very top of the 
landscape rose a sheer wall of white. It seemed impos- 
sible that anything which travelled on legs could scale 
that wall ; \-et beyond its very top, as we know, 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 
lighters above their food, their ammunition, all the heavy 
and complicated apparatus pf an army in action. 
The camp, wh.en 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 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 Alpinists 
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 two long barrack sheds were half 
cylinders of black building-paper bowed down with laths, 
a squad of men in white w-ere 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 hrst man could arise. They 
grappled, they wrestled, with their skis performing 
awkward evolutions in the air ; and all the rest of the 
camp yelled loud encouragement. 
As we, stood with the officers, getting acquainted, a 
company jmssed by in single lile, lifting themselves by 
their wheel-tipped alpenstocks. These were not Alpinists 
as their caps showed, but infantry reservists, they wlvb 
help to 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, jjelted him unmercifully. On a slope 
above, a company 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 to 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 ship-shape. 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 
bunk of canvas, slung from boards, a sleeping-bag and a 
straw pillow, book shelves, even a little shelf for a reading 
lamp. What gave it the home touch to m.e. however, 
was' the finish of the walls. As in the miners' cabins of 
the Sierra and the Rockies, they were papered with news- 
papers and illustrated weeklies, stuck on by flour paste. 
The furniture was made on the spot of pine boards, 
fashioned during the long pauses of the winter storms 
by soldiers glad of something to do. 
All that afternoon, in fact all the way from Head- 
quarters, we had been hearing details concerhing the life 
and organisation of the Alpini, whom circumstances have 
made a corps d'elite of the Italian army ; and the 
Lieutenant told us still more as we strolled off to bed. 
The men of these mountain 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 goat- 
herders, following their fiocks 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 them- 
selves. They have tracked and killed chamois along the 
higher peaks. By the time he comes to the army, the 
average Alpine infantryman is learned in the craft of the 
mountains which recjuires special senses acquired only in 
childhood. 
During his two years of army service, the Alpinist 
finishes off his education in mountaineering. He roughs 
it through all weathers, " hardening his meat " as the 
Indians say, and learning under expert guidance all that 
he had not already learned 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. The increase of forces to war strength and 
the inevitable losses have brought to this work thousands 
of men from Southern Italy, who never saw snow before 
the war, yet they are standing an Arctic climate as hardily 
as their comrades of the North. There is a wonderful 
vitality in all these Italians. 
In the theory of Italian army organisation, each regi- 
ment defends or extends that border lying nearest the 
district from which it is recruited. The men know that 
district with its peculiarities and tiicks of weather; 
and they fight for their homes. In the practice of this 
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 in French 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 — his home. 
The ofiicers of the Alpini. if not all mountain-born, are 
usually at least from Northern Italy — Milan, Turin, 
Brescia, Verona, Vicenza and the like. From the time 
they enter service, they follow with enthusiasm what, I 
dare say, is the noblest sport in the world — mountain 
scaling. As 3'our cavalryman plays polo, so do they try 
for impossible peaks or new ways of getting at peaks 
