i8 
LAND & WATER 
June 29, 1916 
From the hiisrher peaks, in the direction of our course, 
tufts and whirls of white snow-mist were blowing. 
" There is a 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 was a kind of Pass- an edge of the giant 
glacier. \\'hen we reached it we should be on the eternal 
ice. 
Our Lieutenant mentioned that it was not ponlous 
chmbing. this. We should not even need the ice-damps, 
those devices like the spikes of a telephone lineman by 
which Alpinists make sure their footing on ice. But 
it 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 another company just 
back from the 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 responses. Then 
the English-speaking soldiers would come forward to tell 
me that thev used to work in Buffalo or Dayton or New 
York or Chicago. However, the South Itahan.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 good English : 
" I do! " 
" \\here do you come from ? " I asked. That was the 
second auestion in the formula. 
" Leailville, 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 manv places, such as Ogden. Salt Lake and Ouray, but 
Leadviile was the latest foothold in his wandering life. 
He hked the camp, he said ; he had a good time there. 
We squatted in the snow, the rest of the Alpini staring 
as though tr\'ing to catch our strange conversation. 
He showed himself pathetically eager to talk common- 
places about the old home. We spoke of how the through 
train stops at Malta and your car goes up to Leadville by 
a side line, of the new movie-shows, of the Elk's Opera 
House, of Ben Loeb's Pioneer Saloon. He was so avid 
of conversation about Leadville that he showed up at 
my quarters that night for another talk. 
.^s we pushed on, all our old sins of pipes and cigarettes 
began to be expiated in our middle-aged hearts. Sol- 
diers 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 scpiad 
coasting without sleds. The\' had simply drawn their 
army overcoats between their legs, sat down and let 
themselves go. They would coast thus imtil the speed 
grew dangerous, w'hen they would turn their course into 
the kiose snow, bring 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. 
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 as if we 
were crawling to the edge of a cauldron, and that the speed- 
ing 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 skimen 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, a snow storm sw'eeping it, and here and 
there we could catch the rise of a grey rock-pinnacle. 
•Also, as the snow rose and settled at the mercy of the 
wind, we could catch glimpses of sj)ots where the Italians 
had set their trenches, or of incredible positions whicli 
they had already taken and passed. Those positions 
looked very near ; but to reach them, our escort mformed 
us, would take many hours. 
The Adamello, spreading over a hundred square kilo- 
meters, is one of the f,Tcat glaciers of the world. Now it 
has become a battlefield, the strangest on w-hich man 
e\-er fought. I can give no better idea of its confonna- 
tion than this homely comparison : Heap up a pan of 
loose, jagged, splintered rock, with many of the splinters 
sticking up in the air, and pour over it a pail of white 
glue. The glue will settle, before it hardens, into the 
spaces between the rock-points ; and here and there 
it will flow over the edge of the pile. The splinters of 
rock are the grey glacial peaks ; the glue is the eternal 
ice ; the points of overflow are the passes, like the one 
upon which we stood now. 
We rested, shivering under our double sweaters and 
our coats, and when our hearts grew accustomed to the 
new altitude, there was more climbing and some perilous 
scrambling until at last, with little force left in us, we 
reached one of the very highest guns of Armageddon. Of 
the gun it is not necessary to speak. 
How they got it there 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 who learned their 
trade in the Pennsylvania mills — 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 blizzards. 
The crew, quartered not far away, had all the comforts 
which one may hope for in Arctic conditions. Their 
avalanche-proof hut was built for compactness ; in their 
bunks they lay like sardines. A cauldron of sausages 
and potatoes was cooking for dinner, and the Captain 
insisted on brewing tea, seasoned with condensed milk. 
There was an English-speaking soldier here, too — but 
he had learned our tongue in Australia. 
However, the thing I remember best about this gun is 
the leaving of it. As we scrambled tiown, 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 breach stood a soldier, singing — singing 
with full voice, into the teeth of the blizzard, a gay love- 
song of Naples. 
When we came across 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. For 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 down on a snowbank and enjoy a view which not two 
men a year ever saw from this point before this war, 
so perilous and difficult was the ascent— the winter- 
covered peaks of the Alps from above. 
We descended before darkness fell. The Lieutenant 
taught us to advance down loose snow by the same 
expert jumps which the Alpini employ. We were 
minutes in descending heights which it had taken houi-s 
to ascend. Wrapped in every garment we had, \ye slept 
in bags that night under a hut on a shelf of rock. Once 
guns woke us, and once the singing of a company starting 
out before dawn on some expedition into the zone of ice 
and fire. In the cloudy morning of the next day we 
walked back by trail through the orderly confusion of army 
transport. There was avalanche dodging to do in that 
walk ; but I, for one, preferred it to descent by teleferica. 
* ' * * * * 
It is a fortnight since I wrote what precedes this ; and 
now I may say more. During all that trip to the glacier, 
we knew without being told that battle was impending 
on those peaks. That was the reason, I may say now, 
why we never saw the front trenches of the" Adamello. 
The storm delayed us for a day ; and the next day there 
was business afoot which it was not for a civilian to see. 
But they used our gun at the edge of the pass and used 
it well ; the Italian line went forward two miles along the 
glacier, taking peak after peak. The gun — at the time 
when we saw it probably the highest in all Armageddon 
— went with them. And to-day I have a letter from our 
Lievitenant, who stayed behind because he would not 
leave an impending fight. " I am alive by miracles," 
he says, " and we are three kilometers nearer Trent." 
