February 15, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
13 
The Soldier who Sings— II 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
III the opening pari of his article, published last week, 
Mr. Lcii'is R. Treeman describes how the Italian soldier 
sings under all circunistances, except when he is for- 
bidden in the High Alps t'oi' fear of starting avalanches. 
Mr. Freeman is probably the only foreign correspondent 
aho has had the opportunity of seeing the Italian Army 
working under winter conditions of exceptional severity. 
He further, illustrates the poiver of song. 
A S regards the spirits of an Alpini. song is a baro- 
/\ meter ; as regards his health, a thermometer. 
/ % An experienced Alpini officer will judge the 
jL A-mental or physical condition of one of his 
men by noting the way he is singing, or refrainhig 
from singing, just as a man determines the condition 
of his dog by touching its nose to see if it is hot 
or cold. I remember standing for a half-hour . on the 
wind-swept summit of a lofty Trentino pass with a dis- 
tinguished Major-General, who had taken me out that 
afternoon in his little mountain-climbing motor to give 
me an idea of how the winter road was kept clear in a 
blizzard. The wind was driving through the " notch " 
of the pass at fifty miles an hour, the air was stiff with 
falling and drifting snow, and it was througli the narrow ed 
holes in our " capuchos " that we watched a battalion 
filing by on its way from the front line trenches to the 
plains for a spell of rest in billets. Packs and cloaks 
were crusted an inch thick with frozen snow, eye- 
brows were frosted, beards and moustaches icicled ; but, 
man after man (though sometimes, as a wind blast 
swallowed the sound, one could only guess it by the 
rhythmically moving hps). they marched singing. Now 
and then, as the drifts permitted, they marched in lusty 
choruses of two and threes : but for most part each man 
was warbling on his own, and many of them probably 
simply humming inprovisations, giving vocal expression 
to their thoughts. ^ 
Suddenly the General stepped forward and, tapping 
sharply with his alpenstock on the ice-stiff skirt of one 
of liis marchers brought him to a halt. The frost-rimmed 
haloes fringing the puckered apertures in the two hoods 
came close together, and there was a quick interchange 
of question and answer between wind-mulfted mouths. 
Then, with a pat of admonition, the General shoved 
the man back into the passing line. 
" That boy wasn't singing," he roared into my car in 
response to my look of interrogation as he stepped back 
into the drift beside me. " Knew something was wrong 
— so stopped him and asked what. Said he got thirsty — 
ate raw snoW' — made throat sore. Told him it served 
him quite right — that an Arab from Tripoli d know 
better 'n to cat snow." 
Three or four times more in the quarter hour that 
elapsed before the heightening storm drove us to the 
shelter of a rufugio the General stopped men whose face 
or bearing implied that there was no song on their lips 
or in their hearts, and in each instance it transpired that 
something was wrong. . One man confessed to ha\'ing 
discarded his flannel abdominal belt a couple of days 
previously and was developing a severe case of dysentery 
as a perfectly natural consequence of the chill which 
followed. Another had just been kicked by a passing 
mule, and a third had received word that mornihg that 
liis newly-born child was dead and its mother dangerously 
ill. The two former were shoved none too gently back into 
line \N ith what a])peared to be the regulation prescription 
in such cases of " Serves you right for your carelessness," 
but I thought I saw a note slipped into the hand of the 
latter as the General pressed it in sympathy, and promised 
to see that leave should be arranged for at once. 
* * * i-t ^ 
But it is not only the buoyant Al])ini who pours out his 
soul in song. The Italian soldier, no matter fi"om what 
part of the country he comes or on what sector of the 
Front he is .stationed, can no more work or light without 
singing than he can without eating. Indeed, a popular 
song that is heard ,all along the Front relates ho^^•, for 
some reason or other, an order went out to the army 
that there was to be no singing in the trenches, andot 
how a soldier, protesting to his officer, exclaimed, " But, 
my Captain, if I cannot sing I shall die of sadness ; 
arid surely it is better that I should die fighting the 
enemy than that I should expire of a broken heart ! " 
On many a drizzly winter morning, motoring past the 
painted SiciUan carts which form so important a feature 
of the Italian transport on the broken hills of the Isonzo 
Front, I noted with sheer astonishment that the drivers 
were far and away likelier to be singing than sweariijg 
at the mules. To one who has driven mules, or even 
li\cd in a country where mules are driven, I will not need 
to advance any further c^-idcnce of the SiciUan soldier's 
love of song. 
And on that stony ti-ench-torn plateau of the Carso, 
where men live in ca\erns under tht; earth, and where the 
casualties are multiplied two and three-fold by the frag- 
ments of explosive-shattered rock ; even there — on 
this deadliest and most repulsive of all the battle-fronts 
of Armageddon — the lilting melodies of sunny southern 
Italy, punctuated but never for long interrupted by the 
shriek and detonation of Austrian shells, arc heard on 
e\cry hand. 
There was a trio' of blithe rock-breakers that furnished 
me with one of the most grimly amusing impressions of 
my visit. It was toward the end of December and 
Captain 
the indefatigable young officer who had 
me in charge, arranged an especial treat in the form of a 
visit to a magnificent observation on the brink of a hill 
which the Italians had wrested from the Austrians in one 
of their late advances. We picked our way across some 
miles of this shell-churncKl and still uncleared battlefield 
and munched our hmch of sandwiches on the parapet of a 
trench from which one could follow, but with few breaks, 
the course of the Austrian lines in the hills beyond 
Gorizia to where they melted into the marshes fringing 
the sea. 
" There's only one objection to this vantagQ/ point," 
remarked the Captain, directing his glass along nTc lower 
fringe of the clouds that hung low on the opposite hills. 
" Unless the weather is fairly thick one is under the direct 
observations of the Austrians over there for close to an 
hour, both going and coming." 
And at that psychological moment the clouds began to 
lift, the sun came out, and, taking advantage of the first 
good " gunnery weather " that had chanced in a month, 
the artillery of both sides opened up for as lively a bit of 
practice as any really sober-minded individual could 
care to be mixed up amongst. I have seen quieter 
intervals on the Somme, even during a period when the 
attack was being sharply pushed. A hulking " "305 " 
which swooped down .and obliterated a spiny pinnacle of 
the ridge a few hundred .yards further along, also swept 
much of the zest out of the sharpening panorama and 
signalled " Time to go ! " A large calibre higli-explosive 
shell is a deal more fearsome a thing rending a crater in 
the rock of the Carso than tossing the soft mud of France. 
\\'ork was still going on in the half-sheltered " sink- 
holes " that pock-marked the grisly plateau, but on the 
remains of a cart-road which we followed, and wliich 
appeared to be the special object of the Austrians' 
diversion, none seemed to be in sight save a few scattered 
individuals actively engaged in getting out of sight. 
It was an illuminating example of the way most of the 
" natives " appeared to feel about the situation, and \\c 
did not saunter any the more leisurely for having had the 
benefit of it. 
We stepped around the riven body of a horse that 
still steamed from the dying warmth of the inert flesh, 
and, a bit further on, there was a red puddle in the middle 
of the road, a black and lazily smoking shell-hole close 
beside it, with a crisply fresh mound of sod and rock 
fragments just beyond. A hammer and a dented trench 
helmet indicated that the man had been cracking up 
stone for the road when liis had come. 
" One would imagine that they had enough broken 
stone around here already," observed •, drily, glancing 
back o\cr his shoulder to -where a iresh covey of 
