14 
LAND & WATER 
February 15, 1917 
bursting shell was making the sky-line of the stone-wall 
lu'hind us l(X)k like a hedge of pampas plumes in a high 
wind. " Hope the rest of these poor fellows have taken 
tu their holes. A little dose like we're getting here is 
only a f 00 1 appetiser ; to stick it out as a steady diet is 
quite another matter." 
Half a minute later we rounded a bend in the stone 
\s all we had been hugging, to come full upon what I have 
always since thought of as " The Anvil Chorus " —three 
men cracking rock to metal the surface of a recently 
lilled shell-hole in the road and sin.ging a lusty song to 
which they kept time \nth the rhythmic strokes of their 
hammers. Dumped off in a heap at one side of the 
road was what may have been the hastily " jettisoned 
cargo " of a half-dozen motor lorries that had pussy- 
footed up there under cover of darkness — several hundred 
trench bombs containing among them enough explosive to 
have lifted the whole mountainside off into the valley, 
had a shell chanced to nose-dive into their midst. Two 
of these stubby little " winged victories," a couple of the 
singers had appropriated as work stools. The third of 
them sat on the remains of a " dud" " "305," from a 
broad crack in which a tiny stream of rain-dissoh'cd high- 
e.\plosi\-e trickled out to form a gay saffron pool about 
his feet. This one was bareheaded, his trencli helmet, 
full of nuts and dried figs — evidently from a Christmas 
package —sitting on the ground within reach of three. 
The sharp roar of the quickening Italian artillery, the 
deeper booms of the exploding Austrian shells, and the 
syrenic crescendo of arrivees and departs so filled the air 
that it was not until one was almost opposite the merry 
trio that he could catch the fascinating swing of the 
iterated refrain. 
" A fine song to dance to, that," remarked — - — stopping 
and swinging his shoulders to the time of the air. " You 
can almost jcd the beat of it." 
" It strikes me as being still better as a song to march 
to," I rejoined meaningly, settling down my helmet over 
the back of my neck and suiting action to the word. 
" It's undoubtedly a fine song, but it doesn't seem to me 
quite right to tempt a kind Providence by lingering near 
this young mountain of trench bombs any longer than is 
strictly necessary. If that Austrian battery ' lifts ' 
another notch something else is going to lift here, and 
I'd much rather go down to the valley on my feet than 
riding on a trench bomb." 
The roar of the artillery battle flared up and died 
down by spells, but the steady throb of " The Anvil 
Chorus" followed, us down the wind for some minutes 
after another bend in the stone wall cut off our view of 
the singers. How often have I not wondered which 
ones of that careless trio survived that day, or the next, 
or the one after that ; which, if any, of them are still 
beating time on the red-brown rocks of the Carso to the 
air of that haunting refrain. 
I was told that the wounded are sometimes located on 
(he battlefield by their singing ; that they not infre- 
quently sing while being borne in on stretchers or trans- 
])orted in ambulances. ' I had no chance to observe 
personally instances of this kind, but I did hear, time and 
time again, men singing in the hospitals, and they were 
not all convalescents or lightly wounded, either. One 
brave little fellow in that fine British hospital tiiat George 
Trevelyan and his co-workers are conducting M-ith con- 
spicuous success on the Isonzo I shall never forget. 
An explosive bullet had carried all four fingers of his 
right hand away, leaving behind it an infection which 
had run into gaseous gangrene. The stump swelled to 
a hideous mass of about the shape and size of a ten- 
])ound ham, but the doctors were fighting amputation in 
the hope.of saving the wrist and thumb to have something 
to attach artificial members to. The crisis was over at 
the time I visited the hospital, but the whole arm was 
still so inflamed that the plucky lad had to close his 
eyes and set his teeth to keep from crj'ing out with agony 
as the matron lifted the stump to show me the " beautiftil 
healthy red colour," where healing had begun. 
The matron had some " splendid trench foot " 
cases to show me further along, and these, and some 
interesting experiments in disinfection by irrigation, 
wove engrossing my attention when a sort of a crooning 
hum caused me to turn a'lid look at the patient in the bed 
behind me. It was the " gaseous gangrene " boy again. 
^\'e had worked down the next ro\y till we were opposite 
him again, and in the quarter hour that hadrlapsed his 
nurse had set a basin of disinfectant on his bed in which 
to bathe his wound. Into this she had lifted the 
hideously swollen stump and hurried on to her ne.xt 
patient. And tlierc he laid, swaying the repulsive mass 
of mortified flesh that was still a part of him back and 
forth in the healing liquid, the while he crooned a little 
song to it as a mother rocks her child to sleep as she sings 
a lullaby. 
" He always does that," said the nurse, .stopping for 
a moment with her hands full df bandages. " He says 
it helps him to forget the pain. And there are five or 
six others, the worse they feel the more likely they are to 
try to sing as a sort of diversion. That big chap over 
there with the beard — he's a fisherman from somewhere 
in the South — he says that when the ' shooting ' pains begin 
in his frozen feet he has to sing to keep from cursing." 
* ■ * * * * 
On one of my last days on the Italian Front I climbed 
to a shell-splintered peak of the Trentino under the 
guidance of a son of a famous General, a Mercury-footed 
flame of a lad who was Aide-de-Camp to the Division 
Commander of that sector. Mounting by an inter- 
minable teJeferica from just above one of the half- ruined 
towns left behind them by the retreating Austrians after 
tlieir drive of last spring, we threaded a couple of miles of 
steep zigzagging trail, climbed a hundred feet of ladder, 
and about the same distance of rocky toe-holds — the latter 
by means of a knotted rope and occasional friendly iron 
spikes — finally to come out on the summit with nothing 
betAveen us and an almost precisely similar Avistrian 
position opposite but a half mile of thin air and the 
overturned, shrapnel-pitted statue of a saint, doubtless 
erected in happier days by the pious inhabitants of ■ 
as an emblem of peace and good will. An Italian youth, 
who had returned from New York to fight for his country 
— he had charge of some kind of mechanical installation 
in a rock gallery a few hundred feet beneath our feet — • 
climbed up with us to act as interpreter. 
Peering through the crook in the lead-sheathed elbow 
of the fallen statue, the roughly squared openings of the 
rock galleries which sheltered an enemy battery well 
within fair revolver shot, and, indeed, an Alpini sharp- 
shooter had made a careless Austrian gunner pay the 
inevitable penalty of carelessness only an hour or two 
before, one could make his voice carry across without 
half an effort. 
Just before we started to descend my young guide made 
a megaphone of his hands, threw his head back, his chest 
out, and, directing his voice across the seemingly bottom- 
less gulf that separated us from the enemy, sang a few 
bars of what I took to be a stirring battle song. 
" What is the song the Captain sings ? " I asked of the 
New York bred youth, whose head was just disappearing 
over the edge of the cliff as he began to " hand " himself 
down the rope. " Something from ' WiUiam Tell,' 
isn't it ? " 
Young " Mulberry Street "* dug hard for a toe-hold, 
found it, slipped his right hand up till it closed on a com- 
fortable knot above his head, and then, with left leg and 
left arm swinging free over a 200-feet drop to the terrace 
below, shouted back : 
" Noton yer hie, Mista. Di Captain he nut singa no 
song. He just tella di Ostrich'un datta Italia she ready 
fer him. Datta all." 
I looked down to the valley where lipe after line of 
trenches fronted with a furry brown fringe that I knew 
to be rusting barbed wire stretched out of sight over the 
divides on either hand, and where, for every grey-black 
geyser of smoke that marked the bursting of an Austrian 
shell a half-dozen vivid flame spurts flashing out from 
unguessed caverns on the mountain side, told that the 
compliment was being returned with heavy interest. 
Yes, Italy is ready for them, I thought, and whether she 
has to hold here and there — as she may — in defence, or 
wliether she goes forward all along the line in triumphant 
offence — whichever it is, the Italian soldier will go out 
to the battle with a song on his lips, a song that no bullet 
which leaves the blood pulsing through his veins and 
breath in his lungs will have power to stop. 
• " Ahilberry Street " is the main iirlci v of the principal Italian 
quarter of New York. 
