July 25, 19 1 8 Land & Water 15 
The Teleferica : By Lewis R. Freeman 
Among the Dolomites 
IF I wore asked to name the most charactcristif symbol 
of Italian warfare, 1 should unhesitatingly choose the 
teleferica or aerial tramway. The avalanche may 
block the road, the spate of the torrent carry away the 
bridge, the tempest force the aeroplane to shelter, but 
the little wire cage of the teleferica purrs along its way, unheed- 
ful of the disturbances in the heavens above, the earth beneath, 
or the waters under the earth. 
The cable-way or aerial tram has been in use in various 
parts of the world for many years, usually for carrying ore 
from mines to mills or smelters. It also figured occasionally 
in the early stages of bridge construction. The only place 
I ever heard of its being used for regular passenger traffic 
was in Switzerland, where, near Grundelwald. T once saw 
one employed to take tourists across a deep gorge to the foot 
of a glacier. When the Italians decided to "carry the war 
skyward," and began castirfg about for some means of trans- 
port which could be depended upon in all weathers to keep 
communications open between the men in the snow-trenches 
thirteen or fourteen thousand feet in the air and the bases 
■ in the more or less protected Alpine valleys, the teleferica 
at once suggested itself as the best solution of the 
problem. 
" I cannot tell you," said an Italian engineer officer to me, 
" how many hundred of miles of cable- ways there are on our 
front, nor how many thousands of men and hundreds of 
thousands of ^ons of food and munitions have been carried 
over them ; but 1 can assure you that the teleferica (which 
looks the most dangerous) is really the safest means of trans- 
port we have, to say nothing of the fact that (in the higher 
mountains, of course) it is also the most economical. They 
are so simple in design — just the cable-way, a petrol engine 
.and, a couple of ' cages' — that it is pos.sible to guard almost 
absolutely against structural defects, so that the onlj- trouble 
that can ha]i]x;n to them must come from without rather 
than from within. The wind — if it is strong enough — can 
make it difficult or impossible to run the. cars on an exposed 
span, but — since we began grooving the wheels so deeply 
that they simply cannot be blown off the cable — that is 
about all it can do. An avalanche might carry a section 
of one away — if it could get at it. Either for safety or con- 
venience, yon will nevj^r make a mistake, when getting about 
cm any part of our front, to take the teleferica in preference 
to any other form of transportation that offers — from your 
own legs to a motor car." 
I was fortunate in having had this advice at the outset, for 
I must confess that there did arise occasions — especially on 
windy days — when I might otherwise have been strongly 
disinclined to crawl into a two-by-six basket and allow my 
shivering anatomy to be hauled over a tenuous wire that 
was lost, a thousand feet or so above, in a driving snowstorm 
that was then raging round an Alpine pinnacle, to a sheltered 
cavern on the lee side of which the cable was said to run. 
The assurance was well borne out. The jump from sunshine 
to storm, and from storm back to sunshine, became a common 
experience on both my summer and winter tours of the Alpine 
front, and the astonishing places to which the teleferica took 
me, now to sky-line snow trenches, from the parapet of 
which unfolded a fantastic panorama whose foreground 
was the enemy's barbed-wire tangle, well within hand-grenade 
range, and whose background was a serrated range of white 
peaks fifty miles beyond the border of Switzerland ; or to a 
splintered pinnacle, on the summit of which one peered into 
an Austrian gun-cavern in the side of a similar pinnacle three 
hundred yards away icross a mile-deep gorge ; or to a moun- 
tain battery ensconce^ in the eternal blue-green ice of a 
mighty glacier, to a score of vantage-spots scarcely less 
beautiful, wonderful and unforgettable — these journeys laid 
me under a debt which a life-time of gratitude will be insuffi- 
cient to repay. 
My first sight of a teleferica in operation furnished a striking 
example of the unique service that remarkable contrivance 
is rendering in facilitating the handling of the wounded at 
points where other ways of transporting them were either too 
dangerous or too slow. It was on a sector of the Upper 
Isonzo where at that time the Austrians had not yet beer) 
pushed across the river. A rather wide local attack was oii 
at the moment, and to care the more expeditiously for the 
wounded a very remarkable little mobile ambulanct> — the 
whole equipment of which could be taken down in the morning 
packed upon seven motor lorries, moved from fifty to a 
hundred miles, and be set up and ready for work the same 
evening — had been pushed up, many miles inside the zone 
of fire, to such protection as the lee of a high ridge afforded. 
