enabling troops at once to
resist attack and protect themselves from assault from the rear, was
highly difficult.

TYPICAL ROAD BUILDERS.

The Italians were ever road-builders, descendants, as they are, of those
Romans who built roads for all Europe. While the Austrians were fully
supplied with roads of the best and most modern character, there were
hundreds of miles on the Italian side where there were not even
mule-tracks.

Here was a vast problem.

Literally millions of soldiers were not free to fight, but had been
drafted for the road-building work. Carrying picks and shovels, managing
steam-shovels, working electric hoists, stringing supporting cables,
they were as truly fighting men, however, as any who ever bore rifles or
worked machine-guns.

Miles of the roads were rebuilt under Austrian fire, by men who built
them well enough, even in the great 8,000-foot heights, that they could
bear heavy artillery of vast weights without suffering damage. They
built them in such easy gradients that heavy artillery could be moved
speedily, the guns and motor-lorries that passed over them frequently
weighing as much as fifteen tons.

Nor did the problem end with the construction of these marvel-roads. It
was necessary to transport very heavy war material across stretches
where the building of any roads whatever was a sheer impossibility.
Often it was necessary to take heavy guns as far as might be upon
sleighs and then drag them for considerable distances by hand; quite as
often it was imperative that across chasms great cables should be rigged
on which the guns might be swung, sometimes hundreds or even thousands
of feet above the valleys beneath, from one height to another.

The "wireways" by which much of this unique transportation was
accomplished are of Italian invention, as were other notable and
essential engineering devices of this great war of mountain
transportation.

Such contrivances, known as "teleferrica," were introduced for the first
time during the winter of 1916, and by summer there were about 200 along
the mountainous front. They not only supplied very advanced positions
with armament, ammunition and food, but transported men back and forth
between them and lower points.

SYSTEM ONE OF TACKLES.

The system was one of tackles (where guns and other heavy freight were
to be moved) or cars (like cradles, where men were to be moved),
operated by motor-pulleys directly connected up with great e