hat the slides are under constant temptation to abandon their
beaten tracks and gouge out new and unexpected channels for themselves.
It is only the first-time visitor to the Alps who bridles under the
Judas kiss of the wind called _fun_.

[Sidenote: A hot wind in January.]

It was on an early January day of one of these treacherous hot winds
that I was motored up from the plain of Venezia to a certain sector of
the Italian Alpine front, a sector almost as important strategically as
it is beautiful scenically. What twelve hours previously had been a
flint-hard, ice-paved road had dissolved to a river of soft slush, and
one could sense rather than see the ominous premonitory twitchings in
the lowering snow-banks as the lapping of the hot moist air relaxed the
brake of the frost which had held them on the precipitous mountain
sides. Every stretch where the road curved to the embrace of cliff or
shelving valley wall was a possible ambush, and we slipped by them with
muffled engine and hushed voices.

[Sidenote: Skirting a lake.]

Toward the middle of the short winter afternoon the gorge we had been
following opened out into a narrow valley, and straight over across the
little lake which the road skirted, reflected in the shimmering sheet of
steaming water that the thaw was throwing out across the ice, was a
vivid white triangle of towering mountain. A true granite Alp among the
splintered Dolomites--a fortress among cathedrals--it was the
outstanding, the dominating feature in a panorama which I knew from my
map was made up of the mountain chain along which wriggled the
interlocked lines of the Austro-Italian battle front.

"Plainly a peak with a personality," I said to the officer at my side.
"What is it called?"

[Sidenote: The Col di Lana an important position.]

"It's the Col di Lana," was the reply; "the mountain Colonel 'Peppino'
Garibaldi took in a first attempt and Gelasio Caetani, the
Italo-American mining engineer, afterward blew up and captured
completely. It is one of the most important positions on our whole
front, for whichever side holds it not only effectually blocks the
enemy's advance, but has also an invaluable sally-port from which to
launch his own. We simply _had_ to have it, and it was taken in what was
probably the only way humanly possible. It's Colonel Garibaldi's
headquarters, by the way, where we put up to-night and to-morrow;
perhaps you can get him to tell you the story." . . .

[Sid