ned in
space. Aviation, motor-racing, mountain-climbing, big-game hunting,
all seem commonplace and tame compared with the sensation of swinging
helplessly in a shallow bathtub over half a mile of emptiness while an
Austrian battery endeavors to pot you with shrapnel, very much as a
small boy throws stones at a scared cat clinging to a limb.

Yet over these slender wires has been transported an army, with its
vast quantities of food, stores, and ammunition, and by the same
method of transportation have been sent back the wounded. Without this
ingenious device it is doubtful if the campaign in the High Alps could
ever have been fought. But the cables, strong though they are, are yet
too weak to bear the weight of the heavy guns, some of them weighing
forty and fifty tons, which the Italians have put into action on the
highest peaks. So, by the aid of ropes and levers and pulleys and
hundreds of brawny backs and straining arms, these monster pieces have
been hauled up slopes as steep as that of the Great Pyramid, have been
hoisted up walls of rock as sheer and high as those of the Flatiron
Building. You question this? Well, there they are, great eight and
nine inch monsters, high above the highest of the wire roads, one of
them that I know of at a height of ten thousand feet above the sea.
There is no doubting it, incredible as it may seem, for they speak for
themselves--as the Austrians have found to their cost.

The most advanced positions in the Carnia, as in the Trentino, are
amid the eternal snows. Here the guns are emplaced in ice caverns
which can be reached only through tunnels cut through the drifts; here
the men spend their days wrapped in shaggy furs, their faces smeared
with grease as a protection from the stinging blasts, and their nights
in holes burrowed in the snow, like the igloos of Esquimaux. On no
front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the
frozen Mazurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud of Flanders, does
the fighting man lead so arduous an existence as up here on the roof
of the world. I remember standing with an Italian officer in an
observatory in the lower mountains. The powerful telescope was
trained on the snow-covered summit of one of the higher peaks.

"Do you see that little black speck on the snow at the very top?" the
officer asked me.

I told him that I did.

"That is one of our positions," he continued. "It is held by a
lieutenant and thirty Alpini. I have j