Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1157 page)

I looked up again between the towering snowbanks. There were not even wrinkles on the face of the mountain now, but horrible, smooth honey-coloured thumbs and pinnacles, clustered like candle-drippings round the main core of unaffected rock, and the whole framing of it bent towards me.

The road was a gruel of gravel, stones, and working-parties. No one hurried; no one got in his neighbour’s way; there were very few orders; but even as the mule hoisted herself up and round the pegged-out turns of it, the road seemed to be drawing itself into shape.

There are little engine-houses at the foot of some of the Swiss bob-runs which, for fifty centimes, used to hoist sportsmen and their bob-sleds up to the top again by funicular. The same arrangement stood on a platform nicked out of rock with the very same smell of raw planks, petrol, and snow, and the same crunch of crampons on slushy ground. But instead of the cog-railway, a steel wire, supported on frail struts and carrying a 2steel-latticed basket, ran up the face of the rock at an angle which need not be specified. Qua railway, it was nothing - the merest grocery line, they explained - and, indeed, one had seen larger and higher ones in the valleys lower down; but a certain nakedness of rock and snow beneath, and side-way blasts of air out of funnels and rifts that we slid past, made it interesting.

At the terminus, four or five hundred feet overhead (we were more than two thousand feet above the Mess-house in the pines) , there was a system - it suggested the marks that old ivy prints on a wall after you peel it off - of legends and paths of slushy trampled snow, connecting the barracks, the cook-house, the Officers’ Mess and, I presume, the parade ground of the garrison. If the cook dropped a bucket, he had to go down six hundred feet to retrieve it. If a visitor went too far round a corner to admire the panoramas, he became visible to unartistic Austrians  who promptly loosed off a shrapnel. All this eagle’s nest of a world in two dimensions boiled with young life and energy, as the planks and girders, the packages of other stuff came up the aerial; and the mountain above leaned outward over it all, hundreds of feet yet to the top.

‘Our real work is a little higher up - only a few steps,’ they urged.

But I recalled that it was Dante himself who says how bitter it is to climb up and down other people’s stairs. Besides, their work was of no interest to any one except the enemy round the corner. It was just the regular routine of these parts. They outlined it for the visitor.

You climb up a fissure of a rock chimney - by shoulder or knee work such as mountaineers understand - and at night for choice, because, by day, the enemy drops stones down the chimney, but then they had to carry machine-guns, and some other things, with them. (‘By the way, some of our machine-guns are of French manufacture, so our Machine Gun Corps’ souvenir - please take it, we want you to have it - represents the heads of France and Italy side by side.’) 

And when you emerge from your chimney - which it is best to do in a storm or a gale, since nailed boots on rock make a noise - you find either that you command the enemy’s post on the top, in which case you destroy him, or cut him off from supplies by gunning the only goat-path that brings them; or you find the enemy commands you from some unsuspected cornice or knob of rock. Then you go down again - if you can - and try elsewhere. And that is how it is done all along that section of frontier where the ground does not let you do otherwise.

Special work is somewhat different. You select a mountain- top which you have reason to believe is filled with the enemy and all his works. You effect a lodgement there with your teeth and toe-nails; you mine into the solid rock with compressed-air drills for as many hundred yards as you calculate may be necessary. When you have finished, you fill your galleries with nitroglycerine and blow the top off the mountain. Then you occupy the crater with men and machine-guns as fast as you can. Then you secure your dominating position from which you can gain other positions, by the same means.

‘But surely you know all about this. You’ve seen the Castelletto,’ some one said. 

It stood outside in the sunshine, a rifted bastion crowned with peaks like the roots of molar-teeth. The largest peak had gone. A chasm, a crater and a vast rock slide took its place.

Yes, I had seen the Castelletto, but I was interested to see the men who had blown it up.

‘Oh, he did that. That’s him.’ 

A man with the eyes of a poet or musician laughed and nodded. Yes, he owned, he was mixed up in the affair of the Castelletto - had written a report on it, too. They had used thirty-five tons of nitroglycerine for that mine. They had brought it up by hand - in the old days when he was a second lieutenant and men lived in tents, before the wire-rope railways were made - a long time ago.

‘And your battalion did it all?’

‘No - no: not at all, by any means, but - before we’d finished with the Castelletto we were miners and mechanics and all sorts of things we never expected to be . That is the way of this war.’

‘And this mining business still goes on?’

Yes: I might take it that the mining business did go on.

And now would I, please, come and listen to a little music from their band?  It lived on the rock ledges - and it would play the Regimental and the Company March; but - one of the joyous children shook his head sadly - ‘those Austrians aren’t really musical. No ear for music at all.’

Given a rock wall that curves over in a sounding-board behind and above a zealous band, to concentrate the melody, and rock ribs on either side to shoot the tune down a thousand feet on to hard snowfields below, and thunderous echoes from every cranny and cul de sac along half a mile of resonant mountain-face, the result, I do assure you, reduces Wagner to a whisper. That they wanted Austria was nothing - she was only just round the corner - but it seemed to me that all Italy must hear them across those gulfs of thin air. They brayed, they neighed, and they roared; the bandsmen’s faces puckered with mirth behind the brasses, and the mountains faithfully trumpeted forth their insults all over again.

The Company March did not provoke any applause - I expect the enemy had heard it too often. We embarked on national anthems. The Marsellaise was but a success d’estime, drawing a perfunctory shrapnel or so, but when the band gave them and the whole accusing arch of heaven the Brabanconne the enemy were much moved.

‘I told you they had no taste,’ said a young faun on a rock shelf; ‘still, it shows the swine have a conscience.’

But some folk never know when to stop; besides, it was time for the working-parties to be coming in off the roads. So an announcement was made from high overhead to our unseen audience that the performance was ended and they need not applaud any longer. It was put a little more curtly than this, and it sounded exactly like ears being boxed.

The silence spread with the great shadows of the rock towers across the snow: there was tapping and clinking and an occasional stone-slide far up the mountain side; the aerial railway carried on as usual; the working parties knocked off, and piled tools, and the night shifts began.

The last I saw of the joyous children was a cluster of gnome-like figures a furlong overhead, standing, for there was no visible foothold, on nothing. They separated, and went about their jobs as single dots, moving up or sideways on the face of the rock, till they disappeared into it like ants. Their real work lay ‘only a few steps higher up’ where the observation-posts, the sentries, the supports and all the rest live on ground compared with which the baboon-tracks round the Mess and the barracks are level pavement. Those rounds must be taken in every weather and light; that is, made at eleven thousand feet, with death for company under each foot, and the width of a foot on each side, at every step of the most uneventful round. Frosty glazed rock where a blunt- nailed boot slips once and no more; mountain blasts round the corner of ledges before the body is braced to them; a knob of rotten shale crumbling beneath the hand; an ankle twisted at the bottom of a ninety-foot rift; a roaring descent of rocks loosened by snow from some corner the sun has undermined through the day - these are a few of the risks they face going from and returning to the coffee and gramophones at the Mess, ‘in the ordinary discharge of their duties.’

A turn of the downward road shut them and their world from sight - never to be seen again by my eyes, but the hot youth, the overplus of strength, the happy, unconsidered insolence of it all, the gravity, beautifully maintained over the coffee cups, but relaxed when the band played to the enemy, and the genuine, boyish kindness, will remain with me. But, behind it all, fine as the steel wire ropes, implacable as the mountain, one was conscious of the hardness of their race.

THE TRENTINO FRONT

June 20 1917

IT DOES NOT NEED an expert to distinguish the notes of the several Italian fronts. One picks them up a long way behind the lines, from the troops in rest or the traffic on the road. Even behind Browning’s lovely Asolo where, you will remember, Pippa passed, seventy-six years since, announcing that ‘All’s right with the world,’ one felt the tightening in the air.

The officer, too, explained frankly above his map:

‘See where our frontier west of the Dolomites dips south in this V-like spearhead. That’s the Trentino. Garibaldi’s volunteers were in full possession of it in our War of Independence. Prussia was our ally then against Austria, but Prussia made peace when it suited her - I’m talking of 1864 - and we had to accept the frontier that she and Austria laid down. The Italian frontier is a bad one everywhere - Prussia and Austria took care of that - but the Trentino section is specially bad.’

Mist wrapped the plateau we were climbing. The mountains had changed into rounded, almost barrel- shaped heights, steep above dry valleys. The roads were many and new, but the lorries held their pace; the usual old man and young boy were there to see to that. Scotch moors, red uplands, scarred with trenches and punched with shell-holes, a confusion of hills without colour and, in the mist, almost without shape, rose and dropped behind us.  They hid the troops in their folds - always awaiting troops - and the trenches multiplied themselves high and low on their sides.

We descended a mountain smashed into rubbish from head to heel, but still preserving the outline, like wrinkles on a forehead, of trenches that had followed its contours. A narrow, shallow ditch (it might have been a water-main) ran vertically up the hill, cutting the faded trenches at right angles.

‘That was where our men stood before the Austrians were driven back in their last push - the Asiago push, don’t you call it?  It took the Austrians ten days to work half-way down from the top of the mountain. Our men drove that trench straight up the hill, as you see. Then they climbed, and the Austrians broke. It’s not as bad as it looks, because, in this sort of work, if the enemy uphill misses his footing, he rolls down among your men, but if you stumble, you only slip back among your friends.’

‘What did it cost you?’ I whispered.

‘A good deal. And on that mountain across the gorge - but the mist won’t let you see it - our men fought for a week - mostly without water. The Austrians were the first people to lay out a line of twelve-inch shell-holes on a mountain’s side to serve as trenches. It’s almost a regulation trick on all the fronts now, but it’s annoying.’

He told tales of the long, bitter fight when the Austrians thought, till General Cadorna showed them otherwise, they had the plains to the south at their mercy. I should not care to be an Austrian with the Boche behind me and the exercitus Romanus in front.

It was the quietest of fronts and the least ostentatious of armies. It lived in great towns among forests where we found snow again in dirty, hollow-flanked drifts, that were giving up all the rubbish and refuse that winter had hidden. Labour battalions dealt with the stuff, and there were no smells. Other gangs mended shell- holes with speed; the lorries do not like being checked.

Another township, founded among stones, stood empty except for the cooks and a bored road-mender or two. The population was up the hill digging and blasting; or in wooded park-like hollows of lowland. Battalions slipped like shadows through the mists between the pines. When we reached the edge of everything, there was, as usual, nothing whatever, except uptorn breadths of grass and an ‘unhealthy’ house - the battered core of what had once been human - with rain-water dripping through the starred ceilings. The view from it included the sight of the Austrian trenches on pale slopes and the noise of Austrian guns - not lazy ones this time, but eager, querulous, almost questioning.

There was no reply from our side. ‘If they want to find out anything, they can come and look,’ said the officer.

One speculated how much the men behind those guns would have given for a seat in the car through the next few hours that took us along yet another veiled line of arms. But perhaps by now the Austrians have learned.

The mist thickened around us, and the far shoulders of mountains, and the suddenly-seen masses of men who loomed out of it and were gone. We headed upwards till the mists met the clouds, by a steeper road than any we had used before. It ended in a rock gallery  where immense guns , set to a certain point when a certain hour should come, waited in the dark.