The road had climbed high. The valley was narrower. The orchards sloping to its stream were white with fruit-blossoms. The air was rarefied but still hot under the direct rays of the sun. The dark woods of oak gave place to darker woods of pine. The road swept round in sharp curves on low-parapeted stone bridges above a rushing torrent. Bare green slopes, strewn with grey boulders, opened between the woods. The car overtook a long marching column of Alpini crunching the dust under heavily nailed boots, pack high upon the shoulders, alpenstock as well as rifle, sweating profusely yet pressing upwards with quick step, the eagle's feather in their soft hats still jaunty. It was the rear battalion of a brigade whose units were successively overtaken and passed. The road swung to the right round the head of the valley which here commenced in a sheer drop. As the car followed it there was a sudden spurt of flame, a drifting tawny smoke, in the dark depths to the right. A tremendous, shattering detonation that re-echoed endlessly down the valley ceased at last, leaving audible the eerie moaning of a great shell speeding upwards over the mountains, already far away. Another such flash and detonation followed the first. Looking over the side of the car, the captain perceived, deep down, the long barrel of a monster gun nosing upwards, men tiny about it. A second gun was depressed, a crane-slung shell hovering near its breech. Once more there was a crash--a series of distracted conflicting echoes that shattered the Alpine silence as thick glass is starred and fractured. In the sky above the valley an eagle beat the air with heavy, violent wings, startled into a vertical climb, and then glided swiftly with outstretched pinions downwards to its crag. The road still ascended, left the valley, climbed tortuously a rocky spur, thinly grassed. The car took the gradient slowly, noisily, on second speed. In front, struggling on the brow of the spur, a column of "caterpillar" tractors drawing the component parts of a battery of heavy howitzers distributed on trucks rattled and detonated like machine-guns in full action. The battery personnel, harnessed to long ropes, hauled and strained at the leading piece in an effort to facilitate the passage of the steep crest. Before the war the boldest artilleryman would have scouted the possibility of such heavy ordnance at this height among the mountains. But the battery was only entering upon the area of its severest toil.