“He always does that,” said the nurse, stopping for a moment with her hands full of bandages. “He says it helps him to forget the pain. And there are five or six others: the worse they feel, the more likely they are to try to sing as a sort of diversion. That big chap over there with the beard,--he’s a fisherman from somewhere in the South,--he says that when the shooting pains begin in his frozen feet he has to sing to keep from cursing. Says he doesn’t want to curse before the _forestiere_ if it can possibly be helped.” * * * * * On one of my last days on the Italian front I climbed to a shell-splintered peak of the Trentino under the guidance of the son of a famous general, a Mercury-footed flame of a lad who was aide-de-camp to the division commander of that sector. Mounting by an interminable _teleferica_ from just above one of the half-ruined towns left behind by the retreating Austrians after their drive of last spring, we threaded a couple of miles of steep zigzagging trail, climbed a hundred feet of ladder and about the same distance of rocky toe-holds,--the latter by means of a knotted rope and occasional friendly iron spikes,--finally to come out on the summit, with nothing between us and an almost precisely similar Austrian position opposite but a half-mile of thin air and the overturned, shrapnel-pitted statue of a saint--doubtless erected in happier days by the pious inhabitants of ---- as an emblem of peace and goodwill. An Italian youth who had returned from New York to fight for his country--he had charge of some kind of mechanical installation in a rock-gallery a few hundred feet beneath our feet--climbed up with us to act as interpreter. To one peering through the crook in the lead-sheathed elbow of the fallen statue, the roughly squared openings of the rock galleries which sheltered an enemy battery seemed well within fair revolver shot; and, indeed, an Alpino sharpshooter had made a careless Austrian gunner pay the inevitable penalty of carelessness only an hour or two before. One could make one’s voice carry across without half an effort. Just before we started to descend my young guide made a megaphone of his hands, threw his head back, his chest out, and, directing his voice across the seemingly bottomless gulf that separated us from the enemy, sang a few bars of what I took to be a stirring battle-song. “What is the song the captain sings?” I asked of the New-York-bred youth, whose head was just disappearing over the edge of the cliff as he began to lower himself down the rope. “Something from _William Tell_, isn’t it?” Young “Mulberry Street” dug hard for a toe-hold, found it, slipped his right hand up till it closed on a comfortable knot above his head, and then, with left leg and left arm swinging free over a 200-foot drop to the terraces below, shouted back,--