And so it chanced that on a diamond-bright morning in early January I found myself, after a couple of days of strenuous motoring, speeding in a military car past the old custom-house and up into the heart of that most weirdly grand of all Alpine regions, the Dolomites. Already we were well over into what had once been Austrian territory, and the splintered pinnacles which notched the skyline ahead of us were, as my escorting officer explained, held in part by both the Italians and the enemy. As we coasted down into Cortina di Ampezzo--which in its swarming tourist hotels of motley design rivals St. Moritz or Chamonix--Capt. P---- pointed to where a clean-lined wall of snow-capped yellow rock reared itself against the deep purple of the western sky. “That high mountain ridge is the Tofana _massif_,” he said, “and that partly isolated mass of lighter-coloured rock (crowned with towers like a mediæval stronghold) at its further end is what is left of the famous Castelletto. It is twenty kilometres or more away, but you can see even from here how it dominated the valley and road, the latter the much-pictured Dolomite road, which is also a route of great military importance. “Now look at the end of the Castelletto toward the wall of the Tofana. Do you see where it seems to have been sliced off smoothly at an angle of about forty-five degrees? Well, that is the part they blew off last July. Up to then that end, like the other, was crowned with a lofty spire. That spire, the base from which it sprung, the Austrian barracks and munition depôts, together with the men stationed there--all were blown up and destroyed in the explosion. “Take a good look at it while you have a chance, for the skyline view is better from a distance than from close at hand, where we shall go this afternoon if the way is open. To see the effect of the explosion at its best,” he added, “one should look at it from the Austrian lines, as it was the blowing out of the other side of the mountain which undermined and let down the top. If you come back here in the spring doubtless we will be in occupation of a number of interesting observation points over there.” Viewed even from a distance of a dozen miles or more the alteration wrought in the skyline by the explosion was not difficult to imagine. It was, indeed, literally true--what I had never been fully able to make myself believe until that moment--that a mountain peak had been blown off--hundreds of feet of it, and thousands of tons. My eyes remained focussed in awed fascination on the unnaturally even profile of the wound until our snorting car skidded round a bend of the frozen road and the thick-growing pine forest shut it from sight.