It was not until, after ten miles of precarious climbing and clawing up the ice-paved, snow-walled road, our car brought up in the midst of a neat little group of Alpine buildings nestling in the protection of the last of the timber, that Capt. P---- revealed the surprise that had been prepared for me. “Our host here,” he said, “will be Colonel X----, who conceived and directed the Castelletto project, and at dinner to-night you will meet, and can talk as long as you like, with Lieutenant Malvezzi, who did the work. He is still quartered here, and will be glad to tell you all that he can about Alpine military engineering. We have already sent him word that you came to Italy expressly to see him.” After a hasty lunch Capt. P---- and I, accompanied by an officer of Alpini from the camp, started for the Castelletto. Our powerful military car, which, in spite of the fact that it had non-skid tyres, had been giving a good deal of trouble on the ice, was left behind, and a smaller but heavily-engined machine, with sharp spikes clamped over the rims to grip the glassy surface of the road, was taken for the few miles of the latter which were still open. Abandoning this in a snow-bank at a little advanced camp well up under the towering wall of the Tofana, we took our alpenstocks and started on the 2,000-foot climb up to the base of the Castelletto. The hard-packed snow on the thirty to forty degree slope must have averaged from ten to twenty feet deep all the way, while, for a half-mile or so midway, it was humped up in crumpled fold where, a fortnight before, one of the largest and most terrible slides ever known in the Alps had plunged down on its sinister mission to the bottom of the valley. The full story of that avalanche will hardly be told until after the war. Slightly softened by the brilliant sun, the snow gave good footing; but even so it was a stiff pull to the little ice and rock-begirt barracks at the base of the cliff, and I gained some idea of the titanic labour involved in getting guns, munitions, machinery, food, and thirty-five tons of high explosive up there, all by hand, in every sort of weather, and much of it (to avoid enemy observation and fire) at night.