The smile of whimsical ruefulness died out of the dark sensitive face, leaving behind it lines I had not noticed before--lines that only come on young faces after weeks or months of incessant anxiety. The backward cast shadows of a time of terrible memory were lurking behind his eyes as he replied: “For seven days and nights before the mine was sprung neither I nor the officers working with me slept or even rested from work.” That was all he said; but I saw the eyes--brimming with ready sympathy--of his fellow officers turn to where he sat, and knew the time for light questionings was past. Not until that moment did a full appreciation of the travail involved in the blowing up of the Castelletto sink home to me, and I nodded fervent assent to the words of the English-educated Captain of Alpini next me when he observed that “Malvezzi’s little ‘Order of Savoie’ was jolly well earned, eh?” WONDERS OF THE TELEFERICA “Jolly good work, I call that, for a ‘basket on a string,’” was the way a visiting British officer characterised an exploit of the Italians in the course of which--in lieu of any other way of doing it--they had shot the end of a cable from a gun across a flooded river and thus made it possible to rig up a _teleferica_ for rushing over some badly-needed reinforcements. The name is not a high-sounding one, but I do not know of any other which so well describes the wonderful contrivance which played so important a part in enabling the Italians to hold successfully their three hundred miles and more of high Alpine front during the first two years they were in the war. And in this connection it should be borne well in mind that the Austrians never were able to break through upon the Alpine front, where--until the _débâcle_ upon the Upper Isonzo--the Italians, peak by peak, valley by valley, were slowly but surely pushing the enemy backward all along the line. Nor should it be forgotten that up to the very last the Alpini had their traditional foe mastered along all that hundred and fifty miles of sky-line positions--from the Carnic Alps, through the Dolomites to the Trentino--which ultimately had to be abandoned only because their rear was threatened by the Austro-German advance along the Friulian plain from the Isonzo. The loss of this line under these conditions, therefore, detracts no whit from the magnificent military skill and heroism by which they were won and held.