All sorts of freight--from ducks and donkeys to shells and cannon--have been carried by the _teleferica_, and one of the best stories I heard on the Italian front had to do with a pig--the mascot of a battalion of Alpini holding a lofty position on a Dolomite glacier--which found its way up there by means of the cable. He was a sucking-pig, and was sent up alive to be reared for the major’s Christmas dinner, when the _teleferica_ basket in which he was travelling got stuck in a drift which had encroached upon one of the steel towers. Twelve hours elapsed before it was shovelled free, and the sucking-pig, when it finally reached the top, was frozen as hard and stiff as one of his cold-storage brothers. It was only after he had lain in the hot kitchen for several hours that an indignant grunt revealed the astonishing fact that his armour of fat had kept smouldering a spark of life. They reared him on a bottle, and at the time I saw him he was a hulking porker of two hundred pounds or more, drawing a regular ration of his own. They called him _Tedesco_--on account of his face and figure rather than his disposition, they said--but all the same, I would be willing to wager that, if that brave battalion of Alpini were able to save anything more than their rifles and their eagle-plumes in their retreat, he was not allowed to fall into the hands of his brother _Tedeschi_ from the other side of the Alps. But the most noteworthy service of the _teleferica_ is the way in which it facilitates the handling of the wounded at points where other ways of transporting them are either too dangerous or too slow. It was on a sector of the upper Isonzo, where at that time the Austrians had not yet been pushed across the river. A rather wide local attack was on at the moment, and to care the more expeditiously for the wounded a very remarkable little mobile ambulance--the whole equipment of which could be taken down in the morning, packed upon seven motor lorries, moved from fifty to a hundred miles, and be set up and ready for work the same evening--had been pushed up many miles inside the zone of fire to such protection as the “lee” of a high ridge afforded.