His greeting was warm and hearty, and only in the grave eyes was there hint of the terrible responsibility accumulating through the fact that a hot, moist wind was playing upon the heaviest fall of snow the Alps had known for many winters. “I have sketched you out a tentative programme for the next twenty-four hours,” he said, speaking English with an accent which plainly revealed that it had come to its fluency under American--and probably Western American--skies “which is as far (and a good deal farther, in fact) ahead than there is any use in planning while this accursed weather lasts. There are still a couple of hours of daylight, so we will begin by taking sledges to the upper valley and making a survey of our lines from below. To-morrow--God willing!” (he said it with the same quick fervency with which the pious Mohammedan interpolates “Imshallah” into any outline of his future plans) “you and Captain X---- will go to the summit and glacier of the Marmolada, perhaps the most spectacular position on all our front. That will depend upon whether or not we can keep the _telefericas_ going.” As the sledge threaded its way between deep-cut snow-banks up the narrowing gorge, Colonel Garibaldi spoke briefly of the difficulties of Alpine transport in midwinter. “On the ordinary battle front, like those of France and Russia,” he said, “it requires rather less than one man on the line of communications to maintain one man in the first-line trenches. For the whole Italian front the average is something over two men on the communications to one in the first line; but at points in the Alps (as on this sector of mine), it may run up to six, or even eight or ten in bad weather. It isn’t just keeping the roads clear from falling and drifting snow, it’s the _valangas_, the slides. And with the slides the worst trouble isn’t just the men you may lose under them (though that’s terrible enough, Heaven knows), but rather the men who are holding the lines up beyond the slides that have to be fed and munitioned whatever happens. By an unkind trick of fate (just as bad for the enemy as for ourselves, however), the snows of this year have been among the heaviest ever known. This means that the slides are also bad beyond all precedent, and especially that they are coming in unexpected places, places where they have never been known before. Slides in new places mean--what you saw where that swath was cut through the lower end of the little village down the valley, and problems like this!”