This befell, as it chanced, during one of my early days on the Alpine front, and the incident of men singing in a blizzard almost strong enough to sweep them from their feet made no small impression on me at the moment. It was my first experience of the kind. A week later I should have considered it just as astonishing to have encountered, under any conditions, an Alpino who was _not_ singing; for to him--to all Italian soldiers, indeed--song furnishes the principal channel of outward expression of the spirit within him. And what a spirit it is! He sings as he works, he sings as he plays, he sings as he fights, and--many a tale is told of how this or that comrade has been seen to go down with a song on his lips--he sings as he dies. He soothes himself with song, he beguiles himself with song, he steadies himself with song, he exalts himself with song. It is not song as the German knows it, not the ponderous marching chorus that the Prussian Guard thunders to order in the same way that it thumps through its goose-step; but rather a simple burst of song that is as natural and spontaneous as the soaring lark’s greeting to the rising sun. Discipline of any kind is more or less irksome to the high-spirited Alpino, but he manages to struggle along under it with tolerable goodwill so long as it is plain to him that the military exigencies really demand it. But the one thing that he really chafes under is the prohibition to sing. This is, of course, quite imperative when he is on scouting or patrol-work, or engaged in one of the incessant surprise attacks which form so important a feature of Alpine warfare. He was wont to sing as he climbed in those distant days when he scaled mountains for the love of it; and, somehow, a sort of reflex action seems to have been established between the legs and the vocal chords that makes it extremely awkward to work the one without the other. If the truth could be told, indeed, probably not a few half-consummated _coups de main_ would be found to have been nearly marred by a joyous burst of “unpremeditated melody” on the part of some spirited Alpino who succumbed to the force of habit.