On the occasion I have in mind it was necessary for us, in order to reach a position I especially desired to visit, to climb diagonally across something like three-quarters of a mile of the swath of one of the largest and most treacherous slides on the whole Alpine front. There had been a great avalanche here every year from time out of mind, usually preceded by a smaller one early in the winter. The preliminary slide had already occurred at the time of my visit, and, as the early winter storms had been the heaviest in years, the accumulated snows made the major avalanche almost inevitable on the first day of a warm wind. Such a day, unluckily, chanced to be the only one available for my visit to the position in question. Although it was in the first week in January, the eaves of the houses in the little Alpine village where the colonel quartered had been dripping all night, and even in the early morning the hard-packed snow of the trail was turning soft and slushy when we left our sledge on the main road and set out on foot. We passed two or three sections marked off by the “Pericoloso” signs, without taking any special precautions; and, even when we came to the big slide, the young major responsible for seeing the venture through merely directed that we were to proceed by twos (there were four of us), with a 300-metre interval between, walking as rapidly as possible and not doing any unnecessary talking. That was all. There were no dramatics about it--only the few simple directions that were calculated to minimise the chances of “total loss” in case the slide did become restive. How little this young officer had to learn about the ways of avalanches I did not learn till that evening, when his colonel told me that he had been buried, with a company or two of his Alpini, not long previously, and escaped the fate of most of the men only through having been dug out by his dog. The major, with the captain from the Comando Supremo who had been taking me about the front, went on ahead, leaving me to follow, after five minutes had gone by, with a young lieutenant, a boy so full of bubbling mountain spirits that he had been dancing all along the way and warbling “Rigoletto” to the tree-tops. Even as we waited he would burst into quick snatches of song, each of which was ended with a gulp as it flashed across his mind that the time had come to clamp on the safety-valve.