As regards the spirits of the Alpini, song is a barometer; as regards their health, a thermometer. An experienced officer will judge the mental or physical condition of one of his men by noting the way he is singing, or refraining from singing, just as a man determines his dog’s condition by feeling its nose to see if it is hot or cold. I remember standing for a half-hour on the wind-swept summit of a lofty Trentino pass with a distinguished major-general who had taken me out that afternoon in his little mountain-climbing motor to give me an idea of how the winter road was kept clear in a blizzard. The wind was driving through the notch of the pass at fifty miles an hour; the air was stiff with falling and drifting snow; and it was through the narrowed holes in our _capuchos_ that we watched a battalion filing by on its way from the front-line trenches to the plains for a spell of rest in billets. Packs and cloaks were crusted an inch thick with frozen snow, eyebrows were frosted, beards and moustaches icicled; but, man after man (though sometimes, as a wind-blast swallowed the sound, one could only guess it by the rhythmically moving lips), they marched singing. Now and then, as the drifts permitted, they marched in lusty choruses of twos and threes; but for the most part each man was warbling on his own, many of them probably simply humming improvisations, giving vocal expression to their thoughts. Suddenly the general stepped forward and, tapping sharply with his Alpenstock on the ice-stiff skirt of one of the marchers, brought him to a halt. The frost-rimmed haloes fringing the puckered apertures in the two hoods came close together and there was a quick interchange of question and answer between wind-muffled mouths. Then, with a clumsy pat of admonition, the general shoved the man back into the passing line. “That boy wasn’t singing,” he roared into my ear in response to my look of interrogation as he stepped back into the drift beside me. “Knew something was wrong, so stopped him and asked what. Said he got thirsty--ate raw snow--made throat sore. Told him it served him quite right--an Arab from Tripoli would know better’n to eat snow.”