“Good luck!” says the colonel to me, as he escorts me out over the threshold. “I am going to rest for a few hours.” It is two o’clock in the morning. The worst part of the journey is still to come; fifteen to eighteen hundred yards over a tableland, which by day is here and there vaguely guarded from sight by copses--what copses!--but for the greater part of the time is quite devoid of cover. By moonlight our outlines will scarcely stand out above the road over the ridge; the return journey, if we set out again after sunrise, will be a little more complicated. We walk in Indian file, the guide, Captain P---- of the Brigade Staff, who wished to accompany me, and myself. The shells fall like hail. The earth which they have churned up has crumbled to such an extent that it looks like a mass of cinders. Fifteen to eighteen hundred yards is much farther than one thinks. One has time to make a rapid mental survey of one’s whole career. Again it is mountaineering memories that surge up in my brain. This time it is the journey through a gorge, the Neuweisthor, between the valley of Fée and that of Zermatt in the Valais Alps. We had taken an unfamiliar path; we had to follow a ridge, which on either side looked out over a precipice; on the right, we could make out a very uninviting crevasse; on the left, right at the bottom, the little Italian village of Macugagna appeared at such a sheer drop beneath us that we had the feeling that, if we were to stumble, we should certainly roll down to it, two or three thousand feet below. The ridge was so narrow that we could not place one foot alongside of the other, and we did not know where to pitch our ice-axes. To make matters worse, while the guide was a level-headed man, the porter who brought up the rear of our roped party had fuddled himself with drink before starting. We were at the mercy of a false step on the part of this tippler. But his professional honour had passed into his legs. The ridge ends in a sort of stone tower where one may gain a really firm foothold and breathe freely. There, on turning round, I saw my man, streaming with sweat and his eyes starting out of his head; he had worked all the alcohol out of his system and had fully recovered his faculties as guide.