"A company of men divided into two half companies held, the one half the base of the precipitous rock upon a sward of high valley, the other the summit itself, perhaps 3,000 feet higher; end the communication from one to the other was a double wire swung through the air above the chasm, up and down which traveled shallow cradles of steel carrying men and food, munitions, and instruments. Such a device alone made possible the establishment of these posts in such incredible places, and the perilous journey along the wire rope swung from precipice to precipice and over intervening gulfs was the only condition of their continued survival. The post itself clung to the extreme summit of the mountain as a bird's nest clings to the cranny of rock in which it is built; while huts, devised to the exact and difficult contours of the last crags and hidden as best they might be from direct observation and fire from the enemy below, stood here perched in places the reaching of which during the old days of peace was thought a triumph of skill by the mountaineers. And all this ingenuity, effort, and strain stood, it must be remembered, under the conditions of war. The snow in the neighborhood of this aerie was pitted with the shell that had been aimed so often and had failed to reach this spot, and the men thus perilously clinging to an extreme peak of bare rock up in the skies were clinging there subject to all the perils of war added to the common perils of the feat they had accomplished. "Marvelous as it was, I saw here but one example of I know not how many of the same kind with which the Italians have made secure the whole mountain wall from the Brenta to the Isonzo and from Lake Garda to the Orther and the Swiss frontier. Every little gap in that wall is held. You find small posts of men, that must have their food and water daily brought to them thus, slung by the wire; you find them crouched upon the little dip where a collar of deep snow between bare rocks marks some almost impassable passage of the hills that must yet be held. You see a gun of 6 inches or even of 8 inches emplaced where, had you been climbing for your pleasure, you would hardly have dared to pitch the smallest tent. You hear the story of how the piece was hoisted there by machinery first established upon the rock; of the blasting for emplacement; of the accidents after which it was finally emplaced; of the ingenious thought which has allowed for the chance of recoil or of displacement; you have perhaps a month's journeying from point to point of this sort over a matter of 250 miles." A special correspondent of the London "Times" describes the fighting around Monte Pasubio in the Trentino, which has already been mentioned in the preceding pages, as follows: