"But you, Caetani, are an engineer," I said. "Why not overthrow mountains and build bridges instead of winging about as an observer." Then I went away to see how successful the Austrians had been in destroying the art treasures of Venice and Milan; and after a while men told me the story of an engineer who uprooted a mountain range upon which two battalions of Austrians had defied an army for many months. This engineer who had solved nature's great problems in the Rocky Mountains and in Alaska climbed like a fly up the face of sheer rock cliffs, managed to drag after him the necessary drills and then, with Austrian riflemen patrolling high overhead drilled a tunnel of 300 meters length into the solid rock. It took three months. He stuffed the tunnel with seven tons of explosives, attached his fuses and his wiring, scrambled back down the cliffs and invited the army to a spectacle. A touch of the forefinger, a cataclysm, cheers ringing through the defiles. The mountain top was gone. This engineer was the American trained Gealsio Caetani. The mountain was the Col di Lana in the Trentino. When one visits such men one climbs to the aeries of eagles, for it is at such heights that the troops of Italy are fighting. To such heights--2,000 meters, 3,000 metres, often 4,000 meters, they must swing or drag the great guns, their stores of provisions, their supplies of ammunition. Major Neri, a great engineer, nonchalantly bridged two mountain ranges with slender wire cables; They had told him it couldn't be done. He did it. I asked him how. "By fastening one end of the bridge to one mountain and the other end to another mountain--so," said Neri. What does one reply to such men? In the Carso I formed a pretty good idea of the difficulties of the Italian campaign. From the point of view of attack the character of the country is the cruelest imaginable. It is simply inconceivable that any human beings could persist for two years blasting out trenches inch by inch, building up both sides to a proper height with fragments of rock and myriads of sand bags under the most terrific and plunging crossfire of mitrailleuse, musketry, hand grenades and all kinds of artillery, until at last a trench was constructed varying from ten to twenty meters in distance from the paralleling enemy's work. Everywhere were barbed wire and chevaux de frise, endless lines of them. The rocks between the trenches were literally and absolutely covered with shells of every caliber, exploded and unexploded, and with thousands of hand grenades, so that it was a very serious matter where one should put one's feet. Many of the dead were lying under stones, and fragments of bodies were strewn about.