Page:Cesare Battisti and the Trentino.djvu/31

 blizzard days and two are gun-play days. It is a very hard life because almost all positions are carried after difficult climbs. Winds and blizzards are doing their worst, where there is not even room, enough to build a shack. Sections of our corps are camping on peaks at an elevation of about nine thousand feet, where they look like eagle's nests."

From the Tonale he is sent to the Adamello — that is to say, to a much higher mountain — where he takes part in various encounters under the most awful circumstances amid the snow and the storms. On the 7th of November, he writes: "The other day we were engaged in action at an altitude of more than 10,000 feet, standing in the snow from four o'clock in the morning until late in the evening — still we got off untouched either by the frost or the persistent attacks of enemy artillery. But gallantry and luck are not sufficient to make an advance; all the encounters we have brought to a successful end were tactically impaired by the fury of the blizzards; some nights the temperature was as low as twenty-three degrees C. below zero."

At last, in December, 1915, he is given his commission as lieutenant and takes leave from the Fifth Alpine Regiment feelingly, because he had grown fond of his "gallant Bergamaschi" — and enters the Sixth Regiment, assigned to the Monte Baldo sector. Here he finds conditions quite different from those he experienced on the Adamello. Although the thermometer marks an equally low temperature, still the cold is far more endurable. Here he helps in the construction of blindages and redoubts. "I should have liked far better," he writes, "to have been down in the valley helping the Bersaglieri in their capture of Lappio, but obedience is the foremost virtue of the soldier. And so I adapted myself to the hermitage assigned to me and becoming a carpenter, road builder and mason, during the day, while I spent the long nights reading patriotic poetry to my soldiers." Does not this utterance reveal his soul?

In this sector his stay was a short one, for after a few days his Alpine troops were sent down to Loppio as reinforcements. With his platoon he was the first to enter six houses at one end Page twenty-nine