Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Drei Zinnen! You three rock mountains above Misurina of the Italian Tyrol—how many times have we not climbed up, to lie on your high stony slopes, steeping our eyes in wild form and colour, wherefrom even a dull spirit must take wings and soar a little! Width of thought is surely born, in some sort, of majestic sights—cloud forms, and a burning sky, rock pinnacles, and wandering, deep-down valleys, the gray-violet shadows on the hills, the frozen serenity of far snows. All the outspread miracle there lies fan-shaped to the south, south-east, south-west, having that warmth which so makes the heart rejoice the moment one passes over and looks southward from any mountain. What traveller does not feel strange loveliness steal up into his soul from southern slopes? Domodossola below the Simplon; Val d’Aosta beyond the Matterhorn; Bormio beneath the Stelvio; and many another holy place. It is not merely charm and mellowness—the South can be savage as the North—it is some added poignancy of form and colour, and a look of being blessed.
Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Music comes drifting up your slopes, from pasture far down enough to give magic to cow-bells.
But now, where but three years ago we watched a little white cow licking its herd’s sprained hand, men are fighting to the death. Batteries must be adorning that steep forcella running from the refuge hut. A new kind of thunder reverberates, in whose roar the stones that were for ever falling will have lost their voices. And the beasts, the gray, the dun, the white, mild-eyed—their pasture below must be a desert! Even the goats surely have gone. Or do they and their young masters attend placidly on these new mysteries, just pricking their ears now and again at some too raucous clap and clatter of guns?
Let those who are killed up there be buried in their tracks! Out of their bodies on the lower slopes a few more flowers will spring—gentian, mountain-dandelion, alpen-rose; and higher, nearer those peaks, they will be grateful food for root of edelweiss. And may their spirits—if men have such after death—stay up on those wild heights! Nowhere else could they have such free flitting space! Friend-spirit, foe-spirit, they will fight no more, but on the winter nights in comradeship haunt the frozen hills, where no shred of man or beast or bird or plant is left, till Spring comes again.