Ammunition in boxes was being unloaded from the lorries, stacked on the roadside near the _Teleferica_. The downward-gliding car was seized by a group of waiting men, steadied, stopped, quickly loaded with the boxes.
The staff-captain's motor drew up. He descended, walked towards the _Teleferica_, exchanged a salute with the dapper little ammunition officer superintending the work.
"_Buon' giorno, signor capitano_," said the little lieutenant. "Are you going up to see the attack?"
"Ah! Some people have all the luck! I never see anything. My battery never has any casualties--and here am I left supernumerary. I might as well be mountaineering for my pleasure!" He drew a lugubrious grimace of comic, half-sincere self-pity.
The captain struggled into his heavy fur coat, apparently superfluous here in the fierce heat which glowed from the rock in the noonday sun.
"A glass of wine before you ascend, _capitano_!" said the lieutenant. "Come, I will take no denial!"
He led the way to a little wooden shack close under the lee of the precipice. Within, the walls were decorated with a number of scathingly satirical drawings of the _Tedeschi_; some extremely clever studies of the mountains in their different aspects of light--sunset and dawn, moonlight. The host, perceiving the captain's glance, made a deprecatory gesture.
"What I am reduced to, _signor capitano_! And I might be blowing the Austrians out of their eyries!" He was typical of that new Italy which, while it cannot cease to be artistic, holds all of small account that is not war against the Austrian. He filled the glasses, raised his own, half turned to a portrait of Gabriele d'Annunzio that shared with the King the honours of the wall. "_Per la più grande Italia!_"
"_Per la più grande Italia!_" Both officers drank the toast. "To-morrow morning she will be a little greater if the fates are kind," added the captain.
A few minutes later he was lying full-length in a narrow low-sided cage, suspended from a pulley on a thick wire-rope, and being hauled up, with much creaking and strident protest of the pulley-wheel and vicious jerking of the loose rope, to the summit of the cliff.
There he was again in a scene of activity. Broad-shouldered porters in frayed and much-worn Territorial uniforms were bearing away the ammunition boxes that had arrived at the summit, carrying them towards the next station of the _Teleferica_. The captain followed in their track.