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He looked a magnificent, almost a Mephistophelian, figure, with his dark features, his flashing angry eyes, his air of decision, his sharp gestures, his tall body enveloped in a loose cloak, his Alpino hat, with its long single feather.

Rome grew upon me, rapidly and ceaselessly, during the few days that I spent there, and sent me back to the mountains, clothed with their pinewoods and their graves of much brave youth, uplifted in heart and purified in spirit. Early one afternoon in the Piazza Venezia I fell in with two Italian officers, an Alpino and an Engineer, both wounded and not yet fit to go back to the Front.

Very wonderful too is the spirit which animates the Alpini. My Alpino friend had been wounded in the leg last August at Rombon, and still walked lame. He told me of incidents which he had witnessed, of Alpini charging across and through uncut enemy wire, with the wounded and the dying crying to their comrades, "Ciao! Ciao! Avanti!"

See Annales des Ponts et Chaussees, 1847, 1 semestre, p. 150; VOGT, Nutzliche und schadliche Thiere; and particularly articles in the Giornale del Club Alpino, vol. iv., no. 15, and vol. v., no. 16. See also in Aus der Natur, vol. 54, p. 707, an article entitled Nutzen der Vogel fur die Landwirthschaft, where it is affirmed that "without birds no agriculture or even vegetation would be possible."

Closely attached to the Alpini are the Mountain Artillery, armed with light guns of about the same calibre as our own twelve-pounders. They too are recruited from the mountaineers and wear the Alpino hat and single feather. The Alpini have a magnificent regimental spirit and, in my judgment, are the equals of any troops in the world.