The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the Ægean | Page 7

pointed steeples faced with colored slates or
tiles. On the German side the towns are better kept, the houses better
built, the streets wider and cleaner than in the Italian districts. Instead
of the low, white-walled, red-tiled dwellings so characteristic of Italy,
the houses begin to assume the aspect of Alpine chalets, with carved
wooden balconies and steep-pitched roofs to prevent the settling of the
winter snows. The plastered façades of many of the houses are
decorated with gaudily colored frescoes, nearly always of Biblical
characters or scenes, so that in a score of miles the traveler has had the
whole story of the Scriptures spread before him. They are a deeply
religious people, these Tyrolean peasants, as is evidenced not only by
the many handsome churches and the character of the wall-paintings on
the houses, but by the amazing frequency of the wayside shrines, most
of which consist of representations of various phases of the Crucifixion,
usually carved and painted with a most harrowing fidelity of detail.
Occasionally we encountered groups of peasants wearing the
picturesque velvet jackets, tight knee-breeches, heavy woolen stockings
and beribboned hats which one usually associates with the Tyrolean
yodelers who still inflict themselves on vaudeville audiences in the
United States. As we sped northward the landscape changed with the
inhabitants, the sunny Italian countryside, ablaze with flowers and
green with vineyards, giving way to solemn forests, gloomy defiles,
and crags surmounted by grim, gray castles which reminded me of the
stage-settings for "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin."

Seen from the summit of the Mendel Pass, the road from Trent to
Bozen looks like a lariat thrown carelessly upon the ground. It climbs
laboriously upward, through splendid evergreen forests, in countless
curves and spirals, loiters for a few-score yards beside the margin of a
tiny crystal lake, and then, refreshed, plunges downward, in a series of
steep white zigzags, to meet the Isarco, in whose company it enters
Bozen. Because the car, like ourselves, was thirsty, we stopped at the
summit of the pass at the tiny hamlet of Madonna di Campiglio--Our
Lady of the Fields--for water and for tea. Should you have occasion to
go that way, I hope that you will take time to stop at the unpretentious
little Hotel Neumann. It is the sort of Tyrolean inn which had, I
supposed, gone out of existence with the war. The innkeeper, a jovial,
white-whiskered fellow, such as one rarely finds off the musical
comedy stage, served us with tea--with rum in it--and hot bread with
honey, and heaping dishes of small wild strawberries, and those
pastries which the Viennese used to make in such perfection. There
were five of us, including the chauffeur and the orderly, and for the
food which we consumed I think that the innkeeper charged the
equivalent of a dollar. But, as he explained apologetically, the war had
raised prices terribly. We were the first visitors, it seemed, barring
Austrians and a few Italian officers, who had visited his inn in nearly
five years. Both of his sons had been killed in the war, he told us,
fighting bravely with their Jaeger battalion. The widow of one of his
sons--I saw her; a sweet-faced Austrian girl--with her child, had come
to live with him, he said. Yes, he was an old man, both of his boys were
dead, his little business had been wrecked, the old Emperor
Franz-Joseph--yes, we could see his picture over the fireplace
within--had gone and the new Emperor Karl was in exile, in
Switzerland, life had heard; even the Empire in which he had lived, boy
and man, for seventy-odd years, had disappeared; the whole world was,
indeed, turned upside down--but, Heaven be praised, he had a little
grandson who would grow up to carry the business on.
[Illustration: A LITTLE MOTHER OF THE TYROL
We gave her some candy: it was the first taste of sugar that she had had
in four years]

[Illustration: THE END OF THE DAY
A Tyrolean peasant woman returning from the fields]
"How do you feel," I asked the old man, "about Italian rule?"
"They are not our own people," he answered slowly. "Their language is
not our language and their ways are not our ways. But they are not an
unkind nor an unjust people and I think that they mean to treat us fairly
and well. Austria is very poor, I hear, and could do nothing for us if she
would. But Italy is young and strong and rich and the officers who have
stopped here tell me that she is prepared to do much to help us. Who
knows? Perhaps it is all for the best."
Immediately beyond Madonna di Campiglio the highway begins its
descent from the pass in a series of appallingly sharp turns. Hardly had
we settled