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Crowdsourcing and
Probabilistic Decision-
Making in Software
Engineering:
Emerging Research and
Opportunities
Varun Gupta
University of Beira Interior, Covilha, Portugal
A volume in the Advances in
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Table of Contents
Foreword.............................................................................................................viii
Preface.
................................................................................................................... x
Acknowledgment................................................................................................xiv
Chapter 1
Markov Decision Theory-Based Crowdsourcing Software Process Model.
...........1
Kamalendu Pal, City, University of London, UK
Chapter 2
I-Way: A Cloud-Based Recommendation System for Software Requirement
Reusability............................................................................................................23
Chetna Gupta, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India
Surbhi Singhal, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida,
India
Astha Kumari, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India
Chapter 3
Requirement-Based Test Approach and Traceability for High-Integrity
Airborne Embedded Systems.
...............................................................................35
Sudha Srinivasan, Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), Bangalore,
India
D. S. Chauhan, GLA University Mathura, Mathura, India

Chapter 4
A Systematic Literature Review on Risk Assessment and Mitigation
Approaches in Requirement Engineering.............................................................51
Priyanka Chandani, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida,
India
Chetna Gupta, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India
Chapter 5
Agile Team Measurement to Review the Performance in Global Software
Development.........................................................................................................81
Chamundeswari Arumugam, SSN College of Engineering, India
Srinivasan Vaidyanathan, Cognizant Technology Solutions, India
Chapter 6
Improving Construction Management Through Advanced Computing and
Decision Making...................................................................................................94
Varun Gupta, University of Beira Interior, Covilha, Portugal
Aditya Raj Gupta, Amity University, Noida, India
Utkarsh Agrawal, Amity University, Noida, India
Ambika Kumar, Amity University, Noida, India
Rahul Verma, Amity University, Noida, India
Chapter 7
An Investigation on Quality Perspective of Software Functional Artifacts........109
Vimaladevi M., Pondicherry Engineering College, Puducherry, India
Zayaraz G., Pondicherry Engineering College, Puducherry, India
Chapter 8
An Analysis of UI/UX Designing With Software Prototyping Tools.................134
Shruti Gupta, Amity University, Delhi, India
Chapter 9
Improving Financial Estimation in Construction Management Through
Advanced Computing and Decision Making......................................................146
Varun Gupta, University of Beira Interior, Covilha, Portugal
Aditya Raj Gupta, Amity University, Noida, India
Utkarsh Agrawal, Amity University, Noida, India
Ambika Kumar, Amity University, Noida, India
Rahul Verma, Amity University, Noida, India

Chapter 10
Independent Verification and Validation of FPGA-Based Design for Airborne
Electronic Applications.
......................................................................................153
Sudha Srinivasan, Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), Bangalore,
India
D. S. Chauhan, GLA University, Mathura, India
Rekha R., Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), Bangalore, India
Related Readings............................................................................................... 167
About the Contributors.................................................................................... 177
Index................................................................................................................... 181

Foreword
IftheexperienceofthelastfewdecadesofSoftwareEngineeringisanythingtogoby,
we seem to always be catching up with the innovations taking place in a hyperactive
market, increasing the chances of developing systems that don’t fully take account of
the needs of users, don’t meet legal obligations and end up compromising reliability,
security and maintainability.
Fortunately, the software industry is good at learning as we go. Each innovation
is typically followed by excitement in the market, some unfortunate system failures
due to oversight in the requirements and, most importantly, a realisation that our
Software Engineering methods need to adapt to meet the new demands. Examples of
this learning process include an era where formal methods of software engineering
were developed in the 90’s to meet the need to ensure reliability in safety critical
applications, and more recently, the drive to adopt agile development methods to
increase productivity and reduce risks.
The most recent efforts to improve the software engineering process, which is
the subject of this edited collection, is to utilise crowdsourcing and methods from
machine learning. Although crowdsourcing, which was advocated by Jeff Howe as
a way of achieving “wisdom of the crowd” as far back as 2006, its proposed use
for developing software has been more recent and is growing rapidly. The essence
of crowdsourcing for software development is to utilise a community of external
stakeholders, including potential users, analysts and programmers, to participate in
thedevelopmentofanapplicationonthepremisethatallstakeholderswilleventually
gain mutual benefits.
This broad view of crowdsourcing and use of machine learning for software
engineering raises many questions, such as:
• How does one use crowdsourcing effectively in the different phases of
software development, from requirements elicitation to testing and then
maintenance and deployment?
• We know from recent history, that new software engineering methodologies
are not universally applicable, so are there specific types of applications
where use of crowdsourcing and use of machine learning is best?
viii

Foreword
This edited collection brings together several studies addressing such questions.
The chapters include systematic reviews of the field, case studies showing the use of
machinelearningandcrowdsourcingindomainssuchasconstructionandaerospace,
and key perspectives from the IT industry.
Thechaptersinthisbookwillprovidevaluableinsightforbothacademicspursuing
researchinthisfieldandsoftwaredevelopmentcompanies,whoareseekingtoimprove
their processes by using crowdsourcing or AI methods for software engineering.
Sunil Vadera
University of Salford, UK
July 2019
ix

Preface
AN OVERVIEW
Software Engineering deals with the delivery of high quality software to its users
within time and budgets. The development is done by software development
organization either as bespoke or as mass market product. There are variety of tools
andtechniquesthatsoftwareengineerscanusetoachievetheobjectivesofhighquality
software. Different techniques provides different opportunities of improvements.
Improvement in this area will improve the quality of delivered software that will
impactpositivelythedomainswherethesoftwarehastofunction.Theevolutionofthe
software makes the different activities more challenging. The challenges are further
amplified because these days the inputs are taken from crowds as the software will
be used by these crowds only. The various solutions of various problems faced in
development of the software either co-located or distributed for single customer of
for mass markets, must be capable of handling the crowds in efficient manner. This
requires integration of various areas like Artificial Intelligence especially Natural
LanguageProcessing,BigData,dataminingetctoimprovethesoftwareengineering.
The decision making involved in software development is based on probabilistic
reasoning as the complete process is uncertain and hence the probabilistic decision
models finds its role in overall improvements in crowd based software engineering.
This book provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical
researchfindingsinthebroadareaofsoftwareengineering.Theresearchcontainedin
this book highlights issues, challenges, techniques and practices relevant to software
engineering in general and crowd sourcing in particular. The research addressing
softwareengineeringingeneralprovidesresearcherstheknowledgeaboutconstraints
and best practices applicable for crowd soured software engineering.
x

Preface
TARGET AUDIENCE
The research findings contained in this book is ideal for the software engineers who
want to improve the manner the software is developed by increasing the accuracy
of probabilistic reasoning supporting their decision making and getting automation
support. It will also provide them with the latest solution strategies for various
problems faced during development and various best practices through case studies.
This book is ideal for professionals and researchers working in the field of software
engineeringforbespokeandmassmarketdevelopments.Moreover,thebookprovides
insights and support software engineers and higher management executives with
the latest effective solutions, automation supports and case studies about software
engineering issues, challenges, techniques and practices.
ORGANISATION OF BOOK
This book is organised into ten chapters. Each chapter provides insight into
software engineering related aspects. Chapter 1 analyses the process of software
developmentatacrowdsourcedplatform.Theworkanalysesandidentifiesthephase
wise deliverables in a competitive software development problem. It also proposes
the use of Markov Decision Theory to model the dynamics of the development
processes of a software by using a simulated example. Chapter 2 addresses the
problem of effectively searching and selecting relevant requirements for reuse
meeting stakeholders objectives through knowledge discovery and data mining
techniques maintained over a cloud platform. Knowledge extraction of similar
requirement(s) is performed on data and meta-data stored in central repository
using a novel intersective way method (i-way), which uses intersection results of
two machine learning algorithm namely, K-nearest neighbors (KNN) and Term
frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). i-way is a 2-level extraction
framework which represents win-win situation by considering intersective results
of two different approaches to ensure that selection is progressing towards desired
requirement for reuse consideration. The validity and effectiveness of results of
proposedframeworkareevaluatedonrequirementdataset(Shaukatetal.,2018),which
show that proposed approach can significantly help in reducing effort by selecting
similar requirements of interest for reuse. Chapter 3 proposes a methodology for
achievingrequirementtraceabilityandtherebyperformingrequirementbasedtesting
for efficient test and evaluation of aircraft subsystems. This methodology integrates
requirement traceability throughout the software development life cycle along with
requirement based testing for high integrity software systems. The methodology
has been found to be most effective in revealing errors and optimizes testing by
xi

Preface
preventing repetition of test cases across test platforms. This unique contribution has
the potential to revolutionize the research world in software engineering. Chapter 4
undertakes a study to identify and analyze existing risk assessment and management
techniques from a historical perspective that address and study risk management
and perception of risk. The paper present extensive summary of existing literature
on various techniques and approaches related to requirements defects, defect
taxonomy, its classification and its potential impact on software development as
the main contributions of this research work. The primary objective of this study
was to present a systematic literature review of techniques/methods/tools for risk
assessment and management. This research successfully identifies and discovers
existing risk assessment and management techniques, their limitations, taxonomies,
processes and identifies possible improvements for better defect identification and
prevention. Chapter 5 is aimed at studying the key performance indicators of team
members working in an Agile project environment and in an Extreme Programming
software development. Practitioners from six different XP projects were selected
to respond to the survey measuring the performance indicators, namely, escaped
defects, team member’s velocity, deliverables and extra efforts. The chapter presents
a comparative view of Scrum and XP, the two renowned agile methods with their
processes,methodologies,developmentcyclesandartifactswhileassessingthebase
performance indicators in XP setup. These indicators are key to any Agile project in
aGlobalSoftwareDevelopmentenvironment.Theobservedperformanceindicators
were compared against the Gold Standard industry benchmarks along with best,
average and worst case scenarios. Practitioners from six Agile XP projects were
asked to participate in the survey. Observed results best serve the practitioners to
takenecessarycoursecorrectionstostayinthebestcasescenariosoftheirrespective
projects. Chapter 6 proposes an algorithm to make the bidding dynamic by not
only awarding tenders on basis of cost quoted in tenders (biding cost) but also on
contractorratings.Theratingsofcontractoriscomputedusinghistoricalperformance
of contractor. The paper empirically identifies the factors to rate the contractors.
The historical values associated with the performance rating parameters are then
combined using the “controlled values” which one assumed to standard across the
industry, to yield the overall weighted rating of firms. This rating is then combined
with the bidding cost, thereby making the selection of contractor dynamic. Selected
Contractor is paid bidding cost. The algorithm is executed a hypothetical value
to illustrate the approach. A web application has been developed to execute the
proposed algorithm. Chapter 7 surveys the quality improvement techniques for the
two fundamental artifacts of software product development namely the architecture
design and the source code. The information from top level research databases is
compiled and an overall picture of quality enhancement in current software trends
during the design, development and maintenance phases are presented. This helps
xii

Preface
both the software developers and the quality analysts to gain understanding of the
current state of the art for quality improvement of design and source code and the
usage of various practices. The results indicate the need for more realistic, precise,
automated technique for architectural quality analysis. The complex nature of
the current software products require the system developed to be beyond robust
and resilient and building intelligent software that is anti-fragile, self-adaptive is
favored. Innovative proposals that reduce the cost and time are invited. Chapter 8
presents a tool based on an analysis of different popular prototyping tools in the
industry which will overcome some or all of the major issues faced by application
designers. Author’s describe the prototyping tool’s concept, design, features as well
as how it is suitable for making great user interfaces helping application designers
to design exactly what they want. Chapter 9 proposed an algorithm to provide a
proper way for the contractors to estimate the accurate cost of the project for which
they provides bids. A survey was conducted to gather information about how the
contractors generally estimate the cost of their project, problems they face in this
process, their past experiences, factors they consider when estimating the cost of the
project, etc. This chapter provides an effective solution to the problem of inaccurate
cost estimation. The objective is to enhance the chances of the estimation of the
final cost of the project that contractor believes it will incur, at the time of bidding.
A web application has been developed to execute the proposed algorithm.
Chapter 10 describes the IV&V methodology for Field Programmable Gate
Arrays (FPGA) based Design during the development Life Cycle along with the
Certification Process.
Thisbookcontainsresearcharticlestargetedvariousareasofsoftwareengineering
likerequirementmanagement,quality,softwaretesting,softwareapproachesincivil
engineering, agile teams, process models etc. The emergence of crowd sourcing
had further enhanced the challenges that software engineer faced by enhancing
the quantity of inputs for decision makings and forcing him to consider the human
side of crowds (like motivation) to enhance quality of inputs. Crowd sourcing had
beneficial role to play in software engineering as it provides software engineer
the ability to consider the expectation of crowds and this may affect the software
acceptability among them.
Varun Gupta
xiii

Acknowledgment
ज्ञानशक्तिसमारूढः तत्त्वमालाविभूषितः ।
भुक्तिमुक्तिप्रदाता च तस्मै श्रीगुरवे नमः ॥
First of all, I would like to thank my Gurus Prof. Durg Singh Chauhan, Dr. Kamlesh
Dutta and Prof. Thomas Hanne, whose guidance through out research degrees and
thereafter as an individual researcher, had made it possible to successfully lead &
complete the editorial process of a book effectively.
सर्वार्थसंभवो देहो जनित: पोषितो यत: |
न तयोर्याति निर्वेशं पित्रोर्मत्र्य: शतायुषा ||
Secondly I would like to thank my parents for their continuous support and faith in
me. Its is because of their sacrifices that helped me reach this stage of life.
Third, I would like to take the opportunity to thank the authors who had contributed
their research findings in this book. I thank them for considering this book as the
suitable platform for dissemination of their research work.
Further, I thank the editorial review board members for managing time from their
busy schedules, for undertaking the double blind review process of the submitted
research articles.
I also take this opportunity to thank the IGI publishers and their Book development
Team for all the help & cooperation in making this book a reality.
Last but not the least, I would also like to thank indebted to all whosoever have
contributed in this book.
Varun Gupta
xiv

Copyright © 2020, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Chapter 1
1
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-9659-2.ch001
ABSTRACT
The word crowdsourcing, a compound contraction of crowd and outsourcing,
was introduced by Jeff Howe in order to define outsourcing to the crowd. It is a
sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services.
These services include ideas and development of software or hardware, or any
other business-task from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of
internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. It
has been used for completing various human intelligence tasks in the past, and this
is an emerging form of outsourcing software development as it has the potential to
significantly reduce the implementation cost. This chapter analyses the process of
software development at a crowdsourced platform. The work analyses and identifies
the phase wise deliverables in a competitive software development problem. It also
proposestheuseofMarkovdecisiontheorytomodelthedynamicsofthedevelopment
processes of a software by using a simulated example.
INTRODUCTION
Crowdsourcing is the Information Technology (IT) mediated engagement of crowds
forthepurposesofproblem-solving,taskcompletion,ideagenerationandproduction
(Howe,2006;Howe,2008;Brabham,2008).ThelatestbreakthroughsinInformation
and Communication Technologies (ICT) have ushered a new dawn for researchers to
Markov Decision Theory-
Based Crowdsourcing
Software Process Model
Kamalendu Pal
City, University of London, UK

2
Markov Decision Theory-Based Crowdsourcing Software Process Model
designinnovativecrowdsourcingsystemsthatcanharnessHumanIntelligenceTasks
(HITs) of online communities. The prime aim of crowdsourcing is to facilitate the
wisdom of crowds. The theory suggests that the average response of many people,
even amateurs, to a question is frequently more accurate than the view of a few
experts. In this respect, a community of individuals with common interests and
facing the same tasks can deliver better products and solutions than experts alone
in the field. Information systems scholars Jean-Fabrice Lebraty and Katia Lobre-
Lebraty confirmed that the “diversity and impudence of the members of a crowd”
is a value addition to crowdsourcing operations (Lebraty & Lobre-Lebraty, 2013).
Therefore, the advantages of crowdsourcing lie mainly in the innovative ideas
and problem-solving capacity that the diverse contributors – which may consist of
experts and interested amateurs – can provide. The crowd can provide expert and
faster solution to an existing problem. Depending on the challenge at hand, the
solutionprovidedmayalsoproveinnovative.Inthisway,crowdsourcinghasemerged
as a new labour pool for a variety of tasks, ranging from micro-tasks on Amazon
Mechanical Turk (mTurk) to big innovation contests conducted by Netflix and
Innocentive. Amazon mTurk today dominates the market for crowdsourcing small
task that would be too repetitive and too tedious for an individual to accomplish.
Amazon mTurk established a marketplace where requesters can post tasks and
workers complete them for relatively small amount of money. Image tagging,
document labeling, characterizing data, transcribing spoken languages, or creating
data visualizations, are all tasks that are now routinely being completed online using
the Amazon mTurk marketplace, providing higher speed of completion and lower
price than in-house solutions.
Competitive crowdsourcing is reward based and has been used for variety of
tasks from design of T-Shirts to research and development of pharmaceuticals and
very recently for developing software (Howe, 2008; Lakhani & Lonstein, 2011; Stol
& Fitzgerald, 2014).The mTurk is one of the best-known crowdsourcing platforms
where HITs or microtasks are performed by thousands of workers (Ipeirotis, 2009).
There are different types of crowdsourcing platforms, such as virtual labour
markets (VLMs), tournament crowdsourcing (TC) and open collaboration (OC),
which each have different roles and characteristics (Estelles-Arolas & Gonzalez-
Ladron-de-Guevara, 2012; Prpic, Taeihagh & Melton, 2014). Along with the
growth of crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing platforms are very important to mediate
the transactions. At the same time, IT-mediated platforms improve efficiency and
decrease transaction costs and information asymmetry. However, these platforms
are domain specific.
Crowdsourced Software Engineering derives from crowdsourcing. Using an
open call, it recruits global online labour to work on different types of software
engineering works, such as requirement elicitation, design, coding and testing.

3
This emerging model has been claimed to reduce time-to-market by increasing
parallelism (Lakhani et al., 2010; LaToza et al., 2013; Stol & Fitzgerald, 2014), and
to lower costs and defect rates with flexible development capability (Lakhani et al.,
2010). Crowdsourced Software Engineering is implemented by many successful
crowdsourcing platforms, such as TopCoder, AppStori, uTest, Mob4Hire and
TestFlight. Crowdsourced Software Engineering has also rapidly gained increasing
interest in both industrial and academic communities.
In this chapter only, software development related crowdsourcing business
activitiesandrelevantplatformsareconsidered.Softwaredevelopmentiscreativeand
ever evolving. Organizations use various software development process models and
methodologies for developing software. A software process model (SPM) specifies
the stages in which a project should be divided, order of execution of these stages,
and other constraints and conditions on the execution of these stage (Sommerville,
2017). However, the software development methodology (also known as SDM)
framework did not emerge until the 1960s. The system development life cycle
(SDLC) is the oldest formalized framework for building information systems. The
main idea of the SDLC has been “to pursue the development of information systems
in a very deliberate, structured and methodical way, requiring each stage of the life
cycle – from inception of the idea to delivery of the final system – to be carried out
rigidly and sequentially (Elliott, 2004) within the context of the framework being
applied. The main objective of this framework in the 1960s was to develop large
scale functional business systems in an age of large-scale business conglomerates,
whose information systems activities revolved around heavy data processing and
number crunching routines.
It is worth to explore strategies for successful use of software engineering and
look at the history that forms the basic understanding of good software design and
developmentpractices.Thehistoryisimportantbecausethebasicsseemtohavebeen
ignoredinmany1990scommercialenterprisesseekingtodeveloplargeandcomplex
softwaresystems.InOctober1968,aNATOconferenceonsoftwareengineeringwas
held in Garmisch, Germany (Nauer & Randell, 1969). The conference organizers
coined the phrase ‘software engineering’ as a provocative term to “imply the need
for software manufacture to be based on theoretical foundations and practical
disciplines traditional to engineering”. The highlights of the conference were
discussions related to process: how to produce quality software efficiently, how
to provide customer-oriented service, and how to protect a business investment in
software. Good software engineering was equated with good project management.
As a matter of fact, software engineers aim to use software development models
for building software that meets user requirements and is delivered within the
specified time limit and budget. The objective of software crowdsourcing is to
produce high quality and low-cost software products by harnessing the power of

4
crowd. To meet this objective, the crowd workers who agree to work on the task
are given some financial or social incentives (Hoffmann, 2009). The tasks could
be executed in a collaborative or competitive manner based on the organization
style. Wikipedia and Linux are viewed as well-known collaborative crowdsourcing
examples(Howe,2008;Doan,2011).Developingasoftwarethroughcrowdsourcing
blurs the distinction between a user and developer and follows a cocreation principle
(Tsai, Wu, & Huhns, 2014).
Withtheincreasinginterestincrowdsourcingsoftwaredevelopment,itissignificant
to analyze the development process methodology used by crowdsourcing platforms.
This chapter analyzes the process of software development at a crowdsourced
platform. The work identifies various artifacts needed at each development phase
and the order of events that occur along with the deliverables of each phase. The
development process is modeled using a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that
provides a mathematical framework for modelling decision making in situations
where outcomes are partly random and partly under the control of the decision-
maker. The reminder of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces
thebackgroundinformationofcrowdsourcing.Section3presentsaliteraturereview.
Section4describestheapplicationdevelopmentprocessofacrowdsourcedplatform.
Section 5 explains the basis of modelling the process. Section 6 depicts the Markov
DecisionProcessrepresentation;andfinally,Section7providesconcludingremarks
and future direction this research.
BACKGROUND OF CROWDSOURCING
The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined by Jeff Howe in 2006 through an article in
the wired magazine as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once
performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large)
network of people in the form of an open call” (Howe, 2006). The activities are
executed by people who do not necessarily known each other, and interact with the
company, the ‘requester’, via virtual tools and an internet connection. They become
‘the workers’: they can access tasks, execute them, upload the results and receive
various forms of payment using any web browser. This is a labour market open 24/7,
with a diverse workforce available to perform tasks quickly and cheaply.
A diagrammatic representation of well-established crowdsourcing platform
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk) - (www.mturk.com) is shown in Figure 1. In
this diagram, the “requesters” both design and post tasks for the Crowd to work
on. In mTurk, tasks given to the “workers” are called Human Intelligence Tasks”
(HITs).Requesterscantestworkersbeforeallowingthemtoaccepttaskandestablish
a baseline performance level of prospective workers. Requesters can also accept,

5
or reject, the results submitted by the workers, and this decision impacts on the
worker’s reputation within the mTurk system. Payments for completed tasks can be
redeemedas‘Amazon.com’giftcertificatesoralternativelytransferredtoaworker’s
bank account. Details of the mTurk interface design, how an API is used to creates
and post HITs and a description of the workers’ characteristics are beyond the scope
of this chapter. With each result submitted by a worker the requester receives an
answer that including various information about how the task was processed. One
element of this data is a unique “workerID” allowing the requester to distinguish
between individual workers. Using this “workerID” it is possible to analyse how
many different HITs each worker completed.
A definitive classification of Crowdsourcing tasks has not yet been established,
however Corney and colleagues (Corney et al., 2010) suggest three possible
categorizations based upon: nature of the task (creation, evaluation and organization
tasks), nature of the crowd (‘expert’, ‘most people’ and ‘vast majority’) and nature
of the payment (voluntary contribution, rewarded at a flat rate and rewarded with
a prize). Similarly, Crowdsourcing practitioners, such as Chaordix (from the
Cambrian House (www.cambrianhouse.com)) describes Crowdsourcing models as
a Contest (i.e. individual submit ideas and the winner is selected by the company,
‘the requester’), a Collaboration (i.e. individuals submit their ideas or results, the
crowd evolves the ideas and picks a winner), and Moderated (i.e. individuals submit
their ideas, the crowd evolves those ideas, a panel – set by ‘the requesters’ select
the finalists and the crowd votes on a winner). In recent decades academics across
many different disciplines have started reporting the use of Internet Crowdsourcing
to support a range of research projects, e.g. social network motivators (Brabham,
2008), relevance of evaluations and queries (Alonso & Mizzaro, 2009; Kostakos,
2009), accuracy in judgment and evaluations (Kittur et al., 2008). Some of relevant
research issues are described in the next section.
Figure 1. Schematic diagram of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system

6
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Since the coining of the term crowdsourcing, studies have been carried out on
different aspects of crowdsourcing. Researchers have analyzed the economics of
crowdsourcingcontests,proposedmodelsforpricingstrategiesanddoneanalysison
earningrewardandreputation,ingeneral.Huberman(Huberman,2009)analyzeddata
set from YouTube and demonstrate that the productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing
exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention, measured by the number of
downloads (Huberman, Romero, & Wu, 2008).
The purpose of this literature review section is two-fold: (i) Firstly, to provide a
comprehensive survey of the current research progress on using crowdsourcing to
support software engineering activities. (ii) Secondly, to summarize the challenges
forCrowdsourcedSoftwareEngineeringandtorevealtowhatextentthesechallenges
wereaddressedbyexistingwork.Sincethisfieldisanemerging,fast-expandingarea
in software engineering yet to achieve full maturity. The including literature may
directly crowdsource software engineering tasks to the general public, indirectly
reuse existing crowdsourced knowledge, or propose a framework to enable the
realization or improvement of Crowdsourced Software Engineering.
In simplistic sense, the term ‘Crowdsourced Software Engineering’ to denote
the application of crowdsourcing techniques to support software development. It
emphasizes any software engineering activity included, thereby encompassing
activitiesthatdonotnecessarilyyieldsoftwareinthemselves.Forexample,activities
include project management, requirement elicitation, security augmentation and
software test case generation and refinement. The studies specifying the use of
crowdsourcing for developing software are few in literature. In his work Vukoic M
(Vukoic,2009)presentedasamplecrowdsourcingscenarioinsoftwaredevelopment
domain to derive the requirements for delivering a general-purpose crowdsourcing
service in the Cloud (Vukovic, 2009). LaToza and colleagues (LaToza et al., 2014)
developed an approach to decompose programming work into micro tasks for
crowdsourced software development (Latoza, Towne, & Adriano, 2014). In their
work Stol and Fitzgerald (2014) presented an industry case study of crowdsourcing
software development at a multinational corporation and highlighted the challenges
faced (Stol & Fitzgerald, 2014). Zhenghui H. and Wu W. (2014) applied the famous
game theory to model the 2-player algorithm challenges on TopCoder (Hu & Wu,
2014).
Crowdsourced Software Engineering has several potential advantages compared
to traditional software development methods. Crowdsourcing may help software
development organizations integrate elastic, external human resources to reduce
cost from internal employment, and exploit the distributed production model to
speed up the development process.

Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics

reported a man who could not speak German at once. Anything in
the way of police or officials I should have to fight shy of, and, as I
foresaw there must be all kinds of checks on strangers and
travellers, I knew I should have to steer clear of trains and hotels. I
felt sure of myself on the score of language, therefore; clothes and
money were things to be provided as opportunity offered.
Fortunately, Fate was very kind to me in this respect.
One little incident I must mention before I go on with my story.
In the prison I was transferred to most of the English prisoners,
after a while, began to receive parcels from home, even some of the
Canadians coming in on the deal. I, having no friends either in
Canada or England, got nothing direct, but all sorts of nice little odds
and ends of dainties came my way in the final “divvy.” One lad from
the south of England, who was dying with a sort of slow blood-
poisoning and lack of care of a never-healed wound at the back of
his neck, was especially generous to me with the things he got from
home, and when he finally went under I managed to get permission
to write a few words to his family, telling them, among other things,
how kind he had been to me with his parcels. And what should they
do—his brokenhearted mother and sisters in Devonshire—but
“adopt” me in his place and keep right on sending the chocolate and
cigarettes and other “goodies” just as regularly as before. And now
they’ve been to see me here, and tell me they are going to keep
sending me things when I return to the Front just the same as
though I was the boy they had lost.
As soon as I had fully made up my mind what I wanted to do, I
went on my good behaviour, got into the “trusty” class, and was one
of the first picked for outside work when the call came for English
prisoners to help in harvesting and road-making. I had a good
chance to practise my German during the harvest work, but the
prospects for making good after a “get-away” were not very
promising, and I had sense enough to bide my time. But when I got
switched on to road work, and when almost the first thing I saw was
a bunch of Huns clustered round an old Holt “Caterpillar” tractor that
had got stalled on them, I felt that time was drawing near.

Now a “Caterpillar” is just about the finest tractor in the world
for general purposes, provided it is run by a man that has had plenty
of experience with its funny little ways; in the hands of any one else
—even a first-class engineer that is quite at home with a wheel
tractor—it is the original fount of trouble. To me the machine was an
old friend, however, for I had run one for two or three seasons in the
West and worked for a winter in one of the company’s factories in
Illinois. I took the first opportunity to let the Huns know my
qualifications, and when they saw me start in to true up the wobbly
“track,” they just about fell on my neck then and there. They had
seized the machine in a Belgian sugar-beet field a few days after the
outbreak of the war, they explained, and it had been used for a
while to haul heavy artillery in the drive into France. After a time the
hard usage had begun to tell on the “track,” and—as they had no
new parts to replace worn ones with—it had been giving about as
much trouble as it was worth ever since. When I told them that it
was adjustment rather than replacement that was needed, and that
in a few days I could have the machine as good as new, they fairly
tumbled over themselves to “borrow” me for the job.
As a matter of fact, the old “crawler” was just about on its last
legs, but I knew in any case that I could tinker it into some kind of
running shape, and the comparative freedom of the job was what I
wanted. This worked out even better than I expected, for after the
first day or two, in order to save the time taken up by returning me
to the prison camp at night and bringing me back in the morning,
they arranged for me to bunk in in the road camp. They were too
much occupied in hustling the job along to think about asking me for
my parole—a lucky thing, for I should have had a hard time to keep
from breaking it.
With two men to help me, I took the tractor all down,
“babbitted” up the bearings, readjusted the gears, and had it up and
running at the end of a week. With a string back to the seat to open
up the throttle for the sharp pulls, I had it snaking a string of ten
waggon-loads of crushed rock where it had been stalling down on
three before the overhauling. During that week I had also managed
to pick up—no matter how—several marks in money, and had

succeeded in concealing so effectually the greasy jacket of one of
my assistants that he gave up hunting for it and got a new one. A
machinist’s cap had already been given me, and the evening that the
other helper washed out his overalls and flung them over his tent to
dry, I—seeing a chance to complete my wardrobe—decided promptly
that the time had come to make a move. They had offered me a
steady job running the old “Caterpillar,” and at something better than
ordinary “prisoner’s pay,” but as it would have kept me in the same
neighbourhood, I could not figure how it would help my chances in
the least to “linger on.”
There was supposed to be a sentry watching the road
machinery, and also keeping a wary eye on the tent where I bunked
with a half-dozen of the engineers, but he did not take his job very
seriously, and I knew I would have no difficulty avoiding him. We
had had a hard day of it, and my tent mates were in bed by dark—
about 8 o’clock—and asleep, by their deep breathing, a few minutes
later. They all slept in their working clothes, else I could have made
up my outfit then and there. But it did not matter, for within half a
minute of the time I had slipped noiselessly under the loosened tent-
flap, I was making off down the road with a full suit of German
machinist’s togs under my arm. Five minutes later I stopped in the
darker darkness under a tree by the roadside and slipped them on
over my prison suit, rightly anticipating that the extra warmth of the
latter might be very welcome if I had much sleeping out to do.
It was partly bravado, probably, and partly because I felt that, if
missed, I would be searched for in the opposite direction, that
caused me to head for the two-mile-distant town of X——. And it
was probably the same combination which led me, after passing
unchallenged down the long main street, to march up to the wicket
of a “movie” show, pay my twenty-five pfennig and pass inside. Had
there been a “hue and cry” that night (which there was not), this
was undoubtedly the last place they would have looked for me in.
The films were mostly war views—cracking fine things from both
the Russian and French fronts—and other patriotic subjects, but
among them was one of those “blood-and-thunder thrillers” from
California. I don’t recall exactly how the story went, but the thing

that set me thinking was the way the heroine pinched the lights off
the automobile they had kidnapped her in, and afterwards pawned
them for enough to get a ticket home with. What was to prevent my
going back and getting busy on my old “Caterpillar”? I asked myself.
The magneto was worth something like a hundred dollars, and even
if I had no chance to sell it, it was a pity to overlook so easy a bit of
“strafing.” I concluded that my steps had been guided to that
“movie” show by my lucky star, and promptly got up and started
back for the road-making camp. On the way some tipsy villagers
passed me singing the “Hymn of Hate,” the air and most of the
words of which I had already picked up, and, out of sheer happiness
at being again (if only for a few hours) at liberty, I joined in the
explosive bursts of the chorus, booming out louder than any of them
on “England!” Evidently, unconsciously, I had done quite the proper
thing, for they raised their voices to match mine, gave a “Hoch” or
two, and passed on without stopping. That also gave me an idea.
During the whole following two weeks of my wanderings in Germany
every man, woman or child that I passed upon the road, in light or
in darkness, might have heard me humming “The Hymn of Hate,”
“Die Wacht am Rhein,” or, after I had mastered it toward the end,
“Deutschland über Alles.”
It was plain that my flight had not been discovered, for I found
the camp as quiet as when I left it three hours before. I could just
make out the figure of the sentry pacing along down the line of
tractors and dump-waggons, but the canvas which had been thrown
over the “Caterpillar” to protect it from possible rain made it easy for
me to escape attracting his attention. Of light I had no need; I knew
the old “65” well enough to work on it in my sleep. A wrench and
pair of nippers, located just where I had left them in their loops in
the cover of the tool-box over the right “track,” were all I needed.
First I cut the insulated copper wires running to the magneto with
the nippers, and then (placing my double-folded handkerchief over
them to prevent noise) unscrewed with the wrench the nuts from
the bolts which held the costly electrical contrivance to the steel
frame of the tractor. Then I cut off with a knife a good-sized square
of the canvas paulin that covered the machine, wrapped the

magneto in it, and tied up the bundle with a piece of the insulated
copper wire, leaving a doubled loop for a handle. Then I threw out
some of the more delicate adjustments, dropped some odds and
ends of small tools and bits of metal down among the gears where
they would do the most “good,” pocketed the knife and nippers, and,
with the magneto in one hand and the biggest wrench I could find in
the other, set off for X—— again. The wrench was my last and
greatest inspiration; it was to take the place of the one the Huns had
robbed me of in the trenches. I am glad to be able to write that I
have it by me at the present moment, and that it is slated to go back
to the Front with me—, I hope to do a bit of the “strafing” that Fate
denied the other.
Probably no prisoner of war was ever loose in the interior of
Germany with a clearer idea of what he wanted to do, and how he
intended to do it, than I had at this moment. I knew that my only
chance of escaping capture within the next twenty-four hours was in
putting a long way—a hundred miles or more—between myself and
that place by daylight, when the “alarm” would go out. I knew the
only way this could be done was by train; but I also knew that the
quickest way to instant arrest was to try to enter a station and take
a train in the ordinary way. To any but one who had “hoboed” back
and forth across the North American Continent as I had the game
would have seemed a hopeless one.
I was far from despairing, however; in fact, I never felt more
equal to a situation in my life. The whole thing hinged on my getting
my first train. After that I felt I could manage. I had studied German
passenger cars as closely as possible in watching them pass at a
distance, and was certain they offered fairly good “tourist”
accommodation on the “bumpers” or brake beams; but I did not feel
that I yet knew enough of their under-slung “architecture” to board
them when on the move. This meant that I was going to have to
start on my “maiden” trip from a station or siding, where I could find
a train at rest. A siding would, of course, have been vastly
preferable, but as I had none definitely located, and knew that I
might easily waste the rest of the night looking for one, the X——
bahnhof was the only alternative. Because this was so plainly the

only way, I was nerved to the job far better than if I had had to
decide between two or three lines of action.
Nor was I in any doubt as to how the thing would have to be
done. At the ticket windows, or at the gates to the train shed, I was
positive I would be challenged at once—even if no word had yet
gone to the police of my escape—and held for investigation. Besides,
I had not money enough to take me a quarter the distance I felt that
I should have to go to be reasonably safe. The only way was to
follow the tracks in through the yards and make the best of any
opportunity that offered. The ten or twelve-pound magneto would
be a good deal of a nuisance, but, as the possible sale of it at some
distant point offered an easy way to the money I was sure to need I
decided not to let it go till I had to.
I already knew the general lay of the X—— station, and decided
that it would be best to go to the tracks by crossing a field just
outside of the town. My road crossed the line a half-mile further
away, but I felt sure a bridge over a canal which would have to be
passed if I took to the ties at this point would be guarded by
soldiers. A stumble through a weed-choked ditch, a trudge across a
couple of hundred yards of rye stubble, a climb over the wire fencing
of the right-of-way, and I was once more crushing stone ballasting
under my brogans, as I had done so often before. Ten minutes later
I passed unchallenged under the lights of a switching-tower and was
inside the X—— yards. Almost at the same moment a bright
headlight flashed out down the line ahead, and before I reached the
station a long passenger train had pulled in and stopped. “Just in
time,” I muttered to myself; “that’s my train, wherever it’s going.”
Entering the train-shed, I avoided the platforms and hurried
along between the passenger train and a string of freight cars
standing on the next track. Two or three yard hands brushed by me
without a glance, for there was practically no difference between my
greasy machinist’s rig-out and their own. But as I stopped and
began to peer under one of the erstige coaches I saw, with the tail
of my eye, a brakeman of the freight train pause in his clamber up
the end of one of the cars and crane his head suspiciously in my
direction. Scores of times before (though never with so much at

stake) I had faced the same kind of emergency, and, without an
instant’s hesitation and as though it was the most natural thing in
the world to be doing, I started tapping one of the wheels with my
big steel wrench. Heaven only knows if they test for cracked car
wheels that way in Germany! I certainly have never seen them do it,
at any rate. Anyhow, it served my purpose of making the brakeman
think I was there on business, for he climbed on up on to his train
and passed out of sight. Two seconds later I was snuggled up on the
“bumpers” with my wrench and magneto in my lap.
The brake-beams of a German schlafwagen are not quite as
roomy as those of an American Pullman, but they might be much
worse. The train was a fairly fast one, making few stops, and I
believe would have taken me right in to Berlin if I had remained
aboard long enough. I was getting rather cramped and stiff after
four or five hours, however, and not caring to run the risk of being
seen riding by daylight, I dropped off as the train slowed down at a
junction on the outskirts of what appeared, and turned out, to be a
large manufacturing city. The magneto slipped out of my two-
fingered hand as I jumped off, and brought up in the frog of a
switch with a jolt that must have played hob with its delicate insides,
but I wasn’t doing any worrying on that score. Here I was, safe and
sound, a good hundred miles beyond any place they would ever
think of looking for me. Moreover, I had money in my pocket, as well
as the possible means of getting more. I couldn’t have wished for a
better start.
There are a number of reasons why it would not be best for me
to go into detail at this time regarding the various ways in which I
steered clear of trouble in getting beyond the German frontiers, not
the least of them being that it might make it harder in the future for
some other poor devil trying to do the same thing. I do not think,
however, there would be one chance in a thousand for a British
prisoner less “heeled for the game”—a man unable to speak the
language and to steal rides on the “brake-beams” of the trains, I
mean—than I was to win through from any great distance from the
frontier. But however that may be, I am not going to make it harder
for any one who may get the chance by telling just how I did it.

Money—to be obtained by selling the magneto of the tractor I
had brought along with me—was the first thing for me to see to
after getting well clear of the country in which I was likely to be
searched for, and it was in going after this that I was nearest to
“coming a cropper.” I made the mistake—in my haste to get rid of
the burden of the heavy thing—of offering it to the first electrical
supply shop I came to. The proprietor wanted the thing very badly,
but while he seemed to accept readily enough my story that I was a
returned German-American working in munition factories, he said
that the law required him to call up the police and ask if anything of
the kind had been reported as stolen. I was not in the least afraid
that the magneto would be reported at a point so distant from the
one I had taken it from, but I did know that I couldn’t “stand up” for
two minutes in any kind of interview with the police. So I told old
Fritz to go ahead and telephone, and as soon as his back was turned
grabbed up the magneto and slipped out to the street as quietly as
possible.
Whether the police made any effort to trace me or not I never
knew. There was no evidence of it, anyhow. I headed into the first
side street, and from that into another, and then kept going until I
came to a dirty little secondhand shop with a Jew name over the
door. Luckily the old Sheeny had had some dealing in junk and
hardware, and knew at once the value of the goods I had to offer. As
a matter of fact, indeed, the magneto was a “Bosch,” made in
Germany in the first place, and imported to the U.S. by the makers
of the tractor from which I had taken it. I was a good deal winded
from quick walking—I hadn’t a lot of strength at that time anyhow—
and the shrewd old Hebrew must have felt sure that I had stolen the
thing within the hour. He said no word about ’phoning the police,
however, but merely looked at me slyly out of the corner of one eye
and offered me fifty marks for an instrument that was worth four or
five hundred in ordinary times, and probably half again as much
more through war demands. I could probably have got more out of
him, but I was in no temper for bargaining, and the quick way in
which I snapped up his offer must have confirmed any suspicions
the old fox may have had concerning the way I came by the

“goods.” The joint was probably little more than a “fence”—a thieves’
clearing-house—anyhow, and I was dead lucky to stumble on to it as
I did.
I had two hearty meals that day in cheap restaurants—taking
care to order no bread or anything else I felt there might be a
chance of my needing a “card” for—and that night swung up on to
the “rods” of a passenger train that had slowed down to something
like ten miles an hour at a crossing, and rode for several hours in a
direction which I correctly figured to be that of the Dutch frontier. I
spent the following day moving freely about a good-sized
manufacturing city, and the next night “beat” through to a town on
the border of Holland. As this was not a place where there were any
factories, my machinist’s rig-out didn’t “merge into the landscape” in
quite the same way it did in the places where there was a lot of
manufacturing, and I stayed there only long enough to make sure
that the frontier was guarded in a way that would make the chances
very much against my getting across without some kind of help.
Such help I knew that I could get in Belgium, and therefore, as the
whole of the German railway system seemed to be at my disposal
for night excursions, I decided to try my luck from that direction. I
wanted to take a look at Essen and Krupps’ while I was so near, but
finally concluded it would not be best to take a chance in a district
where there were sure to be more on the watch than anywhere else.
The distant tops of tall chimneys and a cloud of smoke in the sky
were all that I saw of the “place where the war was made.”
The Germans boast of a great intelligence system, yet not once
—so far as I could see—was I under suspicion during the several
days in which I made my leisurely way, by more or less indirect
route, into Belgium. As a matter of fact, I did not give them very
much to “lay hold of.” I kept closely to my original plan of steering
clear of railway stations and hotels, and of asking for nothing in
shops or restaurants that might require “tickets.” The weather was
good, and most of my sleeping was done in about the same quiet
sort of outdoor nooks as the American “hobo” seeks out in making
his way across the continent. The only difference was that it was
safer, if anything, in Germany, and many times when, in the States, I

would have been greeted by a policeman’s club on the soles of my
boots, I saw, from the tail of my eye, the “arm of the law” strut by
without a second glance at the tired machinist, with his wrench
beside him, dozing under a tree in a park or by the roadside. I had
half a dozen good meals with kind-hearted peasants, and one night
—it was raining, and I was pretty well played out—I accepted the
offer of a bed in a farmhouse, the owner of which had a son who
had a sheep ranch in Montana, near Miles City, a place where I had
run a threshing outfit one season. He said he was very sorry that the
boy had not been as clever as I was in evading the “Englanders” and
getting home to help the Fatherland. He was a kind old fellow, and I
tinkered up his mowing-machine and put a new valve in his leaking
pump to square my account. There were a number of little incidents
of this kind, and the simple kindliness of the old peasants I met—
mostly fathers and mothers and wives with sons or husbands in the
war—was responsible for the fact that I did not feel quite as harshly
against Huns in general when I left their country as when I entered
it. Still, I know very well that their good treatment of me was only
because they thought I was one of themselves, and that they would
probably have given me up to a mob to tear to pieces if they had
suspected for a minute what I really was.
I went through into Belgium on the brake-beams of a fast
freight which, from the way it seemed to have the right-of-way over
passengers, I concluded was carrying munitions urgently needed at
the front. It was slowed down in some kind of a traffic jam at a
junction when I boarded it, but when I left it—when I thought I was
as far into Belgium as I wanted to go—it was hitting up a lively thirty
miles an hour or more, and all my practice at the game could not
save me from a nasty roll. Luckily, I dropped clear of the ties; and as
the fill was of soft earth, with a ditch full of water at the bottom, I
was not much the worse for a fall that would have brained me a
dozen times over on most American lines.
Of how I got out of Belgium into Holland, and finally on to
England, it would not do for me to write anything at all at this time,
beyond saying that it was entirely due to aid that I had from the
Belgians themselves. One of the most interesting chapters of the

war will be the one—not to be published till all is over—telling how
Belgian patriots in Belgium not only kept touch with each other
during the German occupation, but also contrived to send news—
and even go and come themselves—to the outer world. Even the
“electric fence” along the Holland boundary has no terrors for them,
and I am giving away no secret when I say that there are more ways
of getting safely under or over that fence than there are wires in it.
It will probably do no harm for me to say that I crossed this barrier
on a very cleverly made little folding stairway which when not in use,
was kept hidden under a square of sod but a few feet away from the
fence itself. The genial old German sentry who spread it for me—he
had, of course, been liberally bribed, and probably had some regular
“working arrangement” with my Belgian friends—confided to me at
parting that, when he had accumulated enough money to keep him
comfortably the rest of his life in Holland, he intended to climb over
that little stairway himself and never go back. I have often wondered
how many other Germans feel the same about leaving “the sinking
ship.”

THE SINGING SOLDIER
I
There was something just a bit ominous in the brooding warmth
of the soft air that was stirring at the base of the towering cliffs of
the Marmolada, where I took the teleferica; and the tossing aigrettes
of wind-driven snow at the lip of the pass where the cable-line
ended in the lee of a rock just under the Italian first-line trenches
signalled the reason why. The vanguard of one of those irresponsible
mavericks of mountain storms that so delight to bustle about and
take advantage of the fine weather to make surprise attacks on the
Alpine sky-line outposts was sneaking over from the Austrian side;
and somewhere up there where the tenuous wire of the teleferica
fined down and merged into the amorphous mass of the cliff behind,
my little car was going to run into it.
“A good ten minutes to snug down in, anyhow,” I said to myself.
And after the fashion of the South Sea skipper who shortens sail and
battens down the hatches with his weather eye on the squall roaring
down from windward, I tucked in the loose ends of the rugs about
my feet, rolled up the high fur collar of my Alpinio coat, and
buttoned the tab across my nose.
But things were developing faster than I had calculated. As the
little wire basket glided out of the cut in the forty-foot drift that had
encroached on its aerial right-of-way where the supporting cables
cleared a jutting crag, I saw that it was not only an open-and-above-
board frontal attack that I had to reckon with, but also a craftily-
planned flank movement quite in keeping with the fact that the
whole affair, lock, stock, and barrel, was a “Made in Austria” product.
Swift-driven little shafts of blown snow, that tried hard to keep their
plumes from tossing above the sheltering rock-pinnacles, were
wriggling over between the little peaks on both sides of the pass and

slipping down to launch themselves in flank attack along the
narrowing valley traversed by the teleferica and the zigzagging trail
up to the Italian positions. Even as I watched, one of them came
into position to strike, and straight out over the ice-cap covering the
brow of a cliff shot a clean-lined wedge of palpable, solid whiteness.
One instant my face was laved in the moist air-current drawing
up from the wooded lower valley, where the warm fingers of the
thaw were pressing close on the hair-poised triggers of the ready-
cocked avalanches; the next I was gasping in a blast of Arctic
frigidity as the points of the blown ice-needles tingled in my
protesting lungs with the sting of hastily-gulped champagne.
Through frost-rimmed eyelashes I had just time to see a score of
similar shafts leap out and go charging down into the bottom of the
valley, before the main front of the storm came roaring along, and
heights and hollows were masked by swishing veils of translucent
white. In the space of a few seconds an amphitheatre of soaring
mountain peaks roofed with a vault of deep purple sky had resolved
itself into a gusty gulf of spinning snow blasts.
My little wire basket swung giddily to one side as the first gust
drove into it, promptly to swing back again, after the manner of a
pendulum, when the air-buffer was undermined by a counter-gust
and fell away; but the deeply grooved wheel was never near to
jumping off the supporting cable, and the even throb of the distant
engine coming down the pulling wire felt like a kindly hand-pat of
reassurance.
“Good old teleferica!” I said half aloud, raising myself on one
elbow and looking over the side: “you’re as comfy and safe as a
passenger lift and as thrilling as an aeroplane. But”—as the picture
of a line of ant-like figures I had noted toiling up the snowy slope a
few moments before flashed to my mind—“what happens to a man
on his feet—a man not being yanked along out of trouble by an
engine on the end of a nice strong cable—when he’s caught in a
maelstrom like that? What must be happening to those poor Alpini?
Whatever can they be doing?”
And even before the clinging insistence of the warm breeze
from the lower valley had checked the impetuosity of the invader,

and diverted him, a cringing captive, to baiting avalanches with what
was left of his strength, I had my answer; for it was while the
ghostly draperies of the snow-charged wind-gusts still masked the
icy slope below that, through one of those weird tricks of acoustics
so common among high mountain peaks, the flute-like notes of a
man singing in a clear tenor floated up to the ears I was just
unmuffling from a furry collar:—
“Fratelli d’Itali, l’Italia, s’è desta;
Dell’ elmo di Scipio s’è cinta la testa!”
It was the “Inno di Mameli,” the Song of 1848—the Marseillaise
of the Italians. I recognised it instantly, because, an hour previously
my hosts at luncheon in the officers’ mess below had been playing it
on the gramophone. Clear and silvery, like freshly minted coins made
vocal, the stirring words winged up through the pulsing air till the
“sound chute” by which they had found their way was broken up by
the milling currents of the dying storm. But I knew that the Alpini
were still singing,—that they had been singing all the time, indeed,—
and when the last of the snow-flurries was finally lapped up by the
warm wind, there they were, just as I expected to find them,
pressing onwards and upwards under their burdens of soup-cans,
wine-bottles, stove-wood, blankets, munitions, and the thousand
and one other things that must pass up the life-line of a body of
soldiers holding a mountain pass in midwinter.
II
This befell, as it chanced, during one of my early days on the
Alpine front, and the incident of men singing in a blizzard almost
strong enough to sweep them from their feet made no small
impression on me at the moment. It was my first experience of the
kind. A week later I should have considered it just as astonishing to
have encountered, under any conditions, an Alpino who was not
singing; for to him—to all Italian soldiers, indeed—song furnishes
the principal channel of outward expression of the spirit within him.

And what a spirit it is! He sings as he works, he sings as he plays, he
sings as he fights, and—many a tale is told of how this or that
comrade has been seen to go down with a song on his lips—he sings
as he dies. He soothes himself with song, he beguiles himself with
song, he steadies himself with song, he exalts himself with song. It
is not song as the German knows it, not the ponderous marching
chorus that the Prussian Guard thunders to order in the same way
that it thumps through its goose-step; but rather a simple burst of
song that is as natural and spontaneous as the soaring lark’s
greeting to the rising sun.
Discipline of any kind is more or less irksome to the high-
spirited Alpino, but he manages to struggle along under it with
tolerable goodwill so long as it is plain to him that the military
exigencies really demand it. But the one thing that he really chafes
under is the prohibition to sing. This is, of course, quite imperative
when he is on scouting or patrol-work, or engaged in one of the
incessant surprise attacks which form so important a feature of
Alpine warfare. He was wont to sing as he climbed in those distant
days when he scaled mountains for the love of it; and, somehow, a
sort of reflex action seems to have been established between the
legs and the vocal chords that makes it extremely awkward to work
the one without the other. If the truth could be told, indeed,
probably not a few half-consummated coups de main would be
found to have been nearly marred by a joyous burst of
“unpremeditated melody” on the part of some spirited Alpino who
succumbed to the force of habit.
I was witness of a rather amusing incident illustrative of the
difficulty that even the officer of Alpini experiences in denying
himself vocal expression, not only when it is strictly against
regulations, but even on occasions when, both by instinct and
experience, he knows that “breaking into song” is really dangerous.
It had to do with passing a certain exposed point in the Cadore at a
time when there was every reason to fear the incidence of heavy
avalanches. Your real Alpino has tremendous respect for the snow-
slide, but no fear. He has—especially since the war—faced death in
too many really disagreeable forms to have any dread of what must

seem to him the grandest and most inspiring finish of the lot—the
one end which he could be depended upon to pick if ever the
question of alternatives were in the balance. In the matter of the
avalanche, as in most other things, he is quite fatalistic. If a certain
valanga is meant for him, what use trying to avoid it? If it is not
meant for him, what use taking precautions? All the precautions will
be vain against your avalanche; all of them will be superfluous as
regards the ones not for you.
It chances, however, that this comforting Oriental philosophy
entered not into the reckoning of the Italian General Staff when it
laid its plans for minimising unnecessary casualties; and so, among
other precautionary admonitions, the order went out that soldiers
passing certain exposed sections, designated by boards bearing the
warning Pericoloso di Valanga, should not raise the voice above a
speaking tone, and, especially, that no singing should be indulged in.
This is, of course, no more than sensible, for a shout, or a high-
pitched note of song, may set going just the vibrations of air needed
to start a movement on the upper slopes of a mountain side which
will culminate in launching a million tons of snow all the way across
the lower valley. The Alpino has observed the rule as best he could,
—probably saving not a few of his numbers thereby,—but the effort
is one that at times tries his stout spirit almost to the breaking point.
On the occasion I have in mind it was necessary for us, in order
to reach a position I especially desired to visit, to climb diagonally
across something like three-quarters of a mile of the swath of one of
the largest and most treacherous slides on the whole Alpine front.
There had been a great avalanche here every year from time out of
mind, usually preceded by a smaller one early in the winter. The
preliminary slide had already occurred at the time of my visit, and,
as the early winter storms had been the heaviest in years, the
accumulated snows made the major avalanche almost inevitable on
the first day of a warm wind. Such a day, unluckily, chanced to be
the only one available for my visit to the position in question.
Although it was in the first week in January, the eaves of the houses
in the little Alpine village where the colonel quartered had been
dripping all night, and even in the early morning the hard-packed

snow of the trail was turning soft and slushy when we left our sledge
on the main road and set out on foot.
We passed two or three sections marked off by the “Pericoloso”
signs, without taking any special precautions; and, even when we
came to the big slide, the young major responsible for seeing the
venture through merely directed that we were to proceed by twos
(there were four of us), with a 300-metre interval between, walking
as rapidly as possible and not doing any unnecessary talking. That
was all. There were no dramatics about it—only the few simple
directions that were calculated to minimise the chances of “total
loss” in case the slide did become restive. How little this young
officer had to learn about the ways of avalanches I did not learn till
that evening, when his colonel told me that he had been buried,
with a company or two of his Alpini, not long previously, and
escaped the fate of most of the men only through having been dug
out by his dog.
The major, with the captain from the Comando Supremo who
had been taking me about the front, went on ahead, leaving me to
follow, after five minutes had gone by, with a young lieutenant, a
boy so full of bubbling mountain spirits that he had been dancing all
along the way and warbling “Rigoletto” to the tree-tops. Even as we
waited he would burst into quick snatches of song, each of which
was ended with a gulp as it flashed across his mind that the time
had come to clamp on the safety-valve.
When his wrist-watch told us that it was time to follow on, the
lad clapped his eagle-feather hat firmly on his head, set his jaw,
fixed his eyes grimly on the trail in front of him, and strode off into
the narrow passage that had been cut through the towering bulk of
the slide. From the do-or-die expression on his handsome young
face one might well have imagined that it was the menace of that
engulfing mass of poised snow which was weighing him down, and
such, I am sure, would have been my own impression had this been
my first day among the Alpini. But by now I had seen enough of
Italy’s mountain soldiers to know that this one was as disdainful of
the valanga as the valanga was of him: and that the crushing burden
on his mind at that moment was only the problem how to negotiate

that next kilometre of beautiful snow-walled trail without telling the
world in one glad burst of song after another how wonderful it was
to be alive and young, and climbing up nearer at every step to those
glistening snow peaks whence his comrades had driven the enemy
headlong but a few months before, and whence, perchance, they
would soon move again to take the next valley and the peaks
beyond it in their turn. If he had been alone, slide or no slide, orders
or no orders, he would have shouted his gladness to the high
heavens, come what might; but as it was, with a more or less
helpless foreigner on his hands, and within hearing of his superior
officer, it was quite another matter.
It was really very interesting going through that awakening
valanga,—so my escorting captain told me when we rejoined him
and the major under a sheltering cliff at the farther side—especially
in the opportunity that the cutting through of the trail gave to study
a cross-section of the forest that had been folded down by the
sliding snow. Indeed, they had told me in advance of this strange
sight, and I had really had it in mind to look out for these up-ended
and crumpled pine trees. Moreover, it is quite probable that I did let
the corner of an eye rove over them in a perfunctory sort of way;
but the fact remains that the one outstanding recollection I have of
that thousand-yard-wide pile of hair-poised snow is of the hunched
shoulders and comically set face of my young guide as revealed to
me when he doubled the zigzags of the tortuous trail that
penetrated it.
Time and again, as his eyes would wander to where the yellow
light-motes shuttled down through the tree-tops to the snow-cap on
the brow of the cliff toward which we toiled, I would hear the quick
catch of his breath as, involuntarily, he sucked it in to release it in a
ringing whoop of gladness, only—recollecting in time—to expel it
again with a wheezy snort of disgust. For the last two or three
hundred yards, by humming a plaintive little love lilt through his
nose, he hit upon a fairly innocuous compromise which seemed to
serve the desired purpose of releasing the accumulating pressure
slowly without blowing off the safety-valve. When we finally came
out on the unthreatened expanse of the glacial moraine above, he

unleashed his pent-up gladness in a wild peal of exultation that must
have sent its bounding echoes caroming up to the solitary pinnacle
of the massif still in the hands of the slipping Austrians.
That afternoon, as it chanced, the teleferica to the summit, after
passing the captain and myself up safely, went on a strike while the
basket containing the young lieutenant was still only at the first
stage of its long crawl, and he had full opportunity to make up,
vocally, for lost time. It was an hour before the cable was running
smoothly again, and by then it was time, and more than time, for us
to descend if we were to reach the lower valley before nightfall. I
found my young friend warbling blithely on the teleferica terrace
when I crawled out at the lower end, apparently no whit upset by
the way his excursion had been curtailed.
“What did you do while you were stuck up there in the basket?”
I hastened to ask him; for being stalled midway on a teleferica cable
at any time in the winter is an experience that may well develop into
something serious. I had already heard recitals—in the quiet matter-
of-fact Alpini way—of the astonishing feats of aerial acrobatics that
had been performed in effecting rescues in such instances, and,
once or twice, grim allusions to the tragic consequences when the
attempted rescues had failed.
“Oh, I just sang for a while,” was the laughing reply in Italian;
“and then, when it began to get cold up there, I dropped over on to
the snow and slid down here to get warm.”
I have not yet been able to learn just how far it was that he had
to drop before he struck the snow; but, whatever the distance, I am
perfectly certain that he kept right on singing all the way.
III
As regards the spirits of the Alpini, song is a barometer; as
regards their health, a thermometer. An experienced officer will
judge the mental or physical condition of one of his men by noting
the way he is singing, or refraining from singing, just as a man
determines his dog’s condition by feeling its nose to see if it is hot or

cold. I remember standing for a half-hour on the wind-swept summit
of a lofty Trentino pass with a distinguished major-general who had
taken me out that afternoon in his little mountain-climbing motor to
give me an idea of how the winter road was kept clear in a blizzard.
The wind was driving through the notch of the pass at fifty miles an
hour; the air was stiff with falling and drifting snow; and it was
through the narrowed holes in our capuchos that we watched a
battalion filing by on its way from the front-line trenches to the
plains for a spell of rest in billets. Packs and cloaks were crusted an
inch thick with frozen snow, eyebrows were frosted, beards and
moustaches icicled; but, man after man (though sometimes, as a
wind-blast swallowed the sound, one could only guess it by the
rhythmically moving lips), they marched singing. Now and then, as
the drifts permitted, they marched in lusty choruses of twos and
threes; but for the most part each man was warbling on his own,
many of them probably simply humming improvisations, giving vocal
expression to their thoughts.
Suddenly the general stepped forward and, tapping sharply with
his Alpenstock on the ice-stiff skirt of one of the marchers, brought
him to a halt. The frost-rimmed haloes fringing the puckered
apertures in the two hoods came close together and there was a
quick interchange of question and answer between wind-muffled
mouths. Then, with a clumsy pat of admonition, the general shoved
the man back into the passing line.
“That boy wasn’t singing,” he roared into my ear in response to
my look of interrogation as he stepped back into the drift beside me.
“Knew something was wrong, so stopped him and asked what. Said
he got thirsty—ate raw snow—made throat sore. Told him it served
him quite right—an Arab from Tripoli would know better’n to eat
snow.”
Three or four times more in the quarter-hour that elapsed
before the heightening storm drove us to the shelter of a rifugio the
general stopped men whose face or bearing implied that there was
no song on their lips or in their hearts, and in each instance it
transpired that something was wrong. One man confessed to having
discarded his flannel abdominal bandage a couple of days before,

and was developing a severe case of dysentery as a perfectly natural
consequence of the chill which followed; another had just been
kicked by a passing mule; and a third had received word that
morning that his newly-born child was dead and its mother
dangerously ill. The two former were shoved none too gently back
into line with what appeared to be the regulation prescription in such
cases: “Serves you right for your carelessness”; but I thought I saw
a note slipped into the third man’s hand as the general pressed it in
sympathy and promised to see that leave should be arranged for at
once.
I was no less struck by the efficacy of this novel system of
diagnosis than by the illuminative example its workings presented of
the paternal attitude of even the highest of the Alpini officers toward
the least of the men under them.
But it is not only the buoyant Alpini who pour out their souls in
song. The Italian soldier, no matter from what part of the country he
comes or on what sector of the front he is stationed, can no more
work or fight without singing than he can without eating. Indeed, a
popular song that is heard all along the front relates how, for some
reason or other, an order went out to the army that there was to be
no more singing in the trenches, and how a soldier, protesting to his
officer, exclaimed, “But, captain, if I cannot sing I shall die of
sadness; and surely it is better that I should die fighting the enemy
than that I should expire of a broken heart!”
On many a drizzly winter morning, motoring past the painted
Sicilian carts which form so important a feature of the Italian
transport on the broken hills of the Isonzo front, I noted with sheer
astonishment that the drivers were far and away likelier to be
singing than swearing at the mules. To one who has driven mules, or
even lived in a country where mules are driven, I shall not need to
advance any further evidence of the Sicilian soldier’s love of song.
And on that stony trench-torn plateau of the Carso, where men
live in caverns under the earth and where the casualties are
multiplied two- or three-fold by the fragments of explosive-shattered
rock; even there, on this deadliest and most repulsive of all the
battle-fronts of Armageddon, the lilting melodies of sunny southern

Italy, punctuated, but never for long interrupted, by the shriek and
detonation of Austrian shells, are heard on every hand.
There was a trio of blithe rock-breakers that furnished me with
one of the most grimly amusing impressions of my visit. It was
toward the end of December, and Captain P——, the indefatigable
young officer who had me in charge, arranged a special treat in the
form of a visit to a magnificent observation-post on the brink of a hill
which the Italians had wrested from the Austrians in one of their late
advances. We picked our way across some miles of this shell-
churned and still uncleared battlefield, and ate our lunch of
sandwiches on the parapet of a trench from which one could follow,
with only a few breaks, the course of the Austrian lines in the hills
beyond Gorizia, to where they melted into the marshes fringing the
sea.
“There’s only one objection to this vantage-point,” remarked the
captain, directing his glass along the lower fringe of the clouds that
hung low on the opposite hills. “Unless the weather is fairly thick one
is under the direct observation of the Austrians over there for close
to an hour, both going and coming. It would hardly be pleasant to
come up here if the visibility were really good.”
And at that psychological moment the clouds began to lift, the
sun came out, and, taking advantage of the first good gunnery
weather that had offered for a long time, the artillery of both sides
opened up for as lively a bit of practice as any really sober-minded
individual could care to be mixed up with. I have seen quieter
intervals on the Somme, even during a period when the attack was
being sharply pushed. A hulking “305,” which swooped down and
obliterated a spiny pinnacle of the ridge a few hundred yards farther
along, also swept much of the zest out of the sharpening panorama,
and signalled, “Time to go!” A large-calibre high-explosive shell is a
far more fearsome thing when rending a crater in the rock of the
Carso than when tossing the soft mud of France.
Work was still going on in the half-sheltered dolinas or “sink-
holes” that pock-marked the grisly plateau; but on the remains of a
cart-road which we followed, and which appeared to be the special
object of the Austrians’ diversion, none seemed to be in sight save a

few scattered individuals actively engaged in getting out of sight. It
was an illuminating example of the way most of the “natives”
appeared to feel about the situation, and we did not saunter any the
more leisurely for having had the benefit of it.
We stepped around the riven body of a horse that still steamed
from the dying warmth of the inert flesh, and a little farther on,
there was a red puddle in the middle of the road, a black, lazily
smoking shell-hole close beside it, with a crisply fresh mound of sod
and rock fragment just beyond. A hammer and a dented trench
helmet indicated that the man had been cracking up stone for the
road when his had come.
“One would imagine that they had enough broken stone around
here already,” observed Captain P—— dryly, glancing back over his
shoulder to where a fresh covey of bursting shell was making the
sky-line of the stone wall behind us look like a hedge of pampas
plumes in a high wind. “Hope the rest of these poor fellows have
taken to their holes. A little dose like we’re getting here is only a
good appetiser; to stick it out as a steady diet is quite another
matter.”
Half a minute later we rounded a bend in the stone wall we had
been hugging, to come full upon what I have always since thought
of as the Anvil Chorus—three men cracking rock to metal the surface
of a recently filled shell-hole in the road and singing a lusty song to
which they kept time with the rhythmic strokes of their hammers.
Dumped off in a heap at one side of the road was what may have
been the hastily jettisoned cargo of a half-dozen motor-lorries, which
had pussy-footed up there under cover of darkness—several
hundred trench-bombs, containing among them enough explosive to
have lifted the whole mountain-side off into the valley had a shell
chanced to nose-dive into their midst. Two of these stubby little
“winged victories” a couple of the singers had appropriated as work-
stools. The third of them sat on the remains of a “dud 305,” from a
broad crack in which a tiny stream of rain-dissolved high explosive
trickled out to form a gay saffron pool about his feet. This one was
bareheaded, his trench helmet, full of nuts and dried figs,—evidently

from a Christmas package,—lying on the ground within reach of all
three men.
The sharp roar of the quickening Italian artillery, the deeper
booms of the exploding Austrian shells, and the siren-like crescendo
of the flying projectiles so filled the air, that it was not until one was
almost opposite the merry trio that he could catch the fascinating
swing of the iterated refrain.
“A fine song to dance to, that!” remarked Captain P——,
stopping and swinging his shoulders to the time of the air. “You can
almost feel the beat of it.”
“It strikes me as being still better as a song to march to,” I
rejoined meaningly, settling down my helmet over the back of my
neck and suiting the action to the word. “It’s undoubtedly a fine
song, but it doesn’t seem to me quite right to tempt a kind
Providence by lingering near this young mountain of trench-bombs
any longer than is strictly necessary. If that Austrian battery ‘lifts’
another notch, something else is going to lift here, and I’d much
rather go down to the valley on my feet than riding on a trench-
bomb.”
The roar of the artillery battle flared up and died down by
spells, but the steady throb of the Anvil Chorus followed us down the
wind for some minutes after another bend in the stone wall cut off
our view of the singers. How often I have wondered which ones of
that careless trio survived that day, or the next, or the one after
that; which, if any, of them is still beating time on the red-brown
rocks of the Carso to the air of that haunting refrain!
I was told that the wounded are sometimes located on the
battlefield by their singing; that they not infrequently sing while
being borne in on stretchers or transported in ambulances. I had no
chance to observe personally instances of this kind, but I did hear,
time and time again, men singing in the hospitals, and they were not
all convalescents or lightly wounded either. One brave little fellow in
that fine British hospital on the Isonzo front, conducted with such
conspicuous success by the British Red Cross, I shall never forget.
An explosive bullet had carried away all four fingers of his right
hand, leaving behind it an infection which had run into gaseous

gangrene. The stump swelled to a hideous mass, about the shape
and size of a ten-pound ham, but the doctors were fighting
amputation in the hope of saving the wrist and thumb, to have
something to which artificial members might be attached. The crisis
was over at the time I visited the hospital, but the whole arm was
still so inflamed that the plucky lad had to close his eyes and set his
teeth to keep from crying out with agony as the matron lifted the
stump to show me the “beautiful healthy red colour” where healing
had begun.
The matron had some “splendid” trench-foot cases to show me
farther along, and these, with some interesting experiments in
disinfection by “irrigation,” were engrossing my attention, when a
sort of a crooning hum caused me to turn and look at the patient in
the bed behind me. It was the “gaseous gangrene” boy again. We
had worked down the next row till we were opposite him once more,
and in the quarter-hour which had elapsed his nurse had set a basin
of disinfectant on his bed in which to bathe his wound. Into this she
had lifted the hideously swollen stump and hurried on to her next
patient. And there he lay, swaying the repulsive mass of mortified
flesh that was still a part of him back and forth in the healing liquid,
the while he crooned a little song to it as a mother rocks her child to
sleep as she sings a lullaby.
“He always does that,” said the nurse, stopping for a moment
with her hands full of bandages. “He says it helps him to forget the
pain. And there are five or six others: the worse they feel, the more
likely they are to try to sing as a sort of diversion. That big chap
over there with the beard,—he’s a fisherman from somewhere in the
South,—he says that when the shooting pains begin in his frozen
feet he has to sing to keep from cursing. Says he doesn’t want to
curse before the forestiere if it can possibly be helped.”
On one of my last days on the Italian front I climbed to a shell-
splintered peak of the Trentino under the guidance of the son of a
famous general, a Mercury-footed flame of a lad who was aide-de-
camp to the division commander of that sector. Mounting by an

interminable teleferica from just above one of the half-ruined towns
left behind by the retreating Austrians after their drive of last spring,
we threaded a couple of miles of steep zigzagging trail, climbed a
hundred feet of ladder and about the same distance of rocky toe-
holds,—the latter by means of a knotted rope and occasional friendly
iron spikes,—finally to come out on the summit, with nothing
between us and an almost precisely similar Austrian position
opposite but a half-mile of thin air and the overturned, shrapnel-
pitted statue of a saint—doubtless erected in happier days by the
pious inhabitants of —— as an emblem of peace and goodwill. An
Italian youth who had returned from New York to fight for his
country—he had charge of some kind of mechanical installation in a
rock-gallery a few hundred feet beneath our feet—climbed up with
us to act as interpreter.
To one peering through the crook in the lead-sheathed elbow of
the fallen statue, the roughly squared openings of the rock galleries
which sheltered an enemy battery seemed well within fair revolver
shot; and, indeed, an Alpino sharpshooter had made a careless
Austrian gunner pay the inevitable penalty of carelessness only an
hour or two before. One could make one’s voice carry across without
half an effort.
Just before we started to descend my young guide made a
megaphone of his hands, threw his head back, his chest out, and,
directing his voice across the seemingly bottomless gulf that
separated us from the enemy, sang a few bars of what I took to be a
stirring battle-song.
“What is the song the captain sings?” I asked of the New-York-
bred youth, whose head was just disappearing over the edge of the
cliff as he began to lower himself down the rope. “Something from
William Tell, isn’t it?”
Young “Mulberry Street” dug hard for a toe-hold, found it,
slipped his right hand up till it closed on a comfortable knot above
his head, and then, with left leg and left arm swinging free over a
200-foot drop to the terraces below, shouted back,—
“Not on yer life, mista. De capitan he not singa no song. He just
tella de Ostrichun datta Italia, she ready fer him. Datta all.”

I looked down to the valley where line after line of trenches,
fronted with a furry brown fringe that I knew to be rusting barbed
wire, stretched out of sight over the divides on either hand, and
where, for every gray-black geyser of smoke that marked the
bursting of an Austrian shell, a half-dozen vivid flame-spurts,
flashing out from unguessed caverns on the mountain-side, told that
the compliment was being returned with heavy interest.
“Yes, Italy is ready for them,” I thought; and whether she has to
hold here and there—as she may—in defence, or whether she goes
forward all along the line in triumphant offence—whichever it is, the
Italian soldier will go out to the battle with a song on his lips, a song
that no bullet which leaves the blood pulsing through his veins and
breath in his lungs will have power to stop.

BLOWING UP THE CASTELLETTO
It was about the middle of last July that the laconic Italian
bulletin recorded, in effect, that the blowing of the top off a certain
mountain in the Dolomite region had been accomplished with
complete success, and that a considerable extension of line had
been possible as a consequence.
That was about all there was to it, I believe; and yet the wonder
engendered by the superb audacity of the thing had haunted me
from the first. There was no suggestion of a hint of how it was done,
or even why it was done. All that was left to the imagination, and
the result—in my own case at least—was the awakening of a burning
interest in the ways of the warriors who were wont to throw
mountain peaks and fragments of glacier at one another as the
everyday plains-bred soldier throws hand-grenades, which, waxing
rather than waning as the weeks went by, finally impelled me to
attempt a visit to the Austro-Italian Alpine Front at a time of year
when the weather conditions threatened to be all but, if not quite,
prohibitive.
“With twenty-five degrees of frost at sea-level in France,”
observed a French officer at Amiens to whom I confided the plan,
“what do you expect to find at 10,000 feet on the Tyrol?”
“A number of things which they don’t do at sea-level in France
or anywhere else,” I replied, “but especially why they blow the tops
off mountain peaks, and how they blow the tops off mountain
peaks.”
Even in Rome and Milan (though there were some who claimed
social acquaintance with the Titans who had been conforming Alpine
scenery to tactical exigency), they still spoke vaguely of the thing as
“fantastico” and “incredibile,” as men might refer to operations in the
Mountains of the Moon.

But once in the Zona di Guerra, with every rift in the lowering
cloud-blanket that so loves to muffle the verdant plain of Venezia in
its moist folds revealing (in the imminent loom of the snowy barrier
rearing itself against the cobalt of the northern sky) evidence that
the “mountain-top” part of the story had at least some foundation of
fact, whether the “blowing off” part did or not, things took on a
different aspect. On my very first day at General Headquarters I met
officers who claimed to have seen with their own eyes a mountain
whose top had been blown off; indeed, they even mentioned the
names of the montagna mutilati, showed me where they were on
the map, pointed out the strategical advantages which had already
accrued from taking them, and those which might be expected to
accrue later.
They were still there, I was assured, even if their tops had been
blown off. They were still held by the Alpini. Two of the most
important of them were not so far away; indeed, both could be
plainly seen from where we were—if other and nearer mountains did
not stand between, and, of course, if the accursed storm-clouds
would only lift. And so, at last, the names of Castelletto and Col di
Lano took sharpened shape as something more than mystic symbols.
“But can I not go and see them?” I asked. “You have told me
why you blew them up, but not how; yet that is the very thing that I
came out to find about at first hand.”
They shook their heads dubiously. “Not while this weather lasts,”
one of them said. “It has snowed in the Alps every day for over a
month. The valangas are coming down everywhere, and (even if you
were willing to risk being buried under one of them) the roads in
places will not be open for weeks. You might wait here a month or
so, and even then be disappointed so far as getting about on the
Alpine Front is concerned. Best see what you can of the Isonzo Front
now and come back for the Alps in the spring.”
That seemed to settle it so far as seeing the Castelletto and Col
di Lano was concerned. Regarding the way in which they were
mined, however, one of the officers at the Ufficio Stampa said that
he would endeavour to arrange to have the Castelletto—much the
greater operation of the two—report put at my disposal, as well as a

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