SEVENTEEN
Snow is truly a sign of mourning; I don’t know
why the westerners chose black; this is another
thing where the Chinese are more intelligent.
Black makes me feel mystery, fear, the absolute,
infinity, God, universal life; but white gives me
the sense of things ending, the iciness of death.
PRIVATE UNGARETTI, at the front, early 1917
In the second half of September 1916, snow began to fall on the Alpine front. The winter that followed was one of the harshest on record. It closed down the fighting on the middle and upper Isonzo, where six to eight metres of snow smothered the mountainsides, three times the annual average today. The impact was greatest on the western portions of the front. From Flitsch on the upper Isonzo to the Stelvio Pass on the Swiss border is more than 400 kilometres, much or most of it over 2,000 metres. Five metres of snow fell during the second half of December alone. In this terrain, warfare – like other human activity before man- made fabrics, aviation and electronics – was a hostage to climate.
The Dolomite mountains, midway along the Alpine front, were not a priority for either side. With Italy’s consuming focus on the Isonzo, the Fourth Army – responsible for this sector – was not given resources to exploit a breakthrough even if one could be achieved. On the other hand, offensive objectives were defined: the Fourth Army was supposed to drive westwards towards Bozen and the Adige valley; north-west, towards the Brenner Pass; and north-east towards inner Austria. This contra diction between means and ends was always likely to have bloody consequences.
The Austrian forces were spread even more thinly here than elsewhere in the mountains; parrying the Italian thrusts was their only aim. In the decades before 1914, most of the Habsburg budget for renewing and extending fortifications had been devoted to Galicia in the east and Istria on the Adriatic. As chief of the general staff, Conrad neglected the Dolomites in favour of strengthening the south Tyrol as a base for attacking the Veneto. As a result, the defences were second-rate compared with those in Trentino. In May 1915, rather than try to hold the small fortresses against Italian artillery, the sector commander, Major General Ludwig Goiginger, abandoned the forts without a fight and distributed their artillery around the mountains. By dividing up their batteries among more or less isolated positions on the flanks and summits, the Austrians wrung every advantage from the dramatic topography of the Dolomites. Goiginger hoped he could pen the Italians in the southern valleys, away from the strategic passes.
As on the Isonzo, then, the Austrians pulled back from the prewar border to the nearest defensible line. This meant inaccessible cliffs and pinnacles hundreds of metres above the approach roads. Before they became a playground for climbers, hikers and skiers, these mountains were a limestone jungle, a thinly populated frontier where pious farming communities, loyal to the emperor in Vienna, eked a living. For the Italians deployed here between 1915 and 1917, the Dolomites were a terrible place, one that mocked their ambitions and their courage. After touring the front in August 1916, the English writer H. G. Wells reflected this mood in a propaganda report. The ‘grim and wicked’ Dolomites are
worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous vertical cliffs of sallow grey, with the square jointings and occasional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed and jagged. In the distance rise other harsh and desolate-looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of old snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees through which passes the road of the Dolomites.
The prewar border between Italy and Austria looped through the Dolomites just south of Cortina d’Ampezzo, then becoming known as a resort. Cortina lay at the crossroads of the only two highways through the Dolomites. The Emperor’s Road linked Toblach (now Dobbiaco) in the north to Belluno and the coastal plains, while the Dolomites Road – the one that Wells surveyed – connected the Julian Alps and the Isonzo valley in the east to Bozen and the Adige valley in the west. Completed a few years before the war, it was a feat of engineering, zigzagging over passes, dropping into broad valleys and skirting the edge of streams.
In May 1915, the Italians did not believe the Austrians would abandon Cortina without a fight, so lost precious days before venturing into the town. Then they waited another week or ten days before pushing north, along the Emperor’s Road. The same errors that plagued the early campaigns on the Isonzo were repeated here. For example, they put a token force of Alpini on the flat summit of Mount Piana, neglected to reinforce it, and were driven off by Austrian militia. A miniature war of position ensued; the Austrians lost ground, but clung to the northern edge of the summit. Although casualties were measurable in hundreds rather than tens of thousands, they were incurred with no better result than on the Isonzo. If anything, these lives were spent even more wastefully, for the Italians had not committed the forces that would be needed to exploit a breakthrough. At least, on the Isonzo, Cadorna believed he had sufficient forces to break through eventually. In the Dolomites there was no such belief, yet the Fourth Army was still obliged to attack. As on the Isonzo, these attacks were not concentrated. By mounting simultaneous attacks along the Dolomites sector – some 80 or 100 kilometres – the Italians lengthened the already long odds against their cracking the Austrian grip on the key routes northward.
Rebuffed to the north, the Italians pushed westwards from Cortina, along the arterial road towards the Adige, twisting up through meadows, shadowed by huge cliffs. They crept forward for 10 kilometres or so, reaching the head of the Falzarego valley by mid-June 1915.1 They approached a feature called the Sasso di Stria, a spike rising a couple of hundred metres like a miniature Matterhorn, forcing the road to swing south-westwards. A secondary route forks north through the Valparola Pass towards the town of Bruneck. The Austrians had fortified the Sasso, on the southern side of the Valparola Pass, and prepared strong positions on the northern side. If the Italians were to have any chance of reaching Bozen and the Brenner Pass, they had to break out of the Falzarego valley.
The first attempt to penetrate the Valparola Pass, on 15 June, was a fiasco. The battalion leading the assault was told that the Alpini had captured the Sasso, on their left flank, and that the wire in front of them had been successfully breached. Both reports proved to be false.2 Their own artillery support failed to materialise; the gunners on the south side of the valley were afraid of hitting their own infantry. The battalion commander was so bent on glory that he ignored the lack of supporting fire. The bugles sounded, and the battalion – Sardinians of the Reggio Brigade – charged at the wire yelling ‘Savoy!’ They lost contact with the reserves and were picked off as they scrabbled for shelter behind boulders on the open hillside. Days later, a junior officer wrote in his diary that the battalion’s spirits had not recovered: ‘No joking, no laughter any more.’
Over the next months, the Sasso di Stria and adjacent positions at the throat of the Valparola valley were occasionally seized, at great cost, but could not be held. A valiant officer led a small unit almost to the top of the Sasso on 18 October. He was shot and his men were captured. It was a pointless gesture. Better results were obtained a couple of kilometres away, where important footholds were captured on the northern rim of the valley. The first counter-attacks were beaten back, but the Italians were not securely placed: the emerging front line was often high above their nearest resources, horribly exposed to enemy fire. The closer the Italians could get to the cliff face, the safer they were. By late autumn they were tucked on ledges hundreds of metres above the valley floor, living in huts pinioned to the rock, supplied by cableways, probing the Austrian lines as and where they could. Donning hemp- soled shoes, they wormed their way up cracks that would challenge a trained alpinist. Easier gradients were overcome by bolting ladders to the rockface. Machine guns and small artillery were hauled by rope to the top of overhangs.
With progress measured in vertical centimetres and no breakthrough in sight, the Italians decided to blast the Austrians off their eyries above the Falzarego valley. This endeavour led to extraordinary feats of engineering: for two years, Italian sappers tunnelled hundreds of metres in order to lay mines under enemy positions. The largest of these mines was laid under the Castelletto or ‘little castle’, a curious rock formation that looms over the entrance to the Travenanzes valley, an alternative passage northward. When they failed to break beyond the Sasso di Stria, the Italians switched their offensive efforts in this direction. One problem with this fallback plan was that the Travenanzes valley was wild and trackless. Getting and supplying an army through it would be difficult, if not impossible, without control of the surrounding heights – something the Italians never looked likely to achieve.
The other problem was access to the valley, which lay over a pass some 500 metres above the road through the Dolomites. This pass, the Forcella Col dei Bos, was dominated by the Castelletto. Geologically, the Castelletto is a fragment of Mount Tofana, which rears over Cortina d’Ampezzo like a mile-high megalith. Separated from the hulking Tofana by a narrow saddle of scree, the Castelletto rises 200 metres to a jagged crest. On its other (western) side, it falls 400 metres to the threshold of the Travenanzes valley. It is a natural fortress.
During the autumn, the Italians edged upwards from the valley almost to the foot of the Castelletto. They captured Tofana without firing a shot and kept a presence on the summit, dug in and supplied under Austrian fire, in temperatures that sank below minus 30 degrees, hammered by blizzards. They expected the Castelletto to fall into their hands, but it could not be sighted from Tofana’s summit and artillery fire did little damage. It could accommodate a platoon in a warren of tunnels and caves. Although it lay 500 metres ahead of the nearest Austrian cover, the rock could be resupplied in darkness. It had to be conquered if the Italians were to secure the Falzarego Pass and get into the Travenanzes valley, leading north to Bruneck, then the Brenner Pass and eventually the Austrian heartland. The sector commanders grew obsessed with the Castelletto, and battered it with everything they could find. To the Austrians, it was the Schreckenstein or ‘rock of terror’. Italian infantrymen crossed themselves when it was mentioned. Apart from tactical reasons, the Italians argued, army morale demanded its capture.
All the misplaced ingenuity and energy of the Alpine campaign was expressed in the attempt to do just this. Two young officers conceived the plan of mining the Castelletto in late 1915. It involved digging a 500-metre gallery from positions at the foot of Tofana, behind the face of the mountain, under the saddle. The two engineers said they needed 35 tonnes of gelignite to be sure of forcing the Austrians off the rock. This would make it the biggest military mine in history.
The mine should have been ready by the end of May 1916, but rapid progress became possible only in March, when two rock-drills were delivered. Except for the officers, the sappers were not military engineers; they were soldiers in the Alpino units of the Fourth Army who had worked as miners before the war in Germany and Austria. With 120 of these men working in shifts, it was possible to drive five or six metres in 24 hours. By early June, they were still 33 metres short of the objective.
The Austrians were aware of the Italian operation, and had started to dig a countermine. Lacking a rock-drill, they could make little headway and were very unlikely to discover the Italian mine. Even so, by the end of the month, the Italian engineers reckoned that the head of their gallery – the chamber for the gelignite – lay no more than six metres from the nearest countermine. After filling the chamber with explosives, the miners plugged the tunnel with 33 metres-worth of rubble, sandbags and broken furniture: sufficient, they reckoned, to stop the blowback of gas. As they had taken the extra precaution of building right-angles into the tunnel, they were confident that their own troops, poised to move onto the saddle from above and below, would be safe from the massive explosion. Half the Italians were waiting in a subsidiary tunnel inside Tofana, above the saddle of scree linking it to the Castelletto. The membrane of rock at the end of this tunnel would be blown out just after the main detonation, freeing the men to swarm down on the shattered Austrian positions. The remainder were ready below the saddle. Across the valley, the King, Cadorna, and the commander of the Fourth Army peered through binoculars as the minutes ticked down to zero.
In the final stage of digging, aromas from the Austrian rations being prepared in the Castelletto seeped through fissures in the limestone to the Italians below. If the Austrians noticed these air currents, they might release poison gas above the fissures, slowing the tunnelling or even stopping it. Apparently the idea never occurred to the Austrians, who were absorbed by the challenge of keeping their sanity.
The senior officer on the Castelletto was Hans Schneeberger, a 19-year- old ensign in the Austrian Kaiserjäger, the Emperor’s Hunters, native Tyrolean soldiers. In early June, he was ordered to lead his platoon up to the Castelletto. A reputation for agility around the mountains had already earned young Schneeberger the nickname of ‘the snow-flea’, yet his commanding officer explained that the main reasons for his assignment were his age (he was the youngest officer available) and marital status (single). For it was clear that the enemy were preparing to detonate a spectacular mine. The rock was buzzing and trembling under the Austrians’ boots. Another drill could be heard behind the surface of Tofana, across the saddle.
Visiting the Castelletto one night, Schneeberger’s sector commander, Captain von Rasch, put him in the picture. In the long term, it was impossible to hold the Castelletto. For ‘reasons of prestige’, the divisional command refused to abandon a single foot of territory without a fight. The situation was hopeless: ‘If you do not freeze or starve to death first, you will be blown up’, Rasch told the teenaged ensign. There were two ways of averting this outcome: they could drive the Italians off Tofana completely, or foil their plan by discovering and destroying their tunnel. The first option was out of the question: the Italian counter-offensive in the south Tyrol and Brusilov’s offensive on the Eastern Front meant that no more men could be spared for the Dolomites. The second option was highly improbable, for the army was unable to provide a rock-drill. The most they could hope for were a few flame-throwers and heavy machine guns.
Schneeberger resisted the impulse to share the bad news. (‘For the first time in my life I intuit the secret of authority: knowing, yet saying nothing.’) The cavern walls were thin, however, and word quickly got around. The effect on the Austrians’ nerves can be imagined. Young Schneeberger’s soldierly resolve sometimes wavered. (‘When death is certain, it eclipses everything else: every other thought and feeling.’) Not so the 30 men under his command. Of Alpine stock themselves, they lived up to the reputation of highlanders for taciturn strength and dependability. Their stoicism shamed and heartened the young ensign. When he asked what they thought of the situation, they shrugged and carried on.
As the days passed, Schneeberger began to find the noise of the enemy drill reassuring: it meant the Italians were not yet ready, and ‘as long as they are not ready, we survive’. When the drills fell silent, everyone knew the countdown had started but not when it would end. Schnee- berger asked who wanted to be transferred off the rock. Nobody spoke: not Aschenbrenner, with eight children at home, nor the spindly, 52-year- old Latschneider. At midday on 10 July, the Italian guns across the valley below Tofana opened fire on the Castelletto. The intensity of the bombardment suggested the detonation was imminent.
At 03:30 next morning, Schneeberger is in his cavern, trying to sleep. A candle gutters on the table. Outside, the sky is predawn grey. At once the rock shakes, everything goes black and he is flung off his hammock. Coming to, he feels his head roaring, his brains want to burst out of his skull. The air is thick with sulphurous dust. Stones crash around him, men groan. It has come at last. From across the valley, the King sees a tower of flame blaze up between the Castelletto and Tofana. A colossal noise crashes around the mountain walls. In Cortina, some 10 kilometres away, people think it must be an earthquake.
Schneeberger staggers outside. The sky has vanished in boiling dust. The saddle is unrecognisable: a crater has been blown in the middle, ‘deep as a church tower’, fringed with rubble. Turning around, he sees the southern end of the summit crest has disappeared. Only ten of his platoon are alive. He sends three men to relieve the observation post under Tofana and posts two more on the crater’s rim. The others search for survivors in the rubble. High overhead on Tofana, machine guns chatter at anything that moves.
Then soldiers and black smoke pour out of the tunnel mouth newly gaping in Tofana. Ignoring the smoke, the Italians make their way down to the huge crater in the saddle. Then they keel over, one after another. It is what miners call afterdamp or white damp: refluxing clouds of carbon monoxide, formed by the explosion and sucked out of the tunnel. The men waiting below the saddle fare no better. As they race up the slope, they are skittled over by huge boulders dislodged by the blast, careering down from the crater. The survivors are driven back by rifle fire from the surviving Austrians, but Schneeberger knows they cannot hold the Castelletto without urgent reinforcements. Thanks to brave Latschneider (‘You only die once, sir’), he gets a message to sector command and a relief platoon arrives 36 hours after the explosion. The spectral Schneeberger briefs the new commanding officer, who considers him coolly and wonders if he has not been ‘up here a bit too long?’
The same considerations of morale that motivated the operation required censorship of the facts about its outcome. The engineers assessed that ‘the mine responded perfectly both in respect of the calculations made and of the practical effects’. The Supreme Command used this report to mislead the public about the paltry results.
Next day, the Italians captured the south side of the Castelletto. At the end of July, they tried to push down the Travenanzes valley. If they had succeeded, they would have cut off the little Austrian force still clinging on to the north side of the Castelletto. But the Austrians knew they were coming and pulled back 500 metres down the valley. They prepared a new defensive line with no wire, trenches or visible dug-outs. Nervous but unsuspecting, the Italians walked into an ambush, took heavy casualties and retreated. Even if they had forced a way through the Travenanzes valley in summer 1916, it is difficult to see how they would have broken through to Bruneck, let alone the Brenner Pass. Besides, during the seven months that were needed to mine the Castelletto, the entire front had ground to a halt.
It took the Fourth Army three more months to prise the Austrians off the Castelletto. The savage winter of 1916–17 then put a stop to large-scale operations. Over the following spring and summer, although the Italians managed to press the Austrians a little way down the Travenanzes valley, there was no breakthrough. In frustration, the Fourth Army approved a madcap scheme to bypass the Sasso di Stria by digging a 2,000-metre tunnel directly from the Falzarego Pass into the Valparola valley. The retreat after Caporetto very likely spared the Italians the embarrassment of another failed ‘technical fix’.
The worst bloodletting in the Dolomites occurred on Mount Col di Lana (2,450 metres), with twin summits overlooking the highway to Bozen, a few kilometres from the Sasso di Stria. An outcrop of dark volcanic rock amid the granular Triassic limestone, the Col di Lana looks more Scottish than Dolomitic, quite unlike the towering pinnacles all around it. The highway curves below the Col di Lana; with light artillery on its twin summits, the Austrians blocked use of the highway leading west and north. If the Italians were to reach the Adige valley and Trento, they had to take Col di Lana. According to received wisdom, which insisted that high ground had to be taken before all else, this meant frontal assaults.
The first bombardments achieved little. In July 1915, a full month after they reached the foot of the mountain – a hiatus that the Austrians knew how to use – the infantry attacked. Despite horrific casualties, they kept attacking the mountain on three sides throughout the summer and autumn: 12 infantry and 14 alpine companies. Imagine a campaign to capture a cathedral spire by creeping along its roof-ridge, with 45-degree slopes on either side. Eventually they got within 50 metres of the enemy trench that ringed the twin summits. In early November, a ferocious bombardment followed by a storming assault gained the top. Incredulous Austrian observers on Mount Sief, a few hundred metres westwards along the ridge, raised the alarm. Under concentrated artillery fire, the Austrians regained the summit the same evening. The Italians crept back and took the summit again early next day without firing a shot. Under cover of thick mist, they moved along the ridge towards Sief. Austrian resistance was too strong, however, and the Italians were caught by overnight temperatures that sank to minus 15 degrees. Dozens of soldiers suffered frostbite.
Winter did not stop the fighting, which raged on through December. By the end of the year, the Italians had launched more than 90 assaults on Col di Lana. They had plenty of men, but as elsewhere lacked machine guns, mortars, and medium and heavy batteries.
In January 1916, as on Tofana, the Italians resorted to mining. The Austrians dug a countermine, which exploded too far from its target to cause damage. A 5,000-kilogram charge was detonated under the Austrian front line, a heavily protected trench, in mid-April. The commander on the summit felt the mountain implode beneath his feet, then boil up like milk. The jubilant Italians reckoned that 10,000 tonnes of rock were displaced. Almost half the Austrian force was killed; the remaining 140 were taken prisoner when the Italians seized the summit once and for all.
Again, the narrow ridge leading to Sief was desperately defended by Austrian reserves. Over the next year and a half, the Italians edged closer and closer to Sief without conquering it. No amount of courage could overcome the Austrians’ natural advantages and, from the strategic point of view, without Sief, the Italians might as well not have Col di Lana. The Austrians still blocked access to the west and north, and threatened traffic on the Dolomites Road as it crawled around the hairpin bends down from Falzarego. In October 1917, the Italian Fourth Army had to retreat, following the breakthrough at Caporetto. By this point, more than 6,000 Italians had died on Col di Lana and Sief for precisely nothing.
The Castelletto and Col di Lana were exceptions. For the most part, due to the landscape, climate, and the lack of men and munitions, combat in the Dolomites was small in scale. After late summer 1915, when the lines settled, this was a front where a single artillery piece would target a single enemy encampment – perhaps a few tents in a meadow – at the same time every day. Offensives were platoon-sized, aimed at capturing an isolated position. A typical operation was a patrol into the no-man’s land between trenches and observation posts. When patrols met, firefights erupted. The nature of the front created a peculiar tension that gnawed at these patrols, especially at night, as they moved past dozens or even hundreds of crags and boulders, any of which could conceal a sharpshooter. A platoon could hide in a shadow. Searchlights playing over a mountain were like candles in a catacomb.
Strange weapons were invented for mountain warfare. The Austrians made Rollbomben, cast-iron spheres filled with explosive, for dropping down the rockface. (Turkish forces had done something similar at Gallipoli.) The Italians made balls of resin and bitumen, as big as footballs, for lighting and rolling towards enemy lines when, as rarely, these were lower than their own. The soldiers, too, were different. Both sides had special units for mountain warfare. The Italian Alpini had a proud tradition dating back to the 1870s. Recruited from Italy’s mountain areas, they were devoutly Catholic and monarchist, less prone to the political turbulence that affected some of the infantry brigades, with their intake from the politicised working class. They were – and still are – famous for their esprit de corps, valour and songs. Unlike many of the lowland and southern Italians on the Alpine front, they were not bewildered by fighting over useless, uninhabitable mountains.
For Germany and Austria, the Tyrolese militias were also drawn from the local population. Often middle-aged, its members were hardy, moved around the terrain with the confidence of chamois, and – as hunters – were crack shots. German troops were also present: the Alpine Corps was formed hurriedly in 1915 to bolster the defence in the Tyrol. Unlike the Tyrolese militia, these were well equipped. Thirteen battalions served in the Dolomites under Krafft von Dellmensingen’s able leadership until the Austrian line was stabilised. As Italy and Germany were not officially at war until August 1916, they tried to stay north of the prewar border.
The mountain units had to endure fantastically severe conditions. War had never been fought at such heights before, up to 3,500 metres. Fighting in the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and more recently in Kashmir occurred at even greater altitudes, but the soldiers’ experience on the Alpine front remains unmatched. In mid-winter, sentries faced temperatures as low as minus 40 or even minus 50 degrees Celsius with woollen greatcoats, scarves and gloves. Freak snowfalls could be heavy even in midsummer. Above the Falzarego Pass in early July 1915, soldiers had to warm their numb hands on the bowls of their pipes as they smoked. By mid-August, higher on the mountains, water froze at night and soldiers were incapacitated with frostbite. On peaks with permanent icefields, such as Marmolada, quarters were excavated in the ice and troops lived there round the year.
Except at Mount Col di Lana and a very few other places, planned offensives stopped from late October until spring – almost half the year. At higher altitudes, the shutdown lasted from mid-September until June. When the snow was really deep, incoming shells would sink in, without exploding. Yet most of the positions remained manned throughout the year, as lookouts. During the snowy months, the more remote positions could only be supplied by cableways up the mountainsides from the nearest roadheads all along the front. In the Alps, these black threads were lifelines.
Alpine conditions exposed the wretched lack of adequate equipment. What was uncomfortable on the Carso could be lethal in the mountains. The lack of camouflage in the first winter was fatal for many: the grey- green uniforms made perfect silhouettes. Winter climbing is now a sport; before the First World War it was unknown, so even the specialist mountain troops had few techniques to minimise the discomforts and dangers, from snow-blindness to avalanches, known as ‘white death’. The former could be prevented with the use of slitted aluminium goggles. Against the latter, nothing could afford protection except experience and prudence, both in short supply. It is estimated that the white death killed more soldiers on the Alpine front than bullets or shells. On one day alone, 13 December 1916, known as White Friday, some 10,000 soldiers perished in avalanches.
For soldiers on the Alpine front, the elements were a third army, one that would kill them all, given a chance. This plight connected soldiers who often came from the same region, sharing the same customs and dialects. For politicians, mountains symbolised the lofty values that justified the war. For the men fighting among them, they were a very present danger, beyond politics altogether. Carlo Salsa’s reflection on the mutual anonymity that made trench war possible is worth quoting again: ‘If I knew something about that poor lad, if I could once hear him speak, if I could read the letters that he carries near his heart, only then would killing him like this seem like a crime.’ Veterans’ memoirs show that this subjunctive state of mind arose more easily in the mountains than on the Carso. Long months of inaction induced more thoughtfulness than soldiers’ conditions usually allowed. Amid the silence, it was easier to realise that the enemies were men like themselves.
Unlike the war on the Isonzo, the war in the Dolomites did not obliterate the individual. What did character matter on the Carso, where sheer numbers and mass were decisive? Here, individuals could influence the outcome of an action. And, despite everything, the mountains were magnificent and the soldiers were young men. This explains the transcendental undertone of veterans’ letters and memoirs, the sense of communing with nature at her most sublime. Living above the tree line, surrounded for months on end by a silence that was intensified rather than broken by the moaning wind, repeating a routine of simple duties, the soldiers could forget that war was more than an occasional disturbance. H. G. Wells was struck by the sight of ‘Alpini sitting restfully and staring with speculative eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccountable enemies’. The sporadic violence could even merge with the natural cycle. For Paolo Monelli, an Alpino officer, the bright cloudlets left by bursting shells were in perfect harmony with the sky around them.
At the same time, these letters and memoirs express a boyish zest for adventure amid the mighty peaks. The small scale of most operations on this front meant that they easily resembled stunts. Luis Trenker, a mountain guide turned Habsburg soldier, described an attempt to capture a machine gun on a solitary ledge, reachable only by climbing a ‘chimney’ or narrow cleft up a sheer rockface. The account reads like mountaineering literature: war as sport.
Despite these differences, the Italian strategy was the same as on the Isonzo. Taking and holding as much ground as possible, regardless of its strategic value, entailed colossal effort for little or no benefit. Colonel Giulio Douhet, chief of staff in the Carnia sector and an implacable critic of Cadorna’s methods, noted that 900 porters working in relay were needed to maintain a garrison of 100 men on a 3,000-metre peak. Munitions, too, were wasted on a grand scale. On one occasion, Italian gunners fired 950 rounds to drive a dozen Austrians off a small turret of rock. Two Austrians were killed (‘4 tonnes of steel per dead man’, as Douhet drily calculated), and the remainder withdrew. The Italians occupied the spur, but as so often were unable to hold it.
Around 1980, when the Cold War was in full swing, Mary Kaldor described the ‘feats of tremendous ingenuity, talent and organisation’ needed to produce modern armaments as baroque, meaning essentially decorative rather than functional. These weapons ‘can inflict unimaginable destruction’, but ‘are incapable of achieving limited military objectives’. In this sense, the war in the Dolomites was baroque: complex, expensive (in life and resources), and ineffectual. So great was the Austrians’ defensive advantage that the Italians’ courage, stamina and triumphs of engineering could not break through. Mining offered a way to make the landscape work in their favour: the Austrians shot down on them, but they burrowed underneath the Austrians. It did not succeed; the mines altered details of the landscape for ever without affecting the strategic picture.3No technical fix could solve the contradiction between ends and means on the Alpine front.
Source Notes
SEVENTEEN Whiteness
1 ‘Snow is truly a sign of mourning’: Ungaretti [1981b], 12.
2 ‘No joking, no laughter any more.’: Giacomel [2003a], 57.
3 Hans Schneeberger, a 19-year-old ensign: My account of the mine under the Castelletto draws on Schneeberger’s description, 38–109.
4 the Austrians regained the summit: On 14 November 1915, Alfredo Panzini recorded a rumour that capturing Col di Lana cost 20,000 lives.
5 ‘feats of tremendous ingenuity, talent and organisation’: Kaldor.
1 At 2,105 metres above sea-level, the Falzarego Pass is only 140 metres lower than the summit of Krn, the highest peak on the Isonzo. Such were the altitudes on the Dolomites front.
2 In fact the Alpini had seized positions close to the summit, capturing most of the Austrian unit on the Sasso. The Fourth Army commander, General Nava, inexplicably abandoned these positions three days later. The Austrians filled the vacuum, and their hold on the Sasso was not seriously threatened again. Nava was replaced in September.
3 Perhaps the Italians should have laid even bigger mines. More than 1,400 mines were fired on the Western Front during 1916 alone, compared with 34 on the Italian front. In the following year, 1917, more than 400 tonnes of explosive were detonated in 19 separate mines at the Battle of Messines, killing an estimated 10,000 men. But where were the Italians to get more gelignite? In 1916, they could only produce 80 tonnes a month.