The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  At a roundabout on the outskirts of town, some militaristic group has planted in the central circle a fighter jet. The aircraft is secured to a slanted pedestal, so that it points almost straight up at the sky. Doubtless there is a military installation in the surroundings—Tolmezzo and its neighbors long housed the famed Italian Alpini Battalions. Beyond the fighter jet, on the horizon, is a stone behemoth doing a passable imitation of the Rock of Gibraltar. This then is the range known as the Julian Alps, named after Julius Caesar, who in 50 BCE founded what would become the town of Cividale del Friuli in the shadow of the mountains.

  There is a narrow valley running between the Julian and Carnic Alps. I head eastward, the mountains marching on both sides of me, one after the other, green on their lower slopes, harsh limestone gray on their summits. The valley, unfortunately, is a victim of Alpine infrastructure. Not only is the highway, with its long viaducts, disruptive of the scenery, but so too is the autostrada, with its own viaducts and tunnels. The two roadways snake around each other, like a French braid, both of them successfully avoiding the railway tracks and bridges.

  The region is known as the Slavia Friulana, a part of Friuli long influenced by the Slavs of nearby Slovenia, who settled here as early as the eighth century. But wait, it gets more confusing. I pull into the charming border town of Tarvisio. The signage is in four languages: Italian, German, Slovene, and Friulian (a cousin of Ladin). Thus we have, respectively, Tarvisio, Tarvis, Trbiž, and, mercifully, Tarvis again. The town also shares the distinction, along with the neighboring municipalities of Arnoldstein, Austria, and Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, of forming a tri-point not only of national borders but also of culture and language. This is where the German, Latin, and Slavic meet, at a watershed of idiom and dialect. On the last leg of my journey, I have finally found a language line as complex as a cobweb. The Alps have contrived to give me a memorable send-off.

  Once I have crossed the border, everything becomes unintelligible. Slovenian is written with the Latin alphabet, but that does not help in any way at all. Any non-Hungarian-speaker visiting Budapest will know what I mean. The cognates are just not there. Is this building in front of me a beauty parlor or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Even the farms look different. Again and again I see curious hayracks in the fields, elongated wooden structures that look like what we used to call monkey bars or jungle gyms, protected from the rain by a long, metallic, pitched roof in the shape of a chevron. In between the horizontal wooden bars, hay has been packed tightly to dry in the breeze.

  Today’s destination, the village of Kranjska Gora, is Slovenia’s most popular ski resort. This being high summer, the place does not suffer from overcrowding, although one particular demographic—heavily pregnant Slovene women—seems to have a weakness for the locale. Walking its streets becomes an exercise in dodging bellies. At last I settle into a terrace and realize that I am in Slavland. I hear men at the next table kibitzing. Their voices are low and musical, but when a punch line is delivered, the laughter is soprano, falsetto even, emitted in a Gatling-gun burst. I have heard this vocal tic before, in the company of Russian friends in the United States. Still, it is somewhat pleasant not to understand what people around you are saying: You can imagine them discussing geopolitics or the time–space continuum, whereas in fact they’re talking about last night’s episode of The Mindy Project.

  At dinner, I ask the waiter about the weird hayracks that caught my attention on the drive into the village. He draws himself up and announces that they are what is called a kozolec, a source of Slovene pride and somewhat of a national symbol. He is quite solemn when imparting this information. I think of other national symbols—America’s bald eagle, Britain’s bulldog, France’s rooster—and decide that the Slovene variant is decidedly less belligerent. What can be more laid-back than drying hay? I later learn that one of Slovenia’s animal mascots is the honeybee. The place is an oasis of civilization.

  The following morning, the way out of town to the Ruska cesta—the Russian Road—is pitifully signposted. At a roundabout, I see a bratwurst roaring off to the right, at about ten o’clock directionally. Motorcyles = Mountain Driving! I put the car into fifth and try to keep them in view. Of course I can’t—they are flying at barely subsonic speed over the asphalt—but the road begins to rise, and a majestic and terrifying wall of rock lowers before me. The Julian Alps. At last a sign confirms that this is, yes, the Ruska cesta. The mountain road—correct that, the insane mountain road—through the Julian range, joining Kranjska Gora and the town of Bovec via the Vršič Pass, was built during World War I by POWs from the armies of Tsar Nicholas. It was a major undertaking—fifty kilometers long with fifty switchbacks—and provided a strategic way of supplying the Austro-Hungarians locked in a struggle with the Italians farther south. However intelligent its plan and execution, that doesn’t make the road less dangerous—especially when it was being built. Fairly early on, at switchback number 8, I encounter the Ruska kapelica, a lovely wooden Russian Orthodox chapel. (The Slovenes are Catholic.) Its tan wooden slats overlap, somewhat in the manner of shingling, giving the sanctuary a strange animation. Its raison d’être, however, is anything but lovely—it was erected to honor the memory of 110 Russian laborers swept to their deaths by an avalanche in 1916.

  The road onward and upward pleases me. The driver is cosseted on both sides by pine trees. Each hairpin bend, numbered with its elevation as on the Grossglockner road, has a helpful cobblestone surface, so that when the car starts behaving seismically, one knows it is time to grip the wheel and get in gear for the approach. Every now and then the greenery thins, exposing a heart-stopping perspective of the valley floor far below. Yet somehow I am no longer fearful. After a summer of jittery viscera in high places, this, the last pass on my journey, fails to plunge me into panic. It’s not that I was afraid of heights, I tell myself, it’s just that I was oversensitive. Yes, that must be it. Hundreds and hundreds of hairpins have finally straightened me out.

  I begin to have second thoughts about my smug self-assessment when switchback number 16 reveals a horrorshow of stone opposite me. I pull over, slightly queasy. This is Mount Prisojnik, a colossal rockpile several kilometers long and stretching 2,547 meters into the sky. It cannot be ignored. I go over to the multilingual signboards posted at the belvedere from which the massive wall can best be viewed. One of Prisojnik’s distinguishing features resides on its right shoulder, a large, circular peephole through which sunlight can be seen. It is known locally as “The Front Window.” The other feature impresses even more. Down perhaps three hundred meters from the window and over to the left, the rockface is actually a face. Tricks of light and ledges have fashioned the likeness of a young girl’s face. She is called “The Pagan Girl,” supposedly a youthful giantess who helped travelers through the pass and then was changed into stone by wrathful furies.

  As I read the stories told on the signboards, car doors slam behind me and loud voices, which at a distance sound as if they’re speaking English, resolve into another West Germanic tongue as they come closer. My heart sinks, for I know what this means. Soon the merry Dutch are upon me, yawping in excitement and jostling me as they trace with their fingers some of the items pictured on the signboard. This gesture, of course, obscures the pictures, much like what happens to a subway wall map when fingered by out-of-towners. When one of their party obliviously places herself directly in front of me, so that I can no longer read the text or see the mountain properly, I admit defeat and turn back to my car. Just as I suspected, they are campers. But I am not angry; I consider theirs to be a farewell gesture to me on behalf of all of their countrymen I have slandered this summer.

  When the tree line flashes by and the pass is reached, I am chagrined to find that there is nowhere to park. Not for lack of parking spaces—there are scores of them along the roadway’s shoulders—but not one single space is free. We are in a Slovenian Valhalla peopled by hikers, bikers, and many, many cyclists. It is a sunny summer Sunday and
everyone has come to the Russian Road. Among the cyclists are some heroic weirdos. On the way up, I passed someone operating one of those recumbent tricycles, moving so slowly that he might not reach the pass till Christmas. On the way down, I will see an older gentleman cruising smartly uphill with Nordic walking poles and inline Rollerblades that look rather like cross-country skis. My hat is off to all of them. Then of course there are the bikers. This pass seems to bring out the worst in them. I suppose it is a healthier way for men to release their energies than going to war. Europe tried that for several thousand years; now there are BIKERS WELCOME! signs everywhere.

  My reading has warned me that the descent from the Vršič Pass is hair-raising. My reading told the truth. Good-bye to the cobbled hairpins, hello to curves so sharp you feel as if your car is perpendicular to the ground, as if you’re executing the maneuver of a crazed biker. And the views: Fireman, save my child! The trees on the south side of the pass road are maddeningly modest, leaving yawning perspectives over the void. The level ground of the valley seems to be miles and miles beneath the roadway. All of this is enhanced by the absence of guardrails. I tell myself that this is yet another farewell. The Vršič Pass is warning me not to get too cocky.

  At last I reach the valley of the River Soča. The roadway crosses and recrosses the frothy river penned in by tall mountains. At a turnout, I spy a sea of cars bearing Austrian, Slovene, and Italian plates. I stop for a look. There they all are, whooping with delight as their inflatable rafts rock in the foaming white water of the Soča. Far better for these three nationalities to be at play together today, considering what they were engaged in a hundred years ago.

  Let me explain. I follow the River Soča and reach the village of Kobarid. To students of agony and debacle, they are better known by their Italian names: the River Isonzo and Caporetto.

  AMONG ALL THE DUNDERHEADS to have excelled in stupidity in their command of armies during World War I, the gold medal must be attributed to Luigi Cadorna, the supreme chief of the Italian army. A vain and vicious martinet who disdained politicians and distrusted his troops, Cadorna believed that martial valor came from fear. On his watch, severe justice was meted out to those perceived to be derelict in their duties. Historians still debate whether Cadorna revived the ancient Roman practice of decimation, whereby every tenth man in a unit would be executed for some collective failing. What is not disputed is the depth of the general’s savagery: The Italian army shot 750 of its own, a number that dwarfs the total for all the other belligerent armies combined. Machine guns were set up behind the Italian Front trenches, to shoot in the back those deemed to be dawdling about going over the top into no-man’s-land. Cadorna was not one to share the blame for his disgraceful prosecution of the war; prior to the final insult of Caporetto, he had sacked 217 generals, 255 colonels, and 355 battalion commanders. And he had no compassion whatsoever for the Italians taken captive by the enemy. In the Great War, by gentlemen’s agreement, each country would supply food to its soldiers held as POWs in hostile territory. Italy, alone among all the nations involved in the war, refused to send food for its captive soldiers. Cadorna declared that the knowledge that one would be fed was an inducement to desertion. He was the only commander to have arrived at this brilliant conclusion. Because of this policy, it is estimated that more than a hundred thousand Italian POWs died of starvation.

  Were that all he did, Cadorna would not have earned his pride of place on the podium of murderous incompetence. But no. Neither a strategist nor a tactician, he ordered major offensives every three months or so. That, in itself, might not have constituted proof of pigheadedness, had not these offensives all occurred in the same place: the front at the River Isonzo. Cadorna oversaw not one, not three, not five, but eleven disastrous attacks along the Isonzo, with hundreds of thousands killed and even more injured in a repeated and usually futile attempt to gain a few kilometers. Touching stories have emerged of Austrian gunners imploring the men advancing toward them to turn around, as recounted in Mark Thompson’s The White War. One has an Austrian officer crying out in Italian, “That’s enough! Stop firing!” When the Italians complied, he called out, “You are brave men. Don’t get yourselves killed like this.”

  By the fall of 1917, the effects of Cadorna’s savage discipline and military blundering bore fruit: The Italian army was utterly demoralized, ready to desert at the drop of a hat. That hat-drop occurred on 24 October 1917 at Caporetto/Kobarid. At two in the morning, the valley filled with poison gas, causing panic among the Italian troops there who had masks that could protect them for a maximum of two hours. Thousands fled. An enormous artillery barrage—2,200 guns—shook the mountains four hours later. The Austro-Hungarians had been reinforced by hardened German divisions from the Western and Eastern Fronts, and the latter used their recently developed storm-trooper techniques—small special-operations squads that would infiltrate the enemy positions and attack unexpectedly from the rear. Within days, the entire Second Italian Army collapsed and a wholesale rout ensued. Men threw down their rifles, their commanders shot themselves, hundreds of thousands ran for their lives back into Friuli. When it was all over, two weeks later, the Italians had been pushed back a hundred kilometers and had dug in defensively on the right bank of the River Piave, near Venice. Twelve thousand of them had been killed, 30,000 wounded, 294,000 taken prisoner, and 350,000 disbanded, wandering the countryside aimlessly, in the hope of getting home. I remember what Sergio, the disgruntled Austro-­Italian of Bolzano, said unfeelingly of his uncle’s service fighting the Italians at Caporetto: “We crushed them!”

  One German lieutenant, twenty-five-year-old Erwin Rommel, with a force of two hundred men under his command, had in just over two days infiltrated eighteen kilometers behind the lines, climbed three thousand meters, and taken captive 150 officers and 9,000 soldiers. In one instance, Rommel advanced alone, far ahead of his contingent, and accepted the surrender of around a thousand soldiers. To his astonishment, the Italians lifted him onto their shoulders and shouted Evviva la Germania!—Long Live Germany! Such was the devastating effect on morale that three years of Cadorna’s blistering idiocy had produced. For his bravery, Rommel—the future “Desert Fox” of World War II—was awarded the Pour le Mérite, a.k.a. the Blue Max, one of Germany’s highest military distinctions.

  In Italy, Caporetto instantly became a byword for humiliating, catastrophic defeat, and it is still used metaphorically for everything from sporting events to political changes. The Slovene town of Kobarid wears its notoriety lightly, seemingly more interested in its new vocation as an outdoorsman’s paradise. More Italianate in architecture than Slovenian—Italy lies just a few kilometers away—the village earned its place in world literature thanks to Ernest Hemingway, who wrote that Caporetto was “a little white town with a campanile in a valley. It was a clean little town and there was a fine fountain in the square.” Never mind that Hemingway never set foot in the place, his Farewell to Arms immortalized the headlong flight westward of the Italian army through Friuli, which he witnessed as a volunteer ambulance driver.

  Not that Kobarid ignores its place in history. It can hardly do so, as on a hilltop overlooking the town Mussolini erected an Italian ossuary for the remains of his country’s fallen along the Isonzo Front. It is solemn and ugly. Many years later, the Slovenian government funded a museum about the battles waged along the banks of the river. In 1993, it won an award for best new museum in Europe—no small accomplishment, as Slovenia would not enter the European Union until 2004.

  The museum merits the award. Located in a handsome three-story townhouse not too far from Hemingway’s campanile, the exhibition rooms immerse the visitor in the wretched conditions of life in the mountains of the Isonzo Front. Dozens of artifacts and letters home and hundreds of pictures help re-create that reality. There is absolutely no triumphalism or chauvinism attached to the accompanying multilingual texts—they are more a clear-eyed description of events and conditions, with a touch of the elegiac. O
ne picture stops me in my tracks—several Italian soldiers jammed into an ice tunnel, pointing their guns and mortars at holes hacked in the ice walls. This was madness.

  I take the stairs to the top floor, passing a chapel-like niche adorned with a large framed photograph of Ernest Hemingway. The curators have obviously decided to play along, paying tribute to the man who never visited Kobarid. My smile fades when I enter the so-called Black Room, a photo gallery of horror, of the dead, of the mutilated. In a previous work on the Great War, Back to the Front, I called such photographs “war porn”; now I am not so sure, as this seems a fitting finale to the narrative told in the Kobarid Museum’s succession of exhibition rooms. To my relief, an attendant comes to fetch me. I have reserved a screening of a multimedia presentation in English. (It is also offered in Slovenian, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Czech, and Hungarian and subtitled in Russian, Hebrew, and Croatian.) We have difficulty navigating our way out of a neighboring room, as a tour group defiantly blocks our way while examining a scale-model maquette of the mountainous front. The attendant sighs, exasperated, “The Italians! Always the same.”

  Eventually I am seated alone in the screening room, watching an admirably potted history of the Isonzo Front in general and the Battle of Caporetto (officially The Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo) in particular. Afterward, I regain the streets of Kobarid thinking of the Austrian, Slovenian, and Italian whitewater rafters seen the day before. Europe has come a long way.

  THE WHIMSICAL CITY of Ljubljana is the first stop on the final leg of my journey. My time and budget are running low, so I decide to skirt the high passes and explore the places in the shadows of the Alps. Well, sort of. I plan on giving myself a treat, in a city that has the mountains on a distant horizon.