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 confidenc
e 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.3 No 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.
EIGHTEEN
Forging Victory
I do not remember much about the days, except
&nbs
p; that they were very hot and that there were
many victories in the papers.
HEMINGWAY
Arriving on the Alpine front from the Isonzo valley and the Carso, journalists felt they had escaped to another war altogether. They were quick to capitalise on the difference. One of them exclaimed that ‘up here the soul of Italy is as pure as the snow that covers all the valleys’. Another wrote that ‘life is healthy here, the war is gentle, even death is beautiful’. The journalists’ relief was genuine, but their reports were full of fakery.
The chief fraudster was Luigi Barzini, perhaps the most famous journalist in the world when the war started. He was the star correspondent of Italy’s most prestigious newspaper, Corriere della Sera, helping it to sell 350,000 copies a day. The Boxer uprising in China, the Russo-Japanese War, the Peking to Paris rally, the coronation of King George V in London, the Balkan Wars and the Mexican Revolution: he covered them all. Newsboys hawking Corriere boosted their sales by shouting ‘Barzini’s latest!’ Female readers sent him ardent letters. His fame and talent for evocative description made him the obvious choice to cover the outbreak of war in 1914, and he was the first Italian journalist into occupied Belgium. His son remembered him as a provincial gentleman of the old school, handsome, spruce, chain- smoking, devoted to his family, masking self-doubt with courtesy. Like other Corriere staffers, he was radicalised by the Libyan war of 1911–12. His new-found convictions led to a series of lurid articles on the ‘tragic and sublime battle’ for Italian identity being waged ‘at the frontiers of the race’, across the Adriatic Sea. Propagating such views, Barzini would have shared his newspaper’s commitment to intervention in 1915. He worked very hard throughout the war, spending long periods at the front where he became ‘a sort of institution … as well- known by sight as the King or General Cadorna’, churning out despatches that were collected into instant books which sold by the thousand.
The White War Page 27