The Trench warfare of WWI was horrendous, but was a "picnic" compared to what Italian troops when faced by Austo-German troops in the Vertical Frozen Slopes of the Dolomites. Italian troops were ordered Constantly to "charge" up vertical icy, slopes, in freezing weather , against barb wire, obstacles, and well dug in machine gun, mortar, and artillery emplacements, along with well dug in troops in well supplied caves. It was inexplicable horror.
 
Italy in !915, was Unified (if one could use that term) only since 1870. It was in political unrest and turmoil with Monarchist, Communists, Socialists, and various other factions that were seeking power in this "New" Italy, and used Strikes and Riots to further their cause. Italy was in NO condition, politically, economically, and especially militarily to fight in WWI, and resisted all initial attempts to be drawn in on either side.  But Britain and France made grandiose promises of the return of the Italian "irrendenta" Regions, PLUS French and German Colonies in Africa. These promises, and the fear of a Kaiser dominated Europe, pulled Italy into the War, and resulted in it having the heaviest Casualties, and Property Loss of all the Allies. Yet in the 1922 Versailles Treaty, the British and French reneged on their promises, which caused the "betrayed" Italian War Veterans to unite and formed the core of the Fascist Party, and that same year Mussolini Marched on Rome and took power. 
 
The British and French "betrayal" created the Fascist Party. 
 
Remember, journalists often have agendas, and biases, plus since they cover many subjects, but not very deeply, it is not unreasonable to recognize that there will be inaccuracies as below. 

High in the southern Dolomites, one of the most dramatic alpine landscapes in Europe, skiers race laughing and exultant down the run. A hundred yards from the cable car summit of Little Lagazuoi, near Cortina d?Ampezzo, none stop to notice a hump in the snow, towards which I follow Pippo the guide.

He drags open a wooden door. We clamber down a ladder, then grope along a tunnel cut deep in the rock face. Pippo gestures towards a loophole in the darkness, through which streams brilliant sunlight, a view to the valley a mile below. "Brrrr!", exclaims the grinning guide. ?Brrrr!" He is imitating the machine-gun that once stood in the emplacement.

This place was a unique and terrible battlefield. Here, between June 1915 and October 1917, amid scorching summer sun, winter ice and snow, Italians fighting in the allied cause struggled for mastery against Austrians and Germans. 

Few modern Europeans know much of Italy?s part in the first world war. The nation, led by Antonio Salandra, the prime minister, rashly entered the conflict in pursuit of territorial gains at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Its army was ill-equipped, its generals incompetent even by comparison with their French and British counterparts. At Versailles in 1919, Italy gained most of the lands it coveted, but they were soaked in blood. Some 689,000 of its men were dead, from a population of 35m. 

Most of the slaughter took place around the Izonzo river close to the border with modern Slovenia. But Italian generals in their madness also made repeated attempts to push into Hapsburg territory north-west from Cortina, up lofty passes commanded by Austrian guns.

HG Wells, who paid a propaganda visit on behalf of the British government in 1916, described the Dolomites as ?grim and wicked, worn old mountains. They tower overhead in enormous vertical cliffs of sallow grey, with square jointings and occasional clefts and gullies, their summits toothed and jagged.?

Thousands died in futile battles on what Italians called ?il fronte verticale?. The illiterate peasant soldiers from the south who executed Rome?s first orders to attack were bewildered by being asked to sacrifice their lives for mountains bereft of agricultural value, the only currency they understood. After they died in the opening clashes, year after year rival forces of alpine troops ? native mountain men ? strove to dispossess each other of neighbouring pinnacles, to tunnel the peaks, to mine and counter-mine in unspeakable conditions.

Now visitors to these old battlefields can see trench systems on the summits and two miles of tunnels are accessible to summer climbers. Some can be explored by winter skiers on a guided day tour.

The Museum of the Tre Sassi Fort, which opened last year, is a fine museum in an old fort, on what was once called The Emperor?s Road, south of San Cassiano. It is filled with weapons and artefacts gathered from the mountains over decades by the Landecellis, a family of indefatigable local collectors.

Here are great heaps of rusted bullets and shells, coils of wire and machine-guns, sepia photographs of men huddled over artillery pieces and field telephones, uniformed dummies, maps and expositions in three languages of the death-struggles which took place nearby.

Along the road, gazing up at the sheer wall of the Little Lagazuoi, it seems to defy belief that men fought as well as subsisted on its 7,000ft crags, but so they did. A legendary Italian hero of the campaign was Captain Etto Martini, who on October 18-19 1915 led two platoons of Alpini troops on a 500ft night climb from the valley, to occupy a cleft deep inside the Austrian line. Soon, 300 men garrisoned what became known as the Martini Ledge, lodged in huts built under an overhang.

The Italians clung to this and other painfully won mountain positions through two years that followed, in the face of Austrian shelling and mining. Snipers were lowered down the face on ropes to harass the Italians. Any visible movement provoked fire. The two sides? engineers laboured ceaselessly to blast each other from their lofty footholds. On January 1 1916, the Austrians fired their first big charge, 600lb of explosives. A year later, they detonated five tons, which brought down part of the mountain. In May 1917, they set off 30 tons, outdone a month later by an Italian mine of 32 tons. 

Captain Martini wrote wretchedly: ?The detonation of a colossal mine doesn?t advance us by one single centimetre.? Men shivered, fought and died, without either side gaining decisive advantage.

Pickets of the opposing armies were entrenched so close that in darkness they sometimes conversed with each other. Complex trench lines were created, where searchlights probed for night movement. During one Austrian attack, in a gesture superbly Italian, Martini ordered his unit?s band to play, to raise the spirits of his men. 

Historian Mark Thompson, author of a magnificent recent book The White War, calls the struggle in the Dolomites ?baroque?. It generated protracted labour and suffering, while for the Italians it ?mocked their ambitions and courage?. 
 

Today, the relics are as moving as the battlefield?s beauty. One showcase holds tawdry jewellery made from shell-rings by a soldier named Cadario, who assuaged the icy boredom of tunnel life by hammering brass and steel into necklaces and bracelets. There is a big 1915 group photograph of young men of Cortina with nicknames such as Bepito, Nero, Roco, Angelico, most doomed to die in Hapsburg service. 
I stayed nearby at San Cassiano, in the heart of the Ladin region, which still cherishes its own language alongside Italian and German. In 1915, it was thinly populated by pious farmers loyal to Vienna. My hotel, the splendid Rosa Alpina, has been owned by three generations of a local family, the Pizzininis. Hugo Pizzinini?s grandfather served in the Austrian army in the first world war while, at the 1918 battle of the Piave, his great-uncle fought on the opposite side, in the Italian ranks.

The experience of the two world wars was so painful for Italy that, unlike the British and French, for many years Italians chose to forget them. Hugo Pizzinini told me: ?At school, we learned almost nothing about this area in the first world war. Nobody round here wanted to know.? 

They have always taken for granted the war debris and rusty barbed wire exposed on the mountains every spring when the snow melts. Hugo said: ?For years, I had six old shells in my garage until my brother-in-law said: ?Are you mad? Do you want to be blown up?? ? The offending objects were removed to the museum. 

To get the most out of exploring this wonderful area, read the stories of men who fought here, such as 19-year-old Ensign Hans Schneeberger of the Austrian Kaiserjager, native Tyroleans. His agility on the mountain earned him a nickname, ?the snow-flea?. Schneeberger described the horror of living underground, amid the sound of Italians drilling the limestone a few yards distant to lay their mines.

At last came a vast explosion which left the young Austrian concussed, the air thick with dust, a crater ?deep as a church tower?, all but 10 of his platoon dead. Six miles away in Cortina, civilians who heard the eruption believed an earthquake had struck. Yet somehow, the Austrians fought off the Italians struggling to exploit the carnage, some of whom collapsed with carbon monoxide poisoning from the fumes of their own explosives.

Mark Thompson describes the elements as ?a third army, one that would kill them all, given a chance?. Temperatures sometimes fell to -40? or -50?C. On one day, December 13 1916 ? which became known as White Friday ? avalanches killed 10,000 men on the Italian front. The snow, indeed, is reckoned to have caused more deaths in the Dolomites than the bullets and shells of both sides. 

An Italian soldier who went on to become a notable poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, wrote later that the war experience of himself and two million comrades wrung from them every ounce of the nationalist passion with which they had enlisted: ?There is no trace in my poetry of hatred for the enemy, or anyone else.? 

As morale flagged amid the slaughter, Italy?s generals embarked on a policy of decimation: systematically shooting one man in 10 of units which fled in battle. A condemned soldier howled at his executioners: ?What have I done to make you shoot me? I?ve got seven children.? The firing squad hesitated. The watching divisional commander said: ?Let us be done with this jabbering. Orders are orders.? Six volleys were needed to finish the job. 

In October 1917, after the Italian army suffered a devastating defeat at Caporetto, its forces were obliged to abandon their hard-won positions in the Dolomites. But a year later, as the Austro-Hungarian empire tottered in the final weeks of the war, the Italian army was belatedly able to make a push forward. Armistice Day 1918 found its foremost units in San Cassiano, the village where I stayed more than 90 years later.

But there was scant Italian joy in victory. Many of the emperor?s subjects lamented their enforced transfer to Roman hegemony. Italy?s new borders embraced 650,000 Italians ? but also 300,000 Slovenes, 200,000 Croats and 250,000 Austrians. German is still spoken almost as often as Italian or Ladino in the valleys here. 

Funds and military contingents from three nations ? Italy, Austria and Germany ? have joined to create the Dolomites? open-air museum. The battlefields of France are familiar tourist trails for students of the period. But north-east Italy deserves to be much better known. 

This is fabulous ski country in winter, walking and climbing territory in summer. The local food is terrific, especially so at Rosa Alpina, probably the finest hotel in the region.

We have left behind the era in which the 1914-18 war was perceived in nationalistic terms. We understand it, instead, as a common European tragedy of which Italy bore more than its share. Even at the time, there was extraordinary fellow-feeling between Austrian and Italian troops confronting each other in identical high-altitude misery. 

At one moment during a doomed Italian advance in 1915, the Austrians stopped firing and called to the attackers clambering over their own heaped dead: ?Stop, go back! We won?t shoot any more. Do you want everyone to die??

An Italian lieutenant on the Carso in the winter of 1916 wrote: ?It is not dying that is the demoralising thing ... It is dying for the stupidity of orders and cowardice of commanding officers.? In the Dolomites today, it is easy to recognise the well of such a man?s despair. 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/33f43882
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