![]() ![]() For nearly two decades he has worked as a professional climbing and skiing guide, and years of studying the landscape as he hikes has honed his eye for detail. But for them, how did they think about their position? When a soldier took the train to the front, was he thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to the front of the First World War, the biggest event ever’? No, he was thinking, ‘This is my life.’”Īs Joshua, Chris and I walked through the saddle between the Austrian and Italian positions, Chris spotted something odd nestled in the loose rocks. But there is another truth, that three young Italian soldiers died in this context,” Nicolis said. ![]() “In the official documents, the meaning is, ‘Attack failed.’ Nothing more. The sun rose, and the Austrians spotted and killed them. They already had their sunglasses, because they were attacking to the east.” “These soldiers climbed up to the trench, and they were waiting for dawn. “Italian troops from the bottom of the valley were trying to conquer the top,” he had told us at his office in Trento, which belonged to Austria-Hungary before the war and to Italy afterward. On a steep slope not far from here, an archaeologist named Franco Nicolis helped excavate the remains of three Italian soldiers found in 2011. This article is a selection from the June issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy ![]() Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 They at least had been recovered hundreds more still rest where they fell, others blown to pieces and never recovered. Most of its occupants had reached the battlefield in July of 1916 and died over the following weeks. We passed a hillside cemetery framed by a low stone wall and overgrown with tall grass and wildflowers. “Think of how many soldiers walked the same steps we’re walking and had to be carried out,” Joshua said. What this had once been strained the imagination: the road crowded with men and animals and wagons, the air rank with filth and death, the din of explosions and gunfire. Two young chamois scampered onto a boulder and watched us. Our path joined the main road, and we hiked through a bucolic scene, blue skies and grassy fields, quiet save for the sheep and the birds. Both Joshua and I had fought in Iraq, but we had never known war like this. We had all served in the military, Chris as a Navy corpsman attached to the Marine Corps, and Joshua and I with the Army infantry. By mid-morning the fog and low clouds had cleared, and before us lay the battlefield, its slopes scored with trenches and stone shelters, the summits laced with tunnels where men lived like moles. “Just to pump a bunch of men up a hill to get slaughtered.”įor the next two hours our trail alternated between heady climbing on rock faces and mellow hiking along the mountain ridge. “A beautiful piece of engineering, but what a wasteful need,” said Chris Simmons, the third member of our group. Just below us a narrow road skirted the mountainside, the Italians’ Road of 52 Tunnels, a four-mile donkey path, a third of which runs inside the mountains, built by 600 workers over ten months in 1917. Had they reached the Venetian plain, they could have marched on Venice and encircled much of the Italian Army, breaking what had been a bloody yearlong stalemate. In the spring of 1916, the Austrians swept down through these mountains. “We’re in one of the most beautiful places in the world,” he said, “and one of the most horrible.” ![]() Joshua Brandon gazed at the surrounding peaks and took a swig of water. The previous night we had slept near the ossuary, along a country road where cowbells clanged softly and lightning bugs blinked in the darkness like muzzle flashes. We could see the Pasubio Ossuary, a stone tower that holds the remains of 5,000 Italian and Austrian soldiers who fought in these mountains in World War I. Sheep bleated in a meadow, and a shepherd called to them. We scaled the 50 feet of steel rungs, stopping every ten feet or so to clip our safety tethers to metal cables that run alongside.Ī half-hour in, our faces slick with sweat, we rested on an outcropping that overlooked a valley carpeted with thick stands of pine and fir. To reach the battlefield we would trek several miles along this via ferrata, or iron road, pathways of cables and ladders that traverse some of the most stunning and otherwise inaccessible territory in the mountains of northern Italy. A curious ladder of U-shaped steel rungs was fixed to the rock. Just after dawn we slipped into the forest and hiked a steep trail to a limestone wall. ![]()
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