The other war within the Great War

“The massive frontal assaults, the anonymous soldier, faceless death—against this backdrop, the mountain war in Italy was a battle of small units, of individuals. In subzero temperatures men dug miles of tunnels and caverns through glacial ice. They strung cableways up mountainsides and stitched rock faces with rope ladders to move soldiers onto the high peaks, then hauled up an arsenal of industrial warfare: heavy artillery and mortars, machine guns, poison gas and flamethrowers. And they used the terrain itself as a weapon, rolling boulders to crush attackers and sawing through snow cornices with ropes to trigger avalanches. Storms, rock slides and natural avalanches—the “white death”—killed plenty more. After heavy snowfalls in December of 1916, avalanches buried 10,000 Italian and Austrian troops over just two days.”

Around 600,000 Italian and 400,000 Austrian soldiers died in the Alps battles.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/most-treacherous-battle-world-war-i-italian-mountains-180959076/

Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War tells, in part, the story of an Italian soldier in those battles.