The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (29 page)

Visiting the Castelletto one night, Schneeberger’s sector commander, Captain von Rasch, put him in the picture. In the long term, it was impossible to hold the Castelletto. For ‘reasons of prestige’, the divisional command refused to abandon a single foot of territory without a fight. The situation was hopeless: ‘If you do not freeze or starve to death first, you will be blown up’, Rasch told the teenaged ensign. There were two ways of averting this outcome: they could drive the Italians off Tofana completely, or foil their plan by discovering and destroying their tunnel. The first option was out of the question: the Italian counter-offensive in the south Tyrol and Brusilov’s offensive on the Eastern Front meant that no more men could be spared for the Dolomites. The second option was highly improbable, for the army was unable to provide a rock-drill. The most they could hope for were a few flame-throwers and heavy machine guns.

Schneeberger resisted the impulse to share the bad news. (‘For the first time in my life I intuit the secret of authority: knowing, yet saying nothing.’) The cavern walls were thin, however, and word quickly got around. The effect on the Austrians’ nerves can be imagined. Young Schneeberger’s soldierly resolve sometimes wavered. (‘When death is certain, it eclipses everything else: every other thought and feeling.’) Not so the 30 men under his command. Of Alpine stock themselves, they lived up to the reputation of highlanders for taciturn strength and dependability. Their stoicism shamed and heartened the young ensign. When he asked what they thought of the situation, they shrugged and carried on.

As the days passed, Schneeberger began to find the noise of the enemy drill reassuring: it meant the Italians were not yet ready, and ‘as long as they are not ready, we survive’. When the drills fell silent, everyone knew the countdown had started but not when it would end. Schnee- berger asked who wanted to be transferred off the rock. Nobody spoke: not Aschenbrenner, with eight children at home, nor the spindly, 52-year- old Latschneider. At midday on 10 July, the Italian guns across the valley below Tofana opened fire on the Castelletto. The intensity of the bombardment suggested the detonation was imminent.

At 03:30 next morning, Schneeberger is in his cavern, trying to sleep. A candle gutters on the table. Outside, the sky is predawn grey. At once the rock shakes, everything goes black and he is flung off his hammock. Coming to, he feels his head roaring, his brains want to burst out of his skull. The air is thick with sulphurous dust. Stones crash around him, men groan. It has come at last. From across the valley, the King sees a tower of flame blaze up between the Castelletto and Tofana. A colossal noise crashes around the mountain walls. In Cortina, some 10 kilometres away, people think it must be an earthquake.

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 confidence 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.