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Ice and Blood: The Alpini on the Plateaus
The winter between 1916 and 1917 was the most difficult. It was now clear to everyone, from the commanders to the men at the front, that the war would be long, exhausting and without significant turning points. Along the line dividing the Kingdom of Italy and the Habsburg Empire, from Adamello up to the Carso and the Isonzo, the armies face each other with frontal assaults. But in some points of this long front the soldiers must also fight against the adversities of nature. One of the most sensitive points is the Asiago Plateau.
The Battle of the Highlands
Italy's entry into the war against the Central Powers is "greeted" from the Venetian plateau with a mortar shot from Fort Verena May 24, 1915 and the beginning of hostilities seems to prove the Italian forces right. Then, however, comes May 1916, when the army of Vienna starts the Spring Offensive, known in Italy as Strafexpedition, the punitive expedition that the Empire launches against the Kingdom of Italy, guilty of having betrayed the Triple Entente.
In one month, from May 15 to June 16, enemy forces launched a vast operation on the plateau with the aim of spreading into the Po Valley, thus cutting into a pocket the Italian armies engaged on the Isonzo, the bloodiest and most violent front that took away forces from Vienna while it was engaged further north against the Russian Empire. The shock was tremendous: in five days Italy recorded losses of about 15 thousand soldiers, including dead, captured and missing, and many forts of the Italian defensive line ended up in the hands of the Austrians.
At the end of the month, the troops of the Austrian 3rd Army march over the rubble of the center of Asiago and come to glimpse the plain. From the east, however, very hard news arrives for Vienna from the Brusilov Offensive launched along the eastern front. Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf imposes a halt to the Strafexpedition and forces the men to retreat along a more defensible line.
At that point the Italian army moved men and artillery pieces towards the Alto Vicentino to launch the counteroffensive. Operations began on June 16, but in the following weeks the conquests were limited to recording the Austrian retreat and the positioning on defensive lines similar to those of early May. Then in autumn the early snows created a new threat: that of the harsh daily routine of high-altitude positional warfare.
The informal “truces”
Throughout the Alpine range in the winter of 1916, between the end of November and December, an unusual amount of snow begins to fall. By the end of the season, it will reach a peak of 16 meters. A heavy white blanket extends over trenches and shelters and breaks through the roofs of many of the soldiers' makeshift shelters. The cold and the amount of snow thus become the real enemies, so much so that they create strange alliances. This is how, among the peaks of the Asiago plateau, some Alpine soldiers from the 62nd company of the Bassano Btg. make an informal truce with the nearby fighters, a group of Austrian soldiers. The former offer white bread and a few chocolate bars, while the latter give cigarettes. Not only that. Once the exchange is concluded, the strange company decides that it is too cold to fight and that it is better to join forces to cut some firewood in the no man's land that separates the two sides.
“That winter there was so much snow that not a single gunshot was heard, nothing,” recalled a few years ago the Asiago writer Mario Rigoni Stern, “There were mountaineers from the Altopiano and Austrian mountaineers from Styria in line and they exchanged tools to go into the woods to cut wood to keep warm.”
In the cold of the trench
Away from the “truces” there is the daily struggle with a hostile environment, often with inadequate tools. This is the case of boots, essential in war as well as on the march, especially in mountain environments. Soldiers are given nailed shoes sometimes with wooden bottoms that have very little grip on rocks and frozen terrain and above all great heat dispersion. The more useful and robust hard rubber soles would arrive only later in the thirties. Even the cordage is a problem. Made largely of hemp, it tends to soak up water and become difficult to handle when going up or down mountain slopes. A banal but dangerous thing that made every operation very difficult.
And then there was the cold. Men engaged in the Alpine fronts were given manuals to avoid what in jargon were called “frostbite”, that is, the loss of limbs due to the cold. These pamphlets recommended consuming a certain amount of spirits such as grappa or cognac every hour, but also to always wear fur garments made of the most noble materials, even suggesting using cat or mouse skin. But the texts also asked soldiers to perform periodic movements of the limbs to keep their circulation active.
In the winter of '16, temperatures plummet to -30 or 40 degrees below zero and become a real nightmare that also affects food supplies. The long times, from preparation to delivery to the soldiers, mean that frozen food and soups often reach the men on the front lines. As can be read in many diaries from the front, soldiers often complain about the lack of edible food, especially close to an attack.
The long supply line also involves the rationalization of water. The Asiago Plateau has no rivers or streams and accumulates water mainly thanks to the spring thaw. For this reason, the soldiers throw themselves on the snow and use it to drink, but this has serious effects on the body. Episodes of dysentery in the troops are frequent along with other pathologies due to precarious hygienic conditions. On the other hand, it is on those peaks, during the war, that a new drink begins to circulate. The commands give orders to give the troops large quantities of coffee to help maintain an alert state during the long waits between one attack and another. It is no coincidence, as many chronicles of the time tell, that once they return home from the front many of them ask their wives for coffee, effectively starting a small revolution in consumption.
Heroism in Adversity
Talking about the Great War starting from the difficulties of soldiers in the freezing winters seems a stretch, an accessory element, but in reality the numbers themselves of those bloody years underline how the "war on the cold" was not secondary. As Stefano Morosini, from the State University of Milan, highlighted in an interview, in the Alpine conflict, on both sides of the front, the fallen were mostly linked to natural events, that is, deaths from frostbite and avalanches compared to those fallen in combat.
Such a context makes every undertaking much more heroic because it requires greater efforts from all the soldiers. Today we are used to taking for granted equipment and clothing to protect us from the cold, but the same could not be said in those years. A climb became an arduous undertaking, a night at the bivouac a hard fight against the risk of dying of exposure and even meals became a mirage. And in the meantime, a few meters away, you could hear the heavy breathing of the enemies, who under the same snow were looking for a way to warm themselves and not think about the Italians ready to attack.
