Read The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 Online

Authors: Mark Thompson

Tags: #Europe, #World War I, #Italy, #20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, #Military History, #European history, #War & defence operations, #General, #Military - World War I, #1914-1918, #Italy - History, #Europe - Italy, #First World War, #History - Military, #Military, #War, #History

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (67 page)

BOOK: The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919
7.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

14
Looking across the mouth of the Travenanzes valley to the flank of Mount Tofana, held by the Italians, and the Castelletto, a natural fortress 400 metres tall, held by the Austro-Hungarians until late 1916.

15
Carso mud and stone: an Italian second-line camp near Mount Fajti.

16
The so-called ‘road of heroes’, cut into the sheer face of Mount Pasubio, in the Trentino. Italian military engineering was much admired. What one veteran called the
exhilaration of extreme situations
was easily felt in such surroundings.

1
Italian infantry attack on the Carso, 1917: an experience of ‘extreme resolution’ or ‘supreme helplessness’? (The soldier on the right carries gelignite tubes to blow up enemy wire.)

2
Boccioni’s
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
(1913). The bronze muscled figure strides forward, ‘a living gun’, safe inside the forcefield of his will.

3
The Italian first line on the southern Carso, near Mount Hermada, in 1917.

4
Emperor Karl studies the Italian positions beyond Mount Hermada, through binoculars, watched by the last Austrian governor of the imperial Adriatic provinces (Baron Fries-Skene, in plumed hat). On the right, General Boroević converses with the Emperor’s aide. The date is 1 June 1917.

5
Italian wounded at the foot of Mount San Gabriele. Private Pardi carried ammunition up the mountain during the Eleventh Battle, when ‘death
was so certain that you almost stopped thinking how to avoid it’.

6
Bosnian prisoners of war. These were the ‘lurid Turks’ of Italian propaganda.

7
Looking north from the Kolovrat ridge across the Isonzo valley towards Mount Krn, ‘Monte Nero’ to the Italians, the highest point on the horizon. Caporetto is just out of sight to the left. This was ‘the mighty mountain world’ that Rommel and his Württemberg troops admired on 26 October 1917, two months after this panorama was photographed by an Italian officer, and only two days after Italian observers on this spot noticed enemy troops moving up the valley towards Caporetto, and assumed they must be prisoners under escort to the rear. Lieutenant Gadda’s battery was on the Krasji ridge, below the ‘O’ of ‘M. NERO’. Corporal Borroni’s platoon clashed with German troops near the river, between Ladra and Caporetto. No wonder that, as Ludendorff remarked, the communications in this sector were ‘as bad as could be imagined’.

8
Italian dead after the German gas attack, Flitsch, 24 October 1917.

9
Third Army units retreating to the River Piave, early November 1917.

10
Italian prisoners of war.

BOOK: The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919
7.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Year of Fear by Joe Urschel
Family Album by Danielle Steel
Disclosure by Thais Lopes
About That Night by Norah McClintock
Skin I'm in, The by Flake, Sharon
Alejandro's Revenge by Anne Mather