XBradTC

Craig tipped me to this piece on a little known slice of history.

When we think of World War I, most of us think the epic bloodshed on the nearly static Western Front, with French and British troops, and later Americans, facing off across No Man’s Land against the Germans of the Kaiser. I’ll leave it to URR to tell the tale of the horrendous slaughter that occurred on the Eastern Front.

A less well known theater was the mountaintop struggle between Italy and Austria-Hungary. Fighting in an environment that could easily have inspired Lucas’s vision of the Battle of Hoth, both sides suffered the horrors of war compounded by some of the most inhospitable terrain and weather possible. And so many of the dead were to lay* where they fell.

Now, after almost a century, glacial retreat is exposing some of these fallen.

This became clear in 2004, when Maurizio Vicenzi, a local mountain guide and the director of Peio’s war museum, whose own family fought for the Austrians, stumbled on the mummified remains of three Hapsburg soldiers hanging upside down out of an ice wall near San Matteo — at 12,000ft, scene of some of the highest battles in history. The three were unarmed and had bandages in their pockets, suggesting they may have been stretcher-bearers who died in the last battle for the mountain, on September 3 1918. When a pathologist was granted permission to study one of the bodies, to try to understand the mummification process, there was an outcry among local people who felt that the dead were being profaned.

*It’s early, I haven’t had my coffee. Lie? Lay?