a relic of WW1, hidden for most of the last century by snow and ice, stuck on the top of a mountain ridge overlooking Austria.
Working in brutal conditions, Italians and Austro-Hungarians alike leveled peaks, opened roads, dug tunnels, built cableways, laid telephone lines, and transported tons of material to lofty heights—for combat, but also for the everyday needs of the thousands of soldiers who were living year-round at altitudes where only shepherds, wild herb hunters, and mountain climbers had ever ventured.
Marco Balbi, founder and president of the White War Historical Society, says that only about one-third of the 150,000 men who died on the Alpine front were victims of battle. The rest were killed by avalanches, landslides, frostbite, and illnesses caused by the extreme cold.
And thanks to climate change, relics from the war are continuing to re-emerge. The glacier is on the move, retreating as it melts. Fifteen years ago climbers who ventured up Corno di Cavento discovered that it was becoming possible to access the Austro-Hungarian garrison once again
After workers from those organizations excavated a tunnel in the ice, they used a massive heat conveyor to illuminate a space—203 feet (62 meters) long, 16 feet (5 meters) wide, and 10 feet (3 meters) tall, which was big enough to house 40 soldiers—in precisely the same state it had been in more than 90 years ago. Straw bunk beds, a storeroom, a telephone operator's station, a commander's small office with a desk, a large metal stove, even a stack of wood to heat the space—it was all there.
"It was like walking into an enormous defrosted refrigerator," says Gramola. "On the floor lay bits of food, dirty swabs, bandages, and quantities of relics—not just bullets, helmets, and military equipment, but the soldiers' personal belongings as well."
There was also a bag of dirty laundry, a deck of cards, a sewing kit, and a little mirror with a woman's photo.
"What struck me most about Punta Linke," he adds, "were the smells—of wood, of the tar paper used for insulation, of the motor oil for the cableway. The sense of smell is a primal one, an almost animal sense that can serve as a time machine to transport us back 100 years in an instant."
Corno di Cavento and Punta Linke are only a couple of the hundreds of sites being readied for the World War I anniversary.
"In the last century and a half," says Christian Casarotto, a glaciologist at the MUSE science museum in Trento, "the Adamello Glacier has retreated 1.2 miles. At the lowest-altitude points, up to 13 feet of thickness is lost every year."
The thawing is revealing more than artifacts. Corpses—unknown soldiers, victims of battles or a random bullet, an avalanche, a careless step—are melting free of their icy tombs. That includes two Austro-Hungarian soldiers, probably killed by a grenade, whose bodies were discovered in 2012 on the Presena Glacier.
read all about it at:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141017-white-war-first-world-war-italy-austro-hungarian-mountains-history/
