THE BLACK stain on the ice was instantly recognisable. The technician checking a tarpaulin stretched over a section of the Presena Glacier in the Italian Alps—an experimental attempt to slow the melting— quickly called in a rescue party. The block of ice was airlifted to the nearby city of Vicenza. Inside were two soldiers who had fallen at the Battle of Presena in May 1918 and were buried in a crevasse.
Their uniforms and their location indicated that they could well have been Kaiserschützen, specialised mountain troops who fought on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to defend these mountains from their Italian equivalent, the Alpini, in the White War, a spectacular but little-known episode of the 1914-1918 war. At the time (they were surpassed by fighting in the Himalayas in the 1990s) the battles were the highest in the world. The two armies were not each other’s most fearsome enemy. Temperatures could fall as low as -30° C, and the cold, storms and avalanches killed as many if not more than died in the fighting.
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