The caption that appeared 100 years ago in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial referred to a “picturesque scene” in the Dolomites, where Italian soldiers were defending the frontier against Austrian and German invasion.
The moment captured by the camera was certainly beguiling. But the “White War” in the alpine heights of Italy was otherwise a dreadful episode.
“In subzero temperatures men dug miles of tunnels and caverns through glacial ice,” Brian Mockenhaupt wrote in Smithsonian Magazine. “They strung cableways up mountainsides and stitched rock faces with rope ladders to move soldiers onto the high peaks, then hauled up an arsenal of industrial warfare: heavy artillery and mortars, machine guns, poison gas and flamethrowers. And they used the terrain itself as a weapon, rolling boulders to crush attackers and sawing through snow cornices with ropes to trigger avalanches. Storms, rock slides and natural avalanches — the ‘white death’ — killed plenty more. After heavy snowfalls in December of 1916, avalanches buried 10,000 Italian and Austrian troops over just two days.”
The “White War” was little remembered until recent years, when frozen corpses began emerging in the mountains.
“As global warming has intensified over the past few decades, first soldiers’ personal affects like diaries and letters melted out of the ice, and now their bodies are following,” Kyle Chayka wrote for Time. “The cold has kept them perfectly intact, like frozen mummies. Bare bones are wrapped in the tattered remains of uniforms, gruesome reminders of now-distant violence.”
Times Insider is offering glimpses of some of the most memorable wartime illustrations that appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, on the 100th anniversary of each issue:
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