Max Leonard treks back in time along the mountainous Italian-Austrian border

An ‘Alpine start’ is a wonderful thing. Not that it feels that way when the alarm commands my companion and me to tear ourselves from our hotel beds at 2.30am, shoulder our packs and exit into the silent streets of Santa Caterina di Valfurva, a village in northern Italy’s Ortler Alps. It’s only many hours later, after a ride in a ramshackle 4WD and a long uphill trudge behind our guide — moonlit snow shining beneath our feet — that we’re greeted by a mountain sunrise so spectacular that it makes it all worthwhile.

A little more than 100 years ago, during the First World War, these now-tranquil peaks formed the border between Italy and Austria and echoed to the sound of artillery fire in what’s become known as the Guerra Bianca. Fought between 1915 and 1918, this ‘White War’ saw the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies face off at altitudes of almost 3,700 metres. 

Subsisting in precarious wooden huts strung out on jagged ridges, the soldiers were also fighting a third enemy: nature itself. It’s thought that, amid storms, avalanches and rock falls, more men died from cold and malnutrition than at the hands of their human foes. Long fascinated by the Alps, I’d become captivated by stories of this desperate and extreme conflict when researching my book, A Cold Spell: A Human History of Ice — an exploration of how ice has enchanted and obsessed us, and how it’s helped to shape our societies in the temperate world. I knew I had to visit. 

So now, here we were, walking in these soldiers’ footsteps, along a track that had been a key supply route to the Italian forces above. Whether by foot, mule or cableway (the precursor to the chairlifts and cable-cars that are now the mainstays of the Alpine tourist industry), every gun, every shell, every plank to build with and log to burn, and every tin of food and bottle of schnapps had to be carried up there somehow. These paths are now the hiking trails that walkers like us enjoy. 

Passing a small stone cabin perched on a rocky island amid a sea of snow (once an officers’ HQ and now a mountaineers’ refuge), we climb to behold the Zebrù glacier tumbling into a sharp, rocky valley. Sitting on the ridge, looking out over deep, white snow, dirty rock and a piercing-blue meltwater lake, we strap crampons to our feet, rope up and part ways with the ghosts of those soldiers. We head to the pass across the same glacier that, a century ago, the Italians dug through to protect their supply line from enemy fire. ‘The ice galleries all formed part of a fairy fortress, an ice palace, which was beautiful beyond human imagining,’ wrote one contemporary observer of the 600-metre-long tunnel. 

The technique had, in fact, been pioneered by the Austrians. Around 60 miles to the east, they constructed an eisstadt (‘ice city’) within another glacier, complete with dormitories, latrines, a hospital and even a chapel — all at constant risk of collapse as the ice continued its stately progress downhill. An insane situation — but these close juxtapositions of beauty, inhumanity and absurdity seem to me to capture something fundamental about our relationship with ice, and the many facets of this contradictory, almost magical substance.

At 3,353 metres above sea level, the Ortler Pass, overlooking the Zebrù glacier, was the literal high point of our trip. There, buffeted by a chilling wind, we huddled on a thin, rocky ledge and peeked over an abyss into what had once been another country — gazing almost, it seemed, into history itself. The metaphorical high point, however, was Eiskofel (‘icy peak’), where three cannons, weighing six tons each, had simply been abandoned by the Austrians as they retreated. On our way to them, we negotiated barbed wire on the passes, found tin cans on the muddy slopes and picked over iron hinges, cable runs and planks, all similarly left behind. With Alpine glaciers retreating at an ever-faster rate, more and more of these relics are now melting back into the light of day. 

Now, these stunning landscapes are contained within the Stelvio National Park, and are the domain of skiers, hikers, ibex and vultures. But the past is never far away. For me, nowhere was this truer than on the broad, steep expanse of the Zebrù glacier, at 3,000 metres, gasping for air and fearful of crevasses, thinking of the men who’d lived and died above us — and, more frighteningly, below our feet, within the very ice we were walking on.

A Cold Spell: A Human History of Ice, by Max Leonard, is published by Bloomsbury, £20.