Archives for July 5th, 2005

The Isonzo Battlefield. (source)

Slovenian blogger Mitja Iskrić has put together a fascinating page about his great-grandfather Johann Iskrić,
who fought on the Isonzo (SoÄ?a) front during World War I. The eleven
brutal battles along the Isonzo valley culminated in the famous Battle of Caporetto (known today as Kobarid) which was immortalized by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.
Cumulatively, the Austro-Hungarian army lost 200,000 of its soldiers in
Slovenia’s borderlands between 1915 and 1918. The
Italians lost 300,000.

As Edward Crankshaw notes in his excellent
The Fall of the House of Habsburg: "The remarkable thing was that the
Habsburgs had held on for so long and that their army proved so loyal.
The deeds of that great army remain unsung. For four years it fought,
always with amazing tenacity, sometimes with great skill, first against
the Russians and the Serbs, then, as well, against the Italians and the
Rumanians, on a front that ran from the Adriatic to Central Poland, and
then along the terrible Alpine barrier….. We have heard a great deal
about the mud of Flanders and the torturing heat of Gallipolli; but we
have heard little or nothing about the mud of the great Polish plain
and the Serbian river valleys; the bitter and terrible fighting in the
Carpathians, the Bosnian hills, the Karst of Istria — where the
totally barren limestone rock, splintering under shellfire, magnified a
thousand times the effect of every burst; in the high Dolomites, where
Austrians and Italians in sub-zero temperatures and eternal snow
tunnelled and counter-tunnelled through ice and living rock to emerge
facing each other at point-blank range thousands of feet above he
valley floor: the relics of that mountain war still, half a century later, clutter the sheer precipices of Monte Marmolada,
so that it is possible to be freshly amazed that ordinary men, Italians
and Austrians alike, managed to exist at all, let alone fight, in such
conditions — and to marvel at historians and military critics who
generalize comfortably about the poor fighting qualities of both
armies."

Mitja’s tribute to his great-grandfather is online in English or Slovene. The project
began as a grammar school seminar that slowly morphed into an online
work. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated since 2003. Here’s hoping
that will change soon.