The White War

Hundreds of thousands of men are fed into a meat grinder in futile charges against entrenched positions; opposing armies are forging a weird sense of camaraderie as they fraternize during lulls in the slaughter; and rows of rotting corpses are scattered over a bleak, pockmarked landscape. But this isn’t the familiar western front in France. Rather, these stark images are part of a stunning and emotionally wrenching account of war between Austria and Italy over the disputed terrain they both claimed. Although the struggle was recounted in the writings of Ernest Hemingway, the Italian front was regarded as a sideshow by many European journalists as well as Allied war planners. Whatever the strategic value of the campaign, Thompson illustrates that this was a massive, epic struggle that may have cost a million lives. He crafts a narrative rich in detail and which does not shrink from describing the horrors of a war that began, on the Italian side, in a spasm of wild nationalistic fervor but quickly degenerated into resigned cynicism. This is a masterful and moving chronicle.