8.
Austria.
The Italian Front in this sector (Carnic Alps) was relatively quiet for the duration of the war. All of the major battles were fought either to the south at the Isonzo, or to the West in the Dolomites. This doesn’t mean that it was peaceful though, as the many trenches, bunkers and tunnels testify to the fighting which continued on a smaller scale. At the start of the war, the Austro-Hungarians retreated to the high ground where they had been wisely preparing fortifications in the event that Italy broke their agreement. (They did.) The location of those defences, now form the modern day border between Austria and Italy. Although some of the summits changed hands during the next few years, the Austrians managed to keep the front lines in the Carnic Alps relatively stable for the duration of the war.
I headed west from Arnoldstein, following small roads and tracks which follow the border at the base of the mountains that formed the front lines. Despite the heavy rain coming back, I was making good progress until I reached the small town of Hermagor-Pressegger See, where I discovered that I’d once again run out of money. I considered just heading on and hoping for the best, but I had only found this out in a shop when trying to buy some food with my bank card. So not only was I skint, I was also down to less than a day’s worth of food! Ruthy ended up bailing me out again. It was hard for her, as she’s a supply teacher without a steady income. I also didn’t know at the time that she didn’t have much work. (I’ll pay her back a thousand times over, one day.) Unfortunately, I had gone over my limit and owed about half of the money that she gave me to the bank. Things weren’t looking good to say the least!
The rain became heavier as the day progressed and I was thankful when I discovered a good campsite with a drying room at the small town of Kotschach-Mauthen, where I put my pitiful looking and leaky shelter up amongst the modern motorhomes and caravans which ‘normal’ people without daft ambitions use to tour Europe in!
The following morning, after leaving just about everything that I could in the drying room, I headed up to the top of the Plockenpass, which straddles Italy and Austria. After a strenuous ride to the top of the pass, I had been hoping to ascend the top of Monte Coglians (Hohe Warte.) The view of its eastern face didn’t fill me with much confidence as there was still a fair bit of snow on slopes to the summit. I wasn’t equipped for alpinism, (I had an ice axe, but no crampons.) So instead I resigned myself to climbing Mt Frieskofel instead. I had already made the ascent of Frieskofel when I made this decision, as it was on the route to Mt Coglians. So I had a fairly leisurely afternoon exploring the dugouts, caves and trenches which dotted the summit and slopes, as well as just admiring the view, even if it was a bit cloudy. Before my ascent, I wasn’t sure which side held Mt Frieskofel during the war. The majority of the sentry positions faced north, so I presumed that it was the Italians. It must have been a hell of a fight to capture that, as it’s a bit steep to say the least!
After a slow descent down the pass (yes, I was still a chicken!) I was very happy to discover that the drying room at the campsite really did dry things out. After putting my now dry tent and shelter back up, I decided that it would be a good idea to stock up on essential supplies, which would enable me to keep going when I once again ran out of money. (I couldn’t keep relying on Ruthy to keep bailing me out!) I bought two large bags of rice, a large bag of pasta, a load of dried sausage things and five 50g pouches of tobacco (Plus papers.) Having already paid for the campsite, I now had the grand total of 83 Euros to get me back to Blighty! I would have to supplement the meagre food rations by foraging and scavenging whilst travelling god knows how many miles a day. I felt sick!
The large village of Obertilliach was my next destination but as it was only about twenty miles away. I had a leisurely start to the day (slept in) followed by a nice gentle ride, whilst admiring the wonderful scenery. After spending all of five minutes exploring the streets of Obertilliach, I was somehow drawn to the old church at the edge of the village. Now I’m not religious in the slightest, so I don’t know what made me go inside. There, I found a large mural painted above the entrance, a memorial to the Austrian dead from the First World War. I left a poppy before leaving.
After speaking to a man at a tourist information place about somewhere to camp, I headed to the bottom of the valley where a forest begins, to search for somewhere suitable. Throughout my journey, I’d picked up a bit of a habit of sleeping in strange and peculiar places. The camping spot near Obertilliach was no exception! Earlier in the day I had seen a sign warning about hungry bears in the area, so I was slightly apprehensive about camping out at that location. Fortunately, I didn’t have to resort to sleeping up a tree or a bridge like in Macedonia and Albania. Austria was more civilised; I got a log cabin! Ok, it was a very small log cabin, but it was still a log cabin. Inside, there was a built in table and bench with just enough room to store my bike inside and to lie down on the bench. After managing to lock the door using a bit of string and my spanner, I slept soundly in the misguided belief that my rickety old shack would somehow keep a bear out!
The following day’s objectives were to climb Mt Porze, before spending the night in a bivi hut just inside Italy on the southern side of the mountain. For once, things went (almost) to plan!
An early start meant going up the forested lower slopes whilst it was still dark. I did this rather quickly, as my imagination said that every shadow and sound of movement in the dark forest was a bear coming to eat me! Just after daylight made an appearance, I reached the small mountain lake of Klapfsee, the mirror smooth surface of its water perfectly reflecting the craggy bulk of Mt Porze high above. During my journey I realised that I was quite poor when it came to photography, but the picture that I took that morning will probably be the best one that I’ll ever take! Without my knowledge, Ruthy got the image off Drop Box, edited it and put it on her Instagram page. She credited it to me of course, but I was highly amused to hear that it had received more likes than any of her photos. Hehe!
After leaving my bike at Porze Hutte mountain refuge, I ascended a small but good path which wound around the northern slopes of Mt Porze. About halfway up, as it became very steep where it diagonally crossed a scree slope, I noticed that there were a few pieces of metal and other detritus mixed in with the stones and upon closer investigation, they ranged from old disintegrating wine corks and bits of leather, to pieces of shrapnel and barbed wire. I was getting close again. Above the scree, I found long lengths of barbed wire which looked Austro-Hungarian in origin (thicker wire and more barbs.) As Mt Porze was held by the Italians for the duration of the war, I thought that this was a bit strange? Maybe it had been sited by the Austrians to impede an Italian advance, or the Italian defenders might have just been re-using captured wire? Anyway, it’s irrelevant really. The items in the scree slope had originally come from the Italian defensive positions at the top of the mountain that had been brought down by nearly a hundred winters worth of avalanches and spring thaws. Higher up more barbed wire stretched across the saddle between Porze and its lower neighbour. My route headed left up a rocky gully towards the summit, it was protected by some thick wire cabling which you could clip into with via-ferrata equipment. The route wasn’t any more difficult than you would come across in the mountains of the Lake District or the west Highlands, so I didn’t really see the point. As I got nearer to the summit, I stopped to look at the view to the west which had suddenly appeared before me.
The Dolomite mountains were shining white in the sun, not from the limestone which forms their rocky spurs, ridges and towers, but from the fact that they were still covered in a lot of snow. ‘Well that sorts one problem out.’ I thought, with some relief!
As I’ve already said, I had originally planned to literally follow the Italian/Austrian border as these were the front lines for the majority of the war. This ended a couple of miles to the west of my present location where the front lines turned a corner, heading south west towards the Dolomites. The fighting there was unlike anything that the world had seen before and will hopefully never see again.
The Dolomite mountains, stretch from the shores of Lake Garda before ending at the foot of the Carnic Alps, which form the modern border between Italy and Austria. Their spectacular summits rise to a height of over 3,000m and were a series of natural fortifications which the Italian army had to conquer in order to beat the Austrians, who had fortified the tops of the mountains at the outbreak of the war.
At first, the Italian Command didn’t care about the hardships and slaughter which the Italian soldiers had to go through in order to try to capture those summits, but after a while and amid rising casualties numbered in the hundreds of thousands, they had a change of tactics. Instead of carrying on with the head-on infantry attacks which had proved futile at dislodging the Austrians, they reverted to a tried and tested method which had been proved effective in the later Medieval period against castles: mining underneath the positions and blowing them up with explosives.
This method can’t have done much good for the nerves of the soldiers from both sides, as they listened for the sounds of digging below their positions. Those massive explosions literally removed some of the summits, changing the mountains forever.
The air was still as I sat on the top of Mt Porze, just staring at the distant Dolomites in a windless silence. The sun was moving down the sky from noon and I still had a lot to do, so after a quick snack, I headed northwest along the high ridge which connected Mt Porze with its neighbouring mountain Grosse Kinigat. Every few paces there was another sign of the war. Collapsed bunkers and caves dotted the ridge and as they all faced north, I rightly guessed that this area had been held by the Italians. Below the ridge, barbed wire still stretched across the north face of the mountain. Although rusty and broken in places, it still posed a threat to the unwary mountaineer who decided to visit the remains of a trench that lay on the other side of it. Fortunately I’d had a tetanus booster before I left home, but my trousers now had a large tear to go with the many holes which I’d been forced to repair.
Further along the ridge, I entered a small manmade cave which cut through the mountain. The window that looked out over the northern slopes formed a spectacular picture frame into Austria and was the perfect place to leave yet another poppy. Upon leaving the cave, I discovered that a cloud had formed over the mountain and it was now beginning to snow! The small shower of snow began to fall harder and the increase in size of the snowflakes caused it to start settling on the slope outside the cave. I retreated back inside and watched the ridge that I was going to follow turn from grey to white. My intention had been to follow the ridge north for a couple of miles, until I reached the point where the old front lines turned a corner and headed towards the Dolomites, but there was no way that I was carrying on in those conditions, so I decided to retrace my route towards Mt Porze before heading towards the bivi hut, where I planned to spend the night. Typically, the snow stopped when I reached the hut but as some nice person had brought a load of firewood up, I cooked my dinner over a fire, watched the sun setting over the Italian mountains to the east and had an early night.
Early the next morning, I headed east back over Mt Porze, before dropping down the other side. There was a rough pass which crossed the mountains at that point and I was going to return down to the Porze hut as soon as I reached it. However, I became distracted by the remains of old buildings, bunkers and trenches which had been built on the wide ridge, so I followed these east and before I knew it, I had reached the summit of another mountain a few miles away. I had planned for a long journey that day, so after telling myself that it was impossible to try to see everything from the war, I headed back to the pass and back down to my bike which I had left at the Porze mountain hut.