Kolovrat Ridge
It was the kind of day you dream of in the mountains: mid-May, cool in the shade and warm in the sun, with the Soča river (in Italian, Isonzo) snaking through the valley below. Our group — 30 undergraduates, four faculty, our brilliant driver Mario, and my wife Cheryl — clambered out of our chartered bus and trooped up the trail to Kolovrat Ridge. After two weeks of cities, all of us mountain people were giddy to be in the Julian Alps of western Slovenia, with snowcapped peaks above us. The slopes were green and lush and strewn with flowers.
We had already spent two weeks in Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Czech Republic as part of our “Europe on the Edge” class. We had visited memorials to some of the worst things people can do to one another: concentration camps, POW camps, extermination sites, museums of espionage, bombed-out cities, border walls. Places consecrated to the memory of assassination, torture, war, murder, and division. Surely the mountains would be a quiet refuge from those horrors.
But Kolovrat Ridge is laced with trenches and tunnels and the remnants of fortifications.
For three years during the Great War, Italian and Austrian troops slashed and hacked at each other among these mountains, looking to force an entry into a corner of the enemy’s territory. The fighting combined the risks of mountain climbing with the terrors of industrialized warfare. The opposing armies clung impossibly to slopes and ridgelines, supplying themselves with superhuman (and superanimal) effort. Through three fierce mountain winters they practically breathed on each other, losing toes and fingers to frostbite, sometimes fighting with sharpened shovels when their rifles froze. More men reportedly died from snow slides than in combat, but the fighting was awful enough. Eleven times the Italian army hurled itself forward and clawed a few feet of territory from the Austrians before both sides collapsed back in their trenches. The artillery fire was so fierce that the big guns blasted the tip off a peak that stood between the opposing armies.
In October 1917 German advisors suggested to the Austrians that they attack through the valley instead, and they loaned their allies enough poison gas to blast a hole through the Italian lines. In the resulting rout, the twelfth and final battle of the Soča/Isonzo (better remembered as the Battle of Caporetto), a quarter million Italians, exhausted from years of wrenching mountain fighting, surrendered to the Austrians. The victors pushed deep into Italian territory until they outrun their own supply lines. It was all in vain; the Italians regrouped and regained much of their lost territory. The Germans and Austrians sued for peace in November 1918 and the battered Italians joined the French, British, and Americans as victors at the Versailles conference.
At the top of the ridge we took dozens of group photographs (one from the Italian and one the Slovenian side, below) and enjoyed the beautiful day. We could see all the way to the blue Adriatic Sea and into Italy, Croatia, and Austria. The next day we would be in Venice, the last stop of the class.
Today, Kolovrat is part of Slovenia’s “Walk of Peace,” an open-air museum dedicated to memorializing all sides of the fighting and to preventing future conflict.
We are capable of turning any place, no matter how high, remote, and difficult, into a scene of senseless slaughter. The artifacts of war at Kolovrat Ridge remind us that unless we are vigilant, there is no refuge from our own insanity.
Photos by Cheryl Henley.
