The Phantom Battlefields of World War I
All photos by the author, with the exception of historical archival material
Over 100 years later, WWI is still being fought—in ghostly battlefields full of unexploded shells.
High up in the Julian Alps of Europe, shrouded in fog and wind, stands a ghostly battlefield full of perfectly-preserved trenches and 105-year-old unexploded munitions that maim and kill people, even to this day.
This isn’t the premise to a horror story; it’s the Naverco Pass, one of many battlefields on which the Battle of Caporetto, a World War I clash and the worst week in Italian military history, was fought. Because large swaths of these battlefields were never properly cleaned up, locals still occasionally die from the ancient grenades and shells which surface after each winter. These deaths, as grisly and anachronistic as they are, come with one curious asterisk: those maimed by unexploded WWI ordinance, even in 2023, are added to official lists of the war’s casualties, and thus any modern person who has stepped on something and has lived to tell the tale gets to claim, legally, that they were injured in WWI.
Italian soldiers fighting at an Isonzo battle, high up in the Alps.
WWI is often overshadowed by WWII. After all, the second war was the brutal one, the mobile one, the one with that funny Austrian painter and his goon squad wrecking all of Europe. And if anyone knows about the first war, it’s probably through All Quiet on the Western Front, 1917, Battlefield, or other focuses on France and Belgium. But there was another front, an Italian front, and this theater of operations saw the highest-altitude combat in world history.
Imagine Italian and Austrian soldiers hanging off cliffs 20 meters apart and shooting at each other across the narrow gulf; imagine sharp limestone bursting in the air and whole mountainsides collapsing under massive explosive pressure; imagine men trudging through waist-deep snow in June and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with trench clubs and brass knuckles, only to all be buried in an avalanche. Imagine that when these men fell, their bodies were covered in snow and ice and that they disappeared into permafrost and crevasses, only to reemerge a century later—more on that soon.
Above all, imagine that twelve of these chaotic mountain melees were fought in the same place, in the space of just over two years, and imagine that they climaxed in a fight bigger and more brutal than all the rest, that created such monumental destruction that most of it may never be cleaned up.
There were eleven Battles of the Isonzo, fought over the picturesque sapphire waters of the Isonzo (now called Soča) River. The history is complicated but to put things simply, Luigi Cadorna, Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, thought it would be an excellent idea to attack a sector of the Austro-Hungarian front once, then again and again, in hopes of breaking through. Spoiler: he only ended up wasting 650,000 lives as he threw men against the same mountains over and over for two years.
After the eleventh battle of the Isonzo in the autumn of 1917, Austria-Hungary was annoyed at being on the defensive all the time. So they called their ally, Germany, and asked for troops to stage an offensive of their own against the Italians. They launched their attack, the twelfth and final Battle of the Isonzo, on October 24. Taking after the name of the town in which it started, it was called the Battle of Caporetto.
Map of the Battle of Caporetto.
You may have heard of Caporetto through Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, or perhaps in that obscure Sandra Bullock movie from 1996, In Love and War. As I said, it was the worst week in Italian military history, a modern-day Battle of Cannae. The Germans and Austrians routed the Italians, who ran off the mountains and staged a disorganized retreat 100 miles to the west. By the time the smoke cleared, 300,000 Italian soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured.
Two of my relatives, a great-grandfather and a distant cousin, fought with the Italians at Caporetto. One of them survived, and another, Raffaele Marotta, did not. Since getting first interested in the Italian Front in 2018, I’ve been in contact with Italian military historians who live near Caporetto and who report that there are tons of unexploded munitions (also called UXO, short for “unexploded ordinance”) and other relics left behind on the un-excavated battlefields. Naturally, I had to see the place for myself.
The battlefield of Caporetto is located today in Slovenia, a tiny and relatively obscure nation whose total size is smaller than the Los Angeles Valley. It borders Italy and Croatia and was the northernmost country in the former Yugoslavia. Today, Slovenia is known for its ski resorts, honeybees, and relaxed demeanor—but a decent chunk of its western half contains the corpses of 700,000 Austrians, Germans, and Italians killed in the Battles of the Isonzo, along with tons of military material that the EU hasn’t bothered to dig up because they lack the funding. That leaves the task of uncovering these war relics, many of them dangerous explosives, to the Slovenes, WWI historians, and amateur archaeologists. I, too, was game for the task. (Ending up on the WWI casualty list, I reflected morbidly, would not be the worst way to go.)
I booked my tickets for Slovenia in January and immediately began a crash course in the Slovene language. Starting out from Cleveland, Ohio, I landed in Ljubljana, the capital, on April 25. After a weeklong adventure climbing mountains, biking around, and hitchhiking, I arrived in the tiny Alpine town of Bovec on May 4. Three Battles of the Isonzo were fought here, and straightaway I discovered that the historians’ warnings rang true: ruins and relics of the conflict were everywhere if one poked around for them. For example, in shallow woods behind a cave in which several hundred Italians were gassed to death, I found remnants of WWI gas canisters and other shell fragments.
Gas canister shrapnel found behind the tunnel in Bovec.
I was invigorated by the validation of my suspicions, but Bovec wasn’t the main show–I needed to go to Caporetto, now known as Kobarid. I hitchhiked and walked there, along the Isonzo Front, on May 6. Along the way I saw ruined bunkers and stone walls leftover from WWI, but this area had been tamed and plundered already.
In Caporetto, there was a museum to the battle housing some objects discovered by the locals, who are proud of their collections of shells, helmets, bayonets, uniforms, and in many cases, fully intact guns and artillery pieces. On a hill above the town I found an ossuary housing the bones of 7,040 Italian dead, among them my distant cousin Raffaele Marotta. I paid my respects to him, believing myself fulfilled in my journey; I had found a couple relics and seen the battlefields and museums, and now it was time to go home.
So on the morning of May 8, I set out from Caporetto on foot with the intent to hitchhike to another town then take a bus back to Ljubljana. I walked a few miles to the village of Idrsko, where I posted up on a corner with my thumb dumbly sticking southeasterly.
I was in front of a farmhouse; an overalled farmer emerged and we bandied briefly in Slovene. He asked if I wanted to see something cool, and I shrugged and followed him back to his barn. He rolled open the door, and my jaw dropped: covering the walls and floors of this modest wooden building were hundreds of WWI shovels; picks; grappling hooks; mess-kits…and unexploded artillery shells.
The wall of the farmer's barn, containing WWI relics he and his friends had found on the battlefield.
The farmer told me that he and his friends had gathered these from the adjacent mountain over the past 20 years and that a few hours’ hike uphill, there was an untouched WWI battlefield that saw the opening shots of the Battle of Caporetto. So, with an empty stomach but immense hopes, I embarked on the climb up the mountain.
After more than two hours of steep climbing—no easy feat with a 35-pound pack, but it’s how the Alpine troops did it—I reached an un-forested area. At first I thought I had emerged above the treeline, as on previous mountains, but I soon realized that this hilltop had been denuded by no natural means.
Fog moves in on the Naverco Pass battlefield, which is remarkably-preserved 105 years after the Battle of Caporetto.
I found myself on the Pot Miru (Path of Peace), a crude dirt path constructed by WWI historical and veterans’ societies that passes directly through the no-man’s-land of the Naverco Pass, a critical lynchpin in the Italian defense that was broken by the Germans on the first day of the war. Here, a young German lieutenant named Erwin Rommel (yes, that Erwin Rommel) made a career for himself by smashing through Italian lines at 1700 meters, in the fog, and forcing them into a retreat.
All around me stood signs of this engagement, well-preserved by the altitude and the chilly air, which even now was rife with icy drizzle. German storm-troops rushed through the fog, ambushing the Italians, as they captured this spectacular, high-altitude ridge on which I now stood, alone. The picture of it was clear in my mind; I could see that foggy October day, with its yellow foliage mixing with the chartreuse gas clouds; and I could imagine the trenches and the shouting storm-troops and their mushroom-shaped helmets and their gas masks routing the Italians, who with grotesque, terrified faces rushed out of their trenches and stumbled down the rocky outcrops with the greatest possible expediency. It was all so clear; it was all so intact. This was the most virgin battlefield I had ever seen. More than a million men fought at Caporetto and more than twenty million bullets and shells were fired here, and the aftermath stood all around me.
A second view of the Naverco Pass battlefield and its preserved trenches.
And it was still dangerous in 2023. All around the Pot Miru, signs stood sternly warning travelers not to stray off the trail, as only 15% of the battlefield has been excavated and the rest is left in its original state, exactly as it was in October 1917, 105 years ago. Because neither the EU nor Slovenia has the time or budget to deal with this land, this battlefield is—as far as the bureaucracy is concerned—a giant historical landfill.
The posted signs furthermore included examples of those unfortunate souls who did walk off the safe path and ended up stepping on some UXO; and whose toes or feet or legs are now missing; or those who have, in extreme cases, died. Each country publishes individual statistics and Slovenia’s research is behind, but across the front, at least 600 people have been killed by UXO since the end of the war in 1918, and all have been added to the war’s official casualty lists.
One of the many signs, erected by veterans' associations, warning visitors about the danger of unexploded ordnance on the battlefield.
Naturally, as a journalist and explorer, I felt a compelling responsibility to step off the Pot Miru and onto the battlefield.
I began hiking among the tall grasses and the weeds and the bits of stone that comprised the battlefield. Here and there, chunks of metal or concrete would poke up through the ground. I would step occasionally on something that crunched beneath my boots, and I would dig frantically, with my bare fingers, to find a spoon or a nail or a piece of rusted wire. Each relic told a story: this hook might have belonged to an Italian mountain troop who, unable to rappel without it, found himself in enemy hands; this pinback button might have held a medal earned in battle; this shovel fragment might have been used in a desperate, last-ditch attempt at entrenching before the wave of enemy troops washed over the Italian line. These relics presented themselves in obscene quantity and the field was porous with metal; it was an archaeologist’s wet dream.
The Italian trenches were immaculately preserved. In the collapsed dugouts and tunnels, one can still see uniform and possible bone fragments. I wandered around in the drizzle and fog, minding my step, feeling fear bolt through me whenever I chanced upon a hard, sharp piece of metal. I uncovered way more than I could possibly carry: ammo boxes, wagon wheels, and mess kits. I found the top of a suspected unexploded shell, and I left it the hell alone—I was in Ukraine on Z-Day, but this felt infinitely more dangerous. At the end, I found many things I could bring off the hilltop: bits of shrapnel, walls of exploded shells, nails and bullets and other small relics.
A crushed dugout on the Naverco Pass battlefield.
After a couple hours of exploring, I tossed my loot into a produce bag and left the hilltop, grateful that my limbs were still intact. Soon, however, I realized I was lost.
The fog had now firmly moved in. I hadn’t seen another human in hours and I was communing only with the battlefield phantoms, who seemed intent on yanking me into their ranks. So, I began wandering in a southeast direction and praying it was the right way back to civilization.
After a couple miles, in a copse of trees, I reached a wooden cabin; outside, a woman was unloading a car. “Where am I?” I asked in Slovene.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she replied in Italian.
Damn, was I grateful for that—I grew up in an Italian immigrant family, and I was much better at Italian than Slovene. I learned I had wandered into Italy; that hilltop actually marked a national border. What luck!
After she fed me a panino and some coffee and showed me a map, I set off walking back to Slovenia. Four hours of solitary downhill hiking later I was in the town of Tolmin, where I caught a bus to Ljubljana. Three days later, I was back in the US.
A total collection of relics the author gathered around the battlefields of Caporetto.
As I sat on my transatlantic flight with a carryon full of relics, speeding westward in a subsonic aluminum tube that would’ve been science fiction to cousin Raffaele had he lived through the war to see it, I thought of how the phantom hilltop battlefield was a miraculous but unfortunate wonder. On one hand, I’m glad there’s a place untouched by modern tourism and commercialism where history can rest in peace, but on the other, this history continues to strike out vengefully at modern society and kill those who trespass upon it today. Thus continues Caporetto’s rocky, explosive legacy.
The Naverco Pass is just one of dozens of battlefields that comprise an unofficial Zona Rossa (Red Zone) of the Italian Front of WWI, equivalent to France’s Zone Rouge. Across hundreds of square miles, the ground is full of metal and human remains that will take decades, and perhaps centuries more, to excavate. The EU has no current plans to expand its recovery of weapons, material, and human remains of the Italian Front. For now, it’s up to the Slovene locals, the curious farmers, the enterprising historians, and the amateur archaeologists from Cleveland, Ohio.
Follow Manny Marotta on Twitter and Instagram.
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