The laws for days on the books, they explain that the tactical clash determines the operational outcome and that from there triggers the winning strategy, but you have to go to really understand what it means, you have to travel those paths with shortness of breath, the head bowed and hands on the ground, then you can remotely perceive the essence of tragedy and heroism combined together by the patience and dedication of a peasant people accustomed to waiting for the long winter to gather the fruits of the new summer.
The winter of the Great War for Italians lasted three interminable years, those who survived left boys and returned old, those who remained among those ditches, in those valleys was buried in the memories of a mother, a loved one of a child without a father.
I tried to follow it a piece of that road that leads from the bridge of San Quirino to the north-east of Cividale towards Mount Piatto, on the Colovrat, to my right Tolmin and the blue waters of the Isonzo, to the left in a narrow gorge between Matajur and the Tricorno massif Caporetto, a name that evokes defeat and ignominy, a name that brings back to life the ghosts of a hundred years ago.From the Solarie hut, going up towards the east, you reach the flat mountain, today's feelings retrace the trenches of yesterday , narrow and muddy places where the wet dripping of karst stone freezes the limbs even in a July morning.
I wanted to try and sit there, in those outposts a stone's throw away from the enemy, without the fear of being beaten with the fire of weapons, but with the awareness of being hit by the bullets of memory: "I wonder if he died there someone in this trench, who knows who touched this cornerstone, who cried and screamed, who silently left the conflict and then from life! "
Questions unanswered between the chirping of the sparrows and the buzzing of the flies, but looking up the gloomy wooded carpet of Mount Cucco and the grandeur of Mount Nero give me a sense of suffocation, I seem to hear the whistles of cannons and bombards that in those days of October, arranged a little more than four meters from each other, beat the Italian infantrymen without moral means, without a counter-battery, without reserve.
They had begun the XII spilled on the Isonzo, every brigade in two years had lost over 3000 on average, they were exhausted, wet, dirty, terrified, "Win or Die" in the bulletin of the supreme command, died and then sought refuge in the rear, they came in thousands on three narrow and long outlets surrounded by rivers and desperation, with the thunder of the incessant cannon chasing them, they died!
I traced their way devoid of their cross, I climbed part of their golgota without having suffered the immense tortures of the front, dressing the uniform joined them as a brother in arms, walking their steps a little 'I feel ungrateful son.
