Kill All the Mosquitoes?!

New gene-editing technology gives scientists the ability to wipe out the carriers of
malaria and the Zika virus. But should they use it?

o the naked eye, the egg of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito is just a dark speck, but under a
100-power microscope, it shows up as a fat, slightly curved cucumber, somewhat narrower at
one end. In the wild, it is typically found in shallow, sunlit puddles in sub-Saharan Africa, but it
can survive in any number of wet places at around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. In a laboratory in
London, behind three sets of locked doors enclosing negative-pressure containment
vestibules, Andrew Hammond, a doctoral student in molecular genetics, picks up a clump
of Anopheles eggs on a small paintbrush and lines them up on a microscope slide. Hammond
looks for the narrow end, where the germ line cells that will form the next generation are
located. With delicate nudges of a joystick, he maneuvers a tiny needle through his field of
vision until it just penetrates the egg membrane, and the click of a button releases a minute
squirt of DNA. Whether the genetic material reaches and binds to its target region is then a
matter of luck, and luck is, generally, with the mosquito. Hammonds success rate, of which
he
is
very
proud,
is
around
20
percent.
A. gambiae has been called the worlds most dangerous animal, although strictly speaking
that applies only to the female of the species, which does the bloodsucking and harms only
indirectly. Its bite is a minor nuisance, unless it happens to convey the malaria
parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, for which it is a primary human vector. Although a huge
international effort has cut malaria mortality by about half since 2000, the World Health
Organization still estimates there were more than 400,000 fatal cases in 2015, primarily in
Africa. Children are particularly susceptible. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation prioritized
malaria in its more than $500 million commitment to fight infectious disease in developing
countries. A portion of that money ends up here, in the laboratory of Andrea Crisanti at
Imperial College, London, a short walk from Harrods.
Crisanti, a tousled, sad-eyed man with a gentle smile, was trained as a physician in Rome.
Later, studying molecular biology in Heidelberg, he developed his lifelong interest in malaria.
He set out on the trail of A. gambiae some 30 years ago, after he concluded that the best way
to eradicate the disease was to attack the mosquito rather than the parasite. The vector is
the Achilles heel of the disease, he says in his soft Italian accent. If you go after the
pathogen [with drugs], all you are doing is generating resistance.
Humans have been at war with members of the family Culicidae for over a century, since the
pioneering epidemiologist Sir Ronald Ross proved the role of Anopheles in malaria and U.S.
Army Maj. Walter Reed made a similar discovery about Aedes aegypti and yellow fever. The
war has been waged with shovels and insecticides, with mosquito repellent, mosquito traps
and mosquito-larvae-eating fish, with bed nets and window screens and rolled-up newspapers.
But all of these approaches are self-limiting. Puddles fill up again with rain; insects evolve
resistance to pesticides; predators can eat only so much.
By the time Crisanti joined Imperial College, in 1994, molecular genetics had suggested a new
approach, which he was quick to adopt, and in which his lab is now among the most advanced
in the world. Scientists had discovered how to insert beneficial mutationssuch as the gene
for Bt, a natural insecticideinto agricultural crops such as corn. Why not, then, create a
lethal mutation and insert it into the DNA of a mosquito? One problem was that mosquitoes
werent bred in a factory, as commodity corn increasingly is. In the wild, mosquitoes mate
randomly and propagate by Mendelian inheritance, which dictates that a mutation spreads

slowly, if at all. Unless the man-made mutation conveyed some strong evolutionary
advantageand the whole point was to do the oppositeit would most likely disappear.
In 2003, Austin Burt, a colleague of Crisantis at Imperial College, suggested a solution:
coupling the desired mutation with a gene drive that would overwrite the ordinary
processes of inheritance and evolution. Recall that genes are spelled out by DNA sequences
woven into chromosomes, which come in pairs (23 pairs in a human, 3 in a mosquito). A
gene drive involves copying a mutated gene from one chromosome onto the other member
of the pair. The key is that when the pairs split to form the eggs and sperm, it wont matter
which chromosome gets passed alongthe engineered gene will be there either way. Thus a
single mutation would, in theory, be driven into practically every mosquito in a breeding
population.For the next dozen years, Crisanti, working with a senior research fellow named
Tony Nolan and others, obsessively pursued variations of this approach, designing one gene
mutation that would render females sterile and another that would lead to a huge
preponderance of males. The challenge was creating the particular gene drives that
duplicated those mutationsa tedious, years-long process of constructing custom DNAsnipping enzymes.
Then, in 2012, the UC Berkeley researcher Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues developed a
revolutionary new technique for editing DNA. Researchers had known for years that certain
genes in bacteria had short, repeating chunks of DNA. (CRISPR stands for clustered regularly
interspaced short palindromic repeats.) When a virus invaded, the bacteria copied part of the
virus genetic code, slotting it into the spaces between the repeating CRISPR chunks. The next
time the bacteria saw that piece of code, an enzyme called Cas9 would guide its RNA to
exactly that sequence in the gene of the invading virus. It would cut out the DNA with
incredible precision and fuse the strand back together. Doudna and her colleagues harnessed
this process in the lab, using it to quickly and easily edit any part of a gene they targeted. The
following year, separate teams led by MIT bioengineer Feng Zhang and Harvards George
Church showed it would work in living cells.
It was the universality as well as the accuracy that set CRISPR-Cas9 apart from other geneediting techniques. Unlike the custom enzymes Crisanti and his team had been painstakingly
building, Cas9 seemed to work in any type of cell. Researchers saw implications for treating
genetic disorders, for improving agricultureand for more sinister applications, such as
creating biowarfare agents. CRISPR also brought Crisantis dream a giant step closer to reality.
Now, he and his team could program Cas9s guide RNA to pinpoint any part of a gene and
transfer over the material they wanted to copy.

If Crisantis approach works, you could, in theory, wipe out an entire species of mosquito. You
could wipe out every species of mosquito, although youd need to do them one at a time, and
there are around 3,500 of them, of which only about 100 spread human disease. You might
want to stop at fewer than a dozen species in three generaAnopheles (translation:
useless, the malaria mosquito), Aedes (translation: unpleasant, the principal vector for
yellow fever, dengue and Zika) and Culex (translation: gnat, responsible for spreading West
Nile, St. Louis encephalitis and other viruses).
For thousands of years, the relentlessly expanding population of Homo sapiens has driven
other species to extinction by eating them, shooting them, destroying their habitat or
accidentally introducing more successful competitors to their environment. But never have
scientists done so deliberately, under the auspices of public health. The possibility raises
three difficult questions: Would it work? Is it ethical? Could it have unforeseen consequences?
The feasibility question is being studied in Crisantis London lab, where the injected eggs will
hatch into larvae. The ones harboring the mutation are identified by a marker gene, which
glows under a microscope when viewed in certain lights. The mutants of interest are then

returned to the warm, humid air of the mosquito rooms, to stacked trays with walls of white
plastic mesh. On one side, theres a long socklike tube, ordinarily tied in a knot, through which
researchers can insert an aspirator to gently vacuum up specimens. If you hold your hand
nearby, the females, sensing the nearness of blood, gather on that side. When its time for
their blood meal, which will nourish the hundred or so eggs a female will lay at one time, an
anesthetized mouse is laid belly-down on the cage roof, and the females fly up to bite it
through the mesh. (The males, which live on nectar and fruit in the wild, feed on a glucosewater solution, wicked up from a small glass bottle.) These insects live up to a month longer in
the controlled environment of the cages than in the wild, where they often dont survive more
than a week or two.
The next phase of the research takes place in Perugia, Italy, home to one of the worlds oldest
universities, founded in 1308, and to a small, elite research consortium, Polo dInnovazione
Genomica. A few miles from the winding alleys of the medieval hilltop village, in a glasswalled building on a stark windswept plaza, is Polos secure lab, with six ceiling-high field
cages, each with an area of 50 or 60 square feet. Signs on the doors warn away visitors who
might have been exposed to malaria, since they could infect an escaped mosquito if it bit
them. The air inside is tropical. Instead of live mice, females are fed on small dishes of bovine
blood, warmed to body temperature and covered with paraffin, to give them something to
land on. The females are attracted to the pheromones in human sweat, especially from the
feet. Lab workers say they sometimes wear their socks all weekend and bring them to work on
Monday to rub on the feeding dishes.
Inside, the lighting changes to simulate a 24-hour tropical day, and environmental cues
trigger the swarming behavior that is crucial to mating. That is how many insects mate,
explains the chief entomologist, Clelia Oliva. The males swarm, and the females fly through
the swarm and find a mate, and they come together in the air. If you cannot replicate that,
you cannot determine if your line is going to succeed in the wild. An escapee from one of the
cages flits past Oliva as she is talking, and she dispatches it with the slap she perfected while
studying mosquitoes on Reunion Island, in the Indian ocean.
Researchers are skeptical about whether it is even possible to wipe out mosquitoes. Global
elimination of an entire species, I think, is a little far-fetched, says Steven Juliano, an
ecologist at Illinois State University. But, he adds, I think they have a good chance of
reducing local populations, maybe even eradicating a species in a locality.
Something like that has been done with other creatures. Starting in the 1950s, the American
entomologists Edward F. Knipling and Raymond C. Bushland eliminated the screwworm, an
agricultural pest, from the United States and much of Central America. Their approach, called
sterile insect technique, involved breeding and hatching millions of flies, sterilizing the
males with low-level gamma rays, then releasing them in numbers sufficient to swamp the
wild population. Females that mated with the sterile males produced infertile offspring. It took
decades, but it workedthe two men were awarded the World Food Prize in 1992and the
same technique now is used to contain outbreaks of the Mediterranean fruit fly.
But when the sterile insect technique was tried against mosquitoes, the results were mixed. It
requires that the released males compete successfully with their wild counterparts in mating,
and there is evidence that in mosquitoes, the same radiation that makes them sterile may
also impair their mating behavior. Whatever female mosquitoes are looking for in a mate,
these males seem to have less of it.
So researchers have also been looking at variants of sterile insect technology that dont
require radiation. A pilot project has begun in the city of Piracicaba, in southeastern Brazil, by
the British biotech company Oxitec. The target insect is A. aegypti, the main culprit in
spreading yellow fever, dengue and other viral diseases, and the work has taken on greater
urgency in the last six months, because A. aegypti also is a vector for the Zika virus, blamed
for an outbreak of terrifying birth defects in the Americas.

In Oxitecs program, male larvae bred with a lethal mutation are raised in water dosed with
the antibiotic tetracycline, which inactivates the lethal gene. When those males mate with
wild mosquitoes, their offspring, deprived of tetracycline, die before they can reproduce. CEO
Hadyn Parry claims greater than 90 percent suppression of the wild population in five
studies that covered relatively small areas in Brazil, Panama and the Cayman Islands. Now the
company wants to expand to the subtropical U.S., and it recently passed a key regulatory
hurdle to bring the program to the Florida Keys.
Oxitecs technology predates CRISPR, and it doesnt use a gene drive. Its goal is not to
exterminate Aedes, but to reduce the local population to where it can no longer serve as a
vector for human disease. That is, of course, a temporary solution to a perennial problem.
Mosquitoes dont usually travel more than a few hundred yards from where they hatch, but
people do, and they can take yellow fever with them. And the mosquitoes themselves can
travel the globe on airplanes and ships. Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, arrived
in the Western Hemisphere a few years ago, possibly in a shipment of tires, and spreads many
of the same diseases as A. aegypti. So even if the Oxitec program succeeds, it will likely need
to be repeated at intervals. You begin to see why Oxitec is a business, one American
entomologist said dryly.

The Buzz About Altered Bugs

How the revolutionary technique CRISPR-Cas9 gives scientists the ability to insert an infertility
gene into a mosquitoso the gene drives into a population, eventually causing its demise:
Theres not much doubt that eradicating Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti would save
many lives, and for most people thats a good enough reason to do it. I dont think the world
would be a worse-off place if local populations of these species were eliminated, Juliano says,
and it wouldnt bother me any more than eliminating the smallpox virus. Even the great
conservationist E.O. Wilson, the worlds most famous entomologist, has said he wouldnt
mourn A. gambiae. Keep their DNA for future research, he says, and let them go.
Still, there are voices calling to proceed slowly. If we were to intentionally set out to cause
the extinction of a species, we should think about that, says Henry Greely, a Stanford law
professor and bioethicist. I would want there to be some consideration and reflection, and a
social consensus, before we take that step. His argument is based partly on the slippery
slope: If mosquitoes, then why not rats? Im not sure I care if mosquitoes suffer, if they can
suffer. But mammals or birds, I do care.
But suppose the target were the malaria parasite itself, which as a single-celled protozoan has
even a smaller claim on our sympathy than an insect? At UC Irvine, Anthony James, a
geneticist, has been working since the 1980s on breeding mosquitoes that, while viable
themselves, do not transmit P. falciparum. The virus has a complicated life cycle that takes up
to three weeks to move from the mosquitos gut to its circulatory system to the salivary
glands, from which it is transmitted. James realized that if he could endow the mosquito with
genes that produce antibodies to P. falciparum, he could destroy the parasite without having
to kill even one insect. He created the gene for the antibodies, but he needed a way to make
it spread in the wild.
Then he heard about CRISPR-Cas9in particular the work being done at UC San Diego by a
molecular biologist named Ethan Bier, who recently put a mutation into fruit flies. Bier allows
that some situations might warrant removing a genus like A. aegypti from a vast area of the
world where it isnt native. Whenever possible, though, he prefers less-invasive methods. I
like this approach, of modifying the mosquitoes rather than rendering them extinct, says
Bier. Were doing enough of that already. As a human being I dont want to be involved in the
eradication of a species, even an insect. James has successfully engineered the antibody-

producing genes and is working on the gene drive. He could have insects ready for field tests
in a matter of months but cant predict how long the approval process will take. Were not
about to do anything foolish, he says.
If society chooses to eliminate one or more species of mosquito, what are the downsides?
Mosquitoes play a critical role in a few environments, such as the Arctic tundra, where they
hatch out by the billions over a short period and are a significant food resource for birds. In
most other places, biologists believe, the ecosystem could survive the loss.
Still, according to Nolan, Our goal is not to eliminate malaria mosquitoes from the face of the
earth. If we succeed, people wont even notice. There will be plenty of mosquitoes out there.
Its possible, even likely, that another species would take the place of the mosquitoes we
exterminated. For instance, A. aegypti could be replaced by a mosquito from the Culex
pipiens species complex. Culex, which is a vector for the West Nile virus, does very badly
when Aedes is present, Juliano notes, but it might be expected to thrive in its absence. On
the other hand, the newcomer might be a relatively harmless species; the ecological niche for
mosquitoes doesnt require them to carry diseases fatal to human beings. In the long term,
the pathogens could evolve to be spread by the mosquitoes that are still around, but theres
plenty of time for humans to worry about that.
The larger concern, arguably, is over the use of CRISPR itself, and the awesome power it
unleashes over the environment. We can remake the biosphere to be what we want, from
woolly mammoths to nonbiting mosquitoes, Greely muses. How should we feel about that?
Do we want to live in nature, or in Disneyland? Another fear is that CRISPR puts a potential
weapon in the hands of terrorists, who could use it to engineer epidemics. Just as gene drives
can make mosquitoes unfit for spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be
designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,
warns David Gurwitz of Tel Aviv University.
The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine thought enough of the threat to
convene a conference last fall on the implications of gene drive technology for biosecurity. But
many scientists think this is an overblown concern (along with the other horror-movie
scenario, of a high-school student in his basement using CRISPR to make a dog that glows in
the dark). A gene drive in a mosquito would make a very poor bioweapon, says Kevin Esvelt,
an ecologist at MIT, who has written extensively on the subject. They are slow [compared
with disseminating a deadly microbe], they are easy to detect, and its straightforward to
build a reversal mechanism.
But Esvelt has other ethical concerns about using CRISPR technology on animals: We will
have engineered the ecosystems of people elsewhere in the world without their knowledge or
consent. We go from the default assumption that the things we engineer will not spread, to
assuming they will. Normally you can make any kind of fruit flies you wantnatural selection
will wipe the floor with them. But as soon as youre thinking of a gene drive technology, you
have to assume whatever youre making will spread once it gets outside the lab. Human error
will win out, if not deliberate human action.
Yet Esvelt himself is already thinking about whether and how to someday use a CRISPR gene
drive in a mouse, the main animal reservoir of Lyme diseaseand a mammal. He would
engineer a local population to carry antibodies for the bacteria that cause Lyme. (The disease
spreads from mice to humans through tick bites.)
If CRISPR works in a mouse, it will almost certainly work in a human being. The least
controversial application would be for inherited diseases such as muscular dystrophywhich
would most likely involve repairing the somatic (non-reproductive) cells of a child or an adult.
But Chinese scientists just announced the results of their second study of CRISPR in human

embryos. (They used nonviable embryos from fertility clinics.) The results revealed serious
obstacles to the approach, but the technology is fast improving. Harvard scientists, for
instance, recently modified the CRISPR method so it can change a single letter of the genetic
code, making it easier to prevent diseases like Alzheimers and breast cancer. CRISPR also
opens the Pandoras box of editing the germ line cells that pass on their genetic material to
succeeding generations. This could be of enormous benefit to a small number of people who
carry genes for disorders such as Huntingtons disease. More problematically, it could
encourage parents to custom-build their offspring, deleting genes that are unwanted but not
life-threatening (for lactose intolerance, say), or adding ones that convey traits such as
athletic ability, longevityor intelligence.
This possibility has given rise to a lot of op-ed angst about playing God, which certainly
should be taken seriously. Leaving aside the philosophic objections, the practical downside is
that we dont know all of the genes that will actually make someone smarter (or taller,
stronger, healthier, faster and so forth) and the only way to find out for sure is to try different
combinations on various embryos and wait for them to grow up. By that time, if we got it
wrong, it would be too late to fix, not least for the humans who were the unwitting subjects of
the experiments.
That, in the eyes of most ethicists, is an insurmountable problem. An International Summit on
Human Gene Editing in Washington, D.C. last December aired many of these issues, revealing
a split between the medical community, which wants to help patients in the here and now,
and some researchers, who worry about the implications of the tabloid headline announcing
the birth of the first Frankenbaby.
Meanwhile, mosquitoes flit about the villages and cities of central Africa, land silently on
sleeping children and bite. The fight against malaria has made much progress in the last
decade, but at a huge cost that may not be sustainable indefinitely. In the Western
Hemisphere, the threat of Zika has led to extraordinary measures, including warnings in whole
regions of South and Central America for women to consider postponing childbearing. This
summer will tell us if the disease will strike in the parts of the U.S. where two Aedes species
liveFlorida and a strip of the Gulf Coast that is likely to expand as the winters warm in a
changing climate. (The second of those two American Aedes species, A. albopictus, is a
confirmed carrier of the virus and can be found as far north as New England.) Public-health
officials are already bracing for the possibility of a spate of babies with the devastating
diagnosis of microcephaly and associated brain damage. It was human transportation
technology that spread these diseases across the globe. Now technology is offering a way to
contain them, or even defeat them altogether, at the risk of unleashing powerful forces whose
effects we can only dimly predict.
Will we do itwe humans, the species with the relentless appetite for knowledge? The fruit of
that particular tree has never been left uneaten for very long. Crisanti, for his part, is ready to
pick it. I want to see malaria wiped out in my lifetime, he says softly. He is 61.

Did Neanderthals Die Out Because of the Paleo Diet?

A new theory links their fate to a meat-heavy regimen
Humans tend to dismiss Neanderthals as dimwits, yet the brains of our doomed cousins were
actually larger than our own. If you go to a site from 150,000 years ago, says Miki Ben-Dor,
a Tel Aviv University archaeologist, you wont be able to tell whether Neanderthals or Homo
sapiens lived there, because they had all the same tools. Which helps explain why, to fathom
how our fates diverged, he recently scrutinized Neanderthals bodies instead of their skulls.

While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Neanderthals had bell-shaped
torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living
in colder and drier environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy and
therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger respiratory system.
But Ben-Dor had a gut feeling this was wrong. What if the difference was what they ate?
Living in Eurasia 300,000 to 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals settled in places like the Polar
Urals and southern Siberianot bountiful in the best of times, and certainly not during ice
ages. In the heart of a tundra winter, with no fruits and veggies to be found, animal meat
made of fat and proteinwas likely the only energy source.
Alas, though fat is easier to digest, its scarce in cold conditions, as prey animals themselves
burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of
protein, which is tough to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to
remove toxic byproducts. In fact, we humans have a protein ceiling of between 35 and 50
percent of our diet; eating too much more can be dangerous. Ben-Dor thinks that
Neanderthals bodies found a way to utilize more protein, developing enlarged livers and
kidneys, and chests and pelvises that widened over the millennia to accommodate these
beefed-up organs.
For confirmation of his theory, Ben-Dor looks to todays Inuit peoples, who live in northern
climes, subsist at times on an all-meat diet and have larger livers and kidneys and longer ribs
than average Europeans.
To cope with the fat famine, Neanderthals probably also specialized in hunting gigantic
animals like mammoths, which retain fat longer in poor conditions, and require greater
strength but less energy and speed to kill. (Mammoths dont run away, and you only have to
kill one to feast for months.)
But as these mega-beasts vanished, the burly Neanderthals likely struggled to chase down
smaller, swifter prey. Meanwhile, humans, with our narrow pelvises and agile forms,
scampered into the future.

The Most Treacherous Battle of World War I Took Place in the Italian Mountains
Even amid the carnage of the war, the battle in the Dolomites was like nothing the
world had ever seenor has seen since
Just after dawn we slipped into the forest and hiked a steep trail to a limestone wall. A curious
ladder of U-shaped steel rungs was fixed to the rock. To reach the battlefield we would trek
several miles along this via ferrata, or iron road, pathways of cables and ladders that traverse
some of the most stunning and otherwise inaccessible territory in the mountains of northern
Italy. We scaled the 50 feet of steel rungs, stopping every ten feet or so to clip our safety
tethers to metal cables that run alongside.
A half-hour in, our faces slick with sweat, we rested on an outcropping that overlooked a
valley carpeted with thick stands of pine and fir. Sheep bleated in a meadow, and a shepherd
called to them. We could see the Pasubio Ossuary, a stone tower that holds the remains of
5,000 Italian and Austrian soldiers who fought in these mountains in World War I. The previous

night we had slept near the ossuary, along a country road where cowbells clanged softly and
lightning bugs blinked in the darkness like muzzle flashes.
Joshua Brandon gazed at the surrounding peaks and took a swig of water. Were in one of the
most beautiful places in the world, he said, and one of the most horrible.
In the spring of 1916, the Austrians swept down through these mountains. Had they reached
the Venetian plain, they could have marched on Venice and encircled much of the Italian
Army, breaking what had been a bloody yearlong stalemate. But the Italians stopped them
here.
Just below us a narrow road skirted the mountainside, the Italians Road of 52 Tunnels, a fourmile donkey path, a third of which runs inside the mountains, built by 600 workers over ten
months in 1917.
A beautiful piece of engineering, but what a wasteful need, said Chris Simmons, the third
member of our group. Joshua grunted. Just to pump a bunch of men up a hill to get
slaughtered.
For the next two hours our trail alternated between heady climbing on rock faces and mellow
hiking along the mountain ridge. By mid-morning the fog and low clouds had cleared, and
before us lay the battlefield, its slopes scored with trenches and stone shelters, the summits
laced with tunnels where men lived like moles. We had all served in the military, Chris as a
Navy corpsman attached to the Marine Corps, and Joshua and I with the Army infantry. Both
Joshua and I had fought in Iraq, but we had never known war like this.
Our path joined the main road, and we hiked through a bucolic scene, blue skies and grassy
fields, quiet save for the sheep and the birds. Two young chamois scampered onto a boulder
and watched us. What this had once been strained the imagination: the road crowded with
men and animals and wagons, the air rank with filth and death, the din of explosions and
gunfire.
Think of how many soldiers walked the same steps were walking and had to be carried out,
Joshua said. We passed a hillside cemetery framed by a low stone wall and overgrown with tall
grass and wildflowers. Most of its occupants had reached the battlefield in July of 1916 and
died over the following weeks. They at least had been recovered; hundreds more still rest
where they fell, others blown to pieces and never recovered.
On a steep slope not far from here, an archaeologist named Franco Nicolis helped excavate
the remains of three Italian soldiers found in 2011. Italian troops from the bottom of the
valley were trying to conquer the top, he had told us at his office in Trento, which belonged
to Austria-Hungary before the war and to Italy afterward. These soldiers climbed up to the
trench, and they were waiting for dawn. They already had their sunglasses, because they
were attacking to the east.
The sun rose, and the Austrians spotted and killed them.
In the official documents, the meaning is, Attack failed. Nothing more. This is the official
truth. But there is another truth, that three young Italian soldiers died in this context, Nicolis
said. For us, its a historical event. But for them, how did they think about their position?
When a soldier took the train to the front, was he thinking, Oh my God, Im going to the front
of the First World War, the biggest event ever? No, he was thinking, This is my life.
As Joshua, Chris and I walked through the saddle between the Austrian and Italian positions,
Chris spotted something odd nestled in the loose rocks. For nearly two decades he has worked

as a professional climbing and skiing guide, and years of studying the landscape as he hikes
has honed his eye for detail. In previous days he found a machine gun bullet, a steel ball from
a mortar shell and a jagged strip of shrapnel. Now he squatted in the gravel and gently picked
up a thin white wedge an inch wide and long as a finger. He cradled it in his palm, unsure
what to do with this piece of skull.
The Italians came late to the war. In the spring of 1915, they abandoned their alliance with
Austria-Hungary and Germany to join the United Kingdom, France and Russia, hoping for
several chunks of Austria at the wars end. An estimated 600,000 Italians and 400,000
Austrians would die on the Italian Front, many of them in a dozen battles along the Isonzo
River in the far northeast. But the front zigzagged 400 milesnearly as long as the Western
Front, in France and Belgiumand much of that crossed rugged mountains, where the fighting
was like none the world had ever seen, or has seen since.
Soldiers had long manned alpine frontiers to secure borders or marched through high passes
en route to invasion. But never had the mountains themselves been the battlefield, and for
fighting at this scale, with fearsome weapons and physical feats that would humble many
mountaineers. As New York World correspondent E. Alexander Powell wrote in 1917: On no
front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the frozen Mazurian marshes, nor
in the blood-soaked mud of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so arduous an existence as
up here on the roof of the world.
The destruction of World War I overwhelms. Nine million dead. Twenty-one million wounded.
The massive frontal assaults, the anonymous soldier, faceless deathagainst this backdrop,
the mountain war in Italy was a battle of small units, of individuals. In subzero temperatures
men dug miles of tunnels and caverns through glacial ice. They strung cableways up
mountainsides and stitched rock faces with rope ladders to move soldiers onto the high
peaks, then hauled up an arsenal of industrial warfare: heavy artillery and mortars, machine
guns, poison gas and flamethrowers. And they used the terrain itself as a weapon, rolling
boulders to crush attackers and sawing through snow cornices with ropes to trigger
avalanches. Storms, rock slides and natural avalanchesthe white deathkilled plenty
more. After heavy snowfalls in December of 1916, avalanches buried 10,000 Italian and
Austrian troops over just two days.
Yet the Italian mountain war remains today one of the least-known battlefields of the Great
War.
Most people have no idea what happened here, Joshua said one afternoon as we sat atop an
old bunker on a mountainside. Until recently, that included him as well. The little he knew
came from Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms, and later reading Erwin Rommel, the
famed Desert Fox of World War II, who had fought in the Italian Alps as a young officer in
World War I.
Joshua, who is 38, studied history at the Citadel and understands the theory of war, but he
also served three tours in Iraq. He wears a beard now, trimmed short and speckled with gray,
and his 5-foot-9 frame is wiry, better for hauling himself up steep cliffs and trekking through
the wilderness. In Iraq he had bulked to nearly 200 pounds, thick muscle for sprinting down
alleyways, carrying wounded comrades and, on one afternoon, fighting hand-to-hand. He
excelled in battle, for which he was awarded the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars with Valor.
But he struggled at home, feeling both alienated from American society and mentally wrung
out from combat. In 2012 he left the Army as a major and sought solace in the outdoors. He
found that rock climbing and mountaineering brought him peace and perspective even as it
mimicked the best parts of his military career: some risk, trusting others with his life, a shared
sense of mission.

Once he understood the skill needed to travel and survive in mountains, he looked at the
alpine war in Italy with fresh eyes. How, he wondered, had the Italians and Austrians lived and
fought in such unforgiving terrain?
Chris, who is 43, met Joshua four years ago at a rock gym in Washington State, where they
both live, and now climb together often. I met Joshua three years ago at an ice-climbing event
in Montana and Chris a year later on a climbing trip in the Cascade Mountains. Our shared
military experience and love of the mountains led us to explore these remote battlefields, like
touring Gettysburg if it sat atop a jagged peak at 10,000 feet. You cant get to many of these
fighting positions without using the skills of a climber, Joshua said, and that allows you to
have an intimacy that you might not otherwise.
The Italian Front
Italy entered World War I in May 1915, turning on its ex-ally Austria-Hungary. The fighting
soon devolved into trench warfare in the northeast and alpine combat in the north. Hover
over the icons below for information on major battles.
If the Italian Front is largely forgotten elsewhere, the war is ever-present across northern Italy,
etched into the land. The mountains and valleys are lined with trenches and dotted with stone
fortresses. Rusted strands of barbed wire sprout from the earth, crosses built from battlefield
detritus rise from mountaintops, and piazza monuments celebrate the heroes and the dead.
We are living together with our deep history, Nicolis, the researcher, told us. The war is still
in our lives. Between climbs to isolated battlefields, we had stopped in Trento to meet with
Nicolis, who directs the Archaeological Heritage Office for Trentino Province. We had spent
weeks before our trip reading histories of the war in Italy and had brought a stack of maps
and guidebooks; we knew what had happened and where, but from Nicolis we sought more on
who and why. He is a leading voice in what he calls grandfather archaeology, a
consideration of history and memory told in family lore. His grandfather fought for Italy, his
wifes grandfather for Austria-Hungary, a common story in this region.
Nicolis, who is 59, specialized in prehistory until he found World War I artifacts while
excavating a Bronze Age smelting site on an alpine plateau a decade ago. Ancient and
modern, side by side. This was the first step, he said. I began to think about archaeology
as a discipline of the very recent past.
By the time he broadened his focus, many World War I sites had been picked over for scrap
metal or souvenirs. The scavenging continuestreasure hunters recently used a helicopter to
hoist a cannon from a mountaintopand climate change has hastened the revelation of what
remains, including bodies long buried in ice on the highest battlefields.
On the Presena Glacier, Nicolis helped recover the bodies of two Austrian soldiers discovered
in 2012. They had been buried in a crevasse, but the glacier was 150 feet higher a century
ago; as it shrank, the men emerged from the ice, bones inside tattered uniforms. The two
skulls, both found amid blond hair, had shrapnel holes, the metal still rattling around inside.
One of the skulls had eyes as well. It was as if he was looking at me and not vice versa,
Nicolis said. I was thinking about their families, their mothers. Goodbye my son. Please come
back soon. And they completely disappeared, as if they never existed. These are what I call
the silent witnesses, the missing witnesses.
At an Austrian position in a tunnel on Punta Linke, at nearly 12,000 feet, Nicolis and his
colleagues chipped away and melted the ice, finding, among other artifacts, a wooden bucket
filled with sauerkraut, an unsent letter, newspaper clippings and a pile of straw overshoes,

woven in Austria by Russian prisoners to shield soldiers feet from the bitter cold. The team of
historians, mountaineers and archaeologists restored the site to what it might have been a
century ago, a sort of living history for those who make the long journey by cable car and a
steep hike.
We cannot just speak and write as archaeologists, Nicolis said. We have to use other
languages: narrative, poetry, dance, art. On the curved white walls of the Museum of Modern
and Contemporary Art in Rovereto, battlefield artifacts found by Nicolis and his colleagues
were presented without explanation, a cause for contemplation. Helmets and crampons, mess
kits, hand grenades and pieces of clothing hang in vertical rows of five items, each row set
above a pair of empty straw overshoes. The effect was stark and haunting, a soldier
deconstructed. When I saw the final version, Nicolis told us, I said, Oh my God, this
means I am present. Here I am. This is a person.

When Joshua stood before the exhibit, he thought of his own dead, friends and soldiers whod
served under him, each memorialized at ceremonies with a battle cross: a rifle with bayonet
struck in the ground muzzle-down between empty combat boots, a helmet atop the rifle butt.
Artifacts
over
empty
shoes. I
am
present.
Here
I
am.

The sky threatened rain, and low clouds wrapped us in a chilly haze. I stood with Joshua on a
table-size patch of level rock, halfway up a 1,800-foot face on Tofana di Rozes, an enormous
gray massif near the Austrian border. Below us a wide valley stretched to a dozen more steep
peaks. We had been on the wall six hours already, and we had another six to go.
As Chris climbed 100 feet overhead, a golf ball-size chunk of rock popped loose and zinged
past us with a high-pitched whir like whizzing shrapnel. Joshua and I traded glances and
chuckled.
The Tofana di Rozes towers over a 700-foot-tall blade of rock called the Castelletto, or Little
Castle. In 1915 a single platoon of Germans occupied the Castelletto, and with a machine gun
they had littered the valley with dead Italians. The result was startling: In all directions
wounded horses racing, people running from the forest, frightened to death, a soldier named
Gunther Langes recalled of one attack. The sharpshooters caught them with their rifle
scopes, and their bullets did a great job. So an Italian camp bled to death at the foot of the
mountain. More and better-armed Austrians replaced the Germans, cutting off a major
potential supply route and muddling Italian plans to push north into Austria-Hungary.
Conquering the Castelletto fell to the Alpini, Italys mountain troops, known by their dashing
felt hats adorned with a black raven feather. One thought was that if they could climb the
Tofanas face to a small ledge hundreds of feet above the Austrians stronghold, they could
hoist up a machine gun, even a small artillery piece, and fire down on them. But the route
steep, slick with runoff and exposed to enemy firewas beyond the skill of most. The
assignment went to Ugo Vallepiana and Giuseppe Gaspard, two Alpini with a history of daring
climbs together. Starting in a deep alcove, out of Austrian view, they worked up the Tofana di
Rozes, wearing hemp-soled shoes that offered better traction than their hobnailed boots and
dampened the sounds of their movements.
We were climbing a route not far from theirs, with Chris and Joshua alternating the lead. One
would climb up about 100 feet, and along the way slide special cams into cracks and nooks,
then clip the protective gear to the rope with a carabiner, a metal loop with a spring-loaded
arm. In other places, they clipped the rope to a piton, a steel wedge with an open circle at the
end pounded into the rock by previous climbers. If they slipped, they might drop 20 feet
instead of hundreds, and the climbing rope would stretch to absorb a fall.

Vallepiana and Gaspard had none of this specialized equipment. Even the carabiner, a
climbing essential invented shortly before the war, was unknown to most soldiers. Instead,
Gaspard used a technique that makes my stomach quiver: Each time he hammered in a piton,
he untied the rope from around his waist, threaded it through the metal loop, and retied it.
And their hemp ropes could just as easily snap as catch a fall.
As we neared the top of our climb, I hoisted myself onto a four-foot lip and passed through a
narrow chute to another ledge. Joshua, farther ahead and out of sight, had anchored himself
to a rock and pulled in my rope as I moved. Chris was 12 feet behind me, and still on a lower
level, exposed from the chest up.
I stepped onto the ledge and felt it give way.
Rock! I shouted, and snapped my head to see my formerly solid step now broken free and
cleaved in two, crashing down the chute. One piece smashed into the wall and stopped, but
the other half, maybe 150 pounds and big as a carry-on suitcase, plowed toward Chris. He
threw out his hands and stopped the rock with a grunt and a wince.
I scrambled down the chute, braced my feet on either side of the rock and held it in place as
Chris climbed past me. I let go, and the chunk tumbled down the mountainside. A strong whiff
of ozone from the fractured rocks hung in the air. He made a fist and released his fingers.
Nothing broken.
My poorly placed step could have injured or killed him. But I imagine the two Alpini would
have thought our near-miss trivial. On a later climbing mission with Vallepiana, Gaspard was
struck by lightning and nearly died. This climb almost killed him, too. As he strained for a
handhold at a tricky section, his foot slipped and he plummeted 60 feetinto a small
snowbank, remarkable luck in vertical terrain. He climbed on, and into the Austrians view. A
sniper shot him in the arm, and Austrian artillery across the valley fired shells into the
mountain overhead, showering him and Vallepiana with jagged metal shards and shattered
rock.
Still, the two reached the narrow ledge that overlooked the Austrians, a feat that earned them
Italys second-highest medal for valor. Then, in what certainly seems an anticlimax today, the
guns the Italians hauled up there proved less effective than they had hoped.
But the Italians main effort was even more daring and difficult, as we would soon see.
In a region of magnificent peaks, the Castelletto is not much to behold. The squat trapezoid
juts up 700 feet to a line of sharp spires, but is dwarfed by the Tofana di Rozes, which rises an
additional 1,100 feet just behind it. During our climb high on the Tofana wall we couldnt see
the Castelletto, but now it loomed before us. We sat in an old Italian trench built from
limestone blocks in the Costeana Valley, which runs west from the mountain town of Cortina
dAmpezzo. If we strained our eyes, we could see tiny holes just below the Castellettos spine
windows for caverns the Austrians and Germans carved soon after Italy declared war in
1915.
From these tunnels and rooms, which offered excellent protection from artillery fire, their
machine gunners cut down anyone who showed himself in this valley. You can imagine why
this was such a nightmare for the Italians, Joshua said, looking up at the fortress. In the
struggle for the Castelletto we found in microcosm the savagery and intimacy, the ingenuity
and futility of this alpine fighting.
The Italians first tried to climb it. On a summer night in 1915, four Alpini started up the steep
face, difficult in daylight, surely terrifying at night. Lookouts perched on the rocky spires heard
muffled sounds in the darkness below and stepped to the edge, eyes and ears straining.

Again, sounds of movement, metal scraping against rock and labored breathing. A sentry
leveled his rifle and, as the lead climber crested the face and pulled himself up, fired. The
men were so close the muzzle flash lit the Italians face as he pitched backward. Thumps as
he crashed into the climbers below him, then screams. In the morning the soldiers looked
down on four crumpled bodies sprawled on the slope far below.
The Italians next tried the steep and rocky gully between the Castelletto and the Tofana, using
a morning fog as cover. But the fog thinned enough to reveal specters advancing through the
mist, and machine gunners annihilated them. In the autumn of 1915 they attacked from three
sides with hundreds of mensurely they could overwhelm a platoon of defendersbut the
slopes only piled deeper with dead.
The Alpini reconsidered: If they couldnt storm the Castelletto, maybe they could attack from
within.
Just around the corner from the Castelletto and beyond the Austrians field of view, Joshua,
Chris and I scaled 50 feet of metal rungs running beside the original wooden ladders, now
broken and rotting. At an alcove on the Tofana wall, we found the tunnel opening, six feet
wide and six feet high, and the darkness swallowed our headlamp beams. The path gains
hundreds of feet as it climbs through the mountain, steep and treacherous on rock made
slimy with water and mud. Fortunately for us, its now a via ferrata. We clipped our safety
harnesses onto metal rods and cables fixed to the walls after the war.
The Alpini started with hammers and chisels in February of 1916 and pecked out just a few
feet a day. In March they acquired two pneumatic drills driven by gas-powered compressors,
hauled up the valley in pieces through the deep snow. Four teams of 25 to 30 men worked in
continuous six-hour shifts, drilling, blasting and hauling rock, extending the tunnel by 15 to 30
feet each day. It would eventually stretch more than 1,500 feet.
The mountain shuddered with internal explosions, sometimes 60 or more a day, and as the
ground shook beneath them the Austrians debated the Italians intent. Perhaps they would
burst through the Tofana wall and attack across the rocky saddle. Or emerge from below,
another suggested. One night, when were sleeping, they will jump out of their hole and cut
our throats, he said. The third theory, to which the men soon resigned themselves, was the
most distressing: The Italians would fill the tunnel with explosives.
Indeed, deep in the mountain and halfway to the Castelletto, the tunnel split. One branch
burrowed beneath the Austrian positions, where an enormous bomb would be placed. The
other tunnel spiraled higher, and would open on the Tofana face, at what the Italians figured
would be the bomb craters edge. After the blast, Alpini would pour through the tunnel and
across the crater. Dozens would descend rope ladders from positions high on the Tofana wall,
and scores more would charge up the steep gully. Within minutes of the blast, they would
finally control the Castelletto.
The Austrian platoon commander, Hans Schneeberger, was 19 years old. He arrived on the
Castelletto after an Italian sniper killed his predecessor. I would gladly have sent someone
else, Capt. Carl von Rasch told him, but you are the youngest, and you have no family. This
was not a mission from which Schneeberger, or his men, were expected to return.
Its better that you know how things stand up here: They do not go well at all, von Rasch
said during a late-night visit to the outpost. The Castelletto is in an impossible situation.
Nearly surrounded, under incessant artillery bombardment and sniper fire, with too few men
and food running low. Throughout the valley, the Italians outnumbered the Austrians two to
one; around the Castelletto it was perhaps 10 or 20 to one. If you do not die from hunger or
cold, von Rasch said, then someday soon you will be blown into the air. Yet Schneeberger

and his few men played a strategic role: By tying up hundreds of Italians, they could ease
pressure elsewhere on the front.
The Castelletto must be held. It will be held to the death, von Rasch told him. You must
stay up here.
In June, Schneeberger led a patrol onto the face of the Tofana di Rozes to knock out an Italian
fighting position and, if possible, to sabotage the tunneling operation. After precarious
climbing, he pulled himself onto a narrow lip, pitched an Alpini over the edge and stormed into
an outpost on the cliffside, where a trapdoor led to Italian positions below. His trusted
sergeant, Teschner, nodded at the floor and smiled. He could hear Alpini climbing up rope
ladders to attack.
A few days earlier, a half-dozen Austrians standing guard on the Tofana wall had started
chatting with nearby Alpini, which led to a night of shared wine. Teschner did not share this
affinity for the Alpini. One Sunday morning, when singing echoed off the rock walls from the
Italians holding Mass below, he had rolled heavy spherical bombs down the gully between the
Castelletto and the Tofana to interrupt the service.
Now in the small shack he drew his bayonet, threw open the trapdoor and shouted, Welcome
to heaven, dogs! as he sliced through the rope ladders. The Alpini screamed, and Teschner
laughed and slapped his thigh.
The attack earned Schneeberger Austria-Hungarys highest medal for bravery, but he and his
men learned nothing new about the tunneling, or how to stop it. Between daily skirmishes
with Italian sentries, they pondered everything they would missa womans love, adventures
in far-off lands, even lying bare-chested in the sun atop the Castelletto and daydreaming
about a life after the war. Yet the explosions provided an odd comfort: As long as the Italians
drilled and blasted, the mine wasnt finished.
Then the Austrians intercepted a transmission: The tunnel is ready. Everything is perfect.
With the mountain silent and the blast imminent, Schneeberger lay on his bunk and listened
to mice skitter across the floor. Strange, everyone knows that sooner or later he will have to
die, and one hardly thinks about it, he wrote. But when death is certain, and one even
knows the deadline, it eclipses everything: every thought and feeling.
He gathered his men and asked if any wanted to leave. None stepped forward. Not
Latschneider, the platoons oldest at 52, or Aschenbrenner, with eight children at home. And
their wait began.
Everything is like yesterday, Schneeberger wrote on July 10, except that another 24 hours
have passed and we are 24 hours closer to death.
Lt. Luigi Malvezzi, who led the tunnel digging, had asked for 77,000 pounds of blasting gelatin
nearly half of Italys monthly production. High command balked at the request, but was
swayed by a frustrating detail: The Italians had pounded the Castelletto with artillery for
nearly a year, to little effect. So for three days, Italian soldiers had ferried crates of explosives
up the tunnel to the mine chamber, 16 feet wide, 16 feet long, and nearly 7 feet high.
Through fissures in the rock, they could smell the Austrians cooking. They packed the
chamber full, then backfilled 110 feet of the tunnel with sandbags, concrete and timber to
direct the blast upward with full force.
At 3:30 a.m. on July 11, as Hans Schneeberger lay on his bunk mourning a friend whod just
been killed by a snipers bullet, Malvezzi gathered with his men on the terrace leading to the

tunnel and flipped the detonator switch. One, two, three seconds passed in a silence so
intense that I heard the sharp ping of the water dripping from the roof of the chamber and
striking the pool it had formed below, Malvezzi wrote.
Then the mountain roared, the air filled with choking dust, and Schneebergers head seemed
ready to burst. The blast pitched him out of bed, and he stumbled from his room and into a
fog of smoke and debris and stood at the lip of a massive crater that had been the southern
end of the Castelletto. In the darkness and rubble, his men screamed.
The fight for this wedge of rock had gained such prominence for Italy that King Victor
Emmanuel III and Gen. Luigi Cadorna, the army chief of staff, watched from a nearby
mountain. A fountain of flame erupted in the darkness, the right-hand side of the Castelletto
shuddered and collapsed, and they cheered their success.
But the attack proved to be a fiasco. The explosion consumed much of the nearby oxygen,
replacing it with carbon monoxide and other toxic gases that swamped the crater and pushed
into the tunnel. Malvezzi and his men charged through the tunnel to the crater and collapsed,
unconscious. Several fell dead.
Alpini waiting high on the Tofana wall couldnt descend because the explosion had shredded
their rope ladders. And in the steep gully between the Castelletto and the Tofana, the blast
fractured the rock face. For hours afterward huge boulders peeled off like flaking plaster and
crashed down the gully, crushing attacking soldiers and sending the rest scurrying for cover.
We traced the Alpinis route through the tunnel, running our hands along walls slick with
seeping water and scarred with grooves from the tunnelers drill bits. We passed the tunnel
branch to the mine chamber and spiraled higher into the mountain, clipping our safety tethers
to metal cables bolted to the walls.
Around a sharp bend, the darkness gave way. Along with the main detonation, the Italians
triggered a small charge that blasted open the final few feet of this attack tunnel, until then
kept secret from the Austrians. Now Joshua stepped from the tunnel, squinted in the daylight,
and looked down on what had been the southern end of the Castelletto. He shook his head in
awe.
So this is what happens when you detonate 35 tons of explosives under a bunch of
Austrians, he said. Joshua had been near more explosions than he can rememberhand
grenades, rockets, roadside bombs. In Iraq a suicide car bomber rammed into his outpost as
he slept, and the blast threw him from his bed, just as it had Schneeberger. But that was
nowhere near the violence and landscape-altering force of this explosion, he said.
We scrambled down a steep gravel slope and onto a wide snowfield at the craters bottom.
The blast had pulverized enough mountain to fill a thousand dump trucks and tossed boulders
across the valley. It killed 20 Austrians asleep in a shack above the mine and buried the
machine guns and mortars.
It spared Schneeberger and a handful of his men. They scrounged a dozen rifles, 360 bullets
and a few grenades, and from the craters edge and the intact outposts, started picking off
Italians again.
Imagine losing half your platoon instantly and having that will to push on and defend what
youve got, Joshua said. Just a few men holding off an entire battalion trying to assault up
through here. Its madness.

I felt a strange pulse of anticipation as we climbed out of the crater and onto the Castelletto.
At last, the battles culmination. Chris disappeared in the jumble of rock above us. A few
minutes later he let out a happy yelp: Hed found an entrance to the Austrian positions.
We ducked our heads and stepped into a cavern that ran 100 feet through the Castellettos
narrow spine. Water dripped from the ceiling and pooled in icy puddles. Small rooms branched
off the main tunnel, some with old wooden bunks. Windows looked out on the valley far below
and peaks in the distance.
Such beauty was hard to reconcile with what happened a century ago. Chris had pondered
this often throughout the week. You just stop and appreciate where youre at for the
moment, he said. And I wonder if they had those moments, too. Or if it was all terror, all the
time. Emotion choked his voice. When we look across its green and verdant. But when they
were there, it was barbed wire and trenches and artillery shells screaming around. Did they
get to have a moment of peace?
Joshua felt himself pulled deeply into the combatants world, and this startled him. I have
more in common with these Austrians and Italians who are buried under my feet than I do
with a lot of contemporary society, he said. Theres this bond of being a soldier and going
through combat, he said. The hardship. The fear. Youre just fighting for survival, or fighting
for the people around you, and that transcends time.
The Austrians and Italians losses and gains in these mountains made little difference. The
alpine war was a sideshow to the fighting on the Isonzo, which was a sideshow to the Western
and Eastern Fronts. But for the soldier, of course, all that matters is the patch of ground that
must be taken or held, and whether he lives or dies in doing that.
The day after the blast, the Italians hoisted machine guns onto the Tofana and raked the
Castelletto, killing more Austrians. The rest scurried into the tunnels where we now sat.
Schneeberger scribbled a note on his situation33 dead, position nearly destroyed,
reinforcements badly neededand handed it to Latschneider.
You only die once, the platoons old man said, then crossed himself and sprinted down the
wide scree slope between the Castelletto and the Tofana, chased by machine gun bullets. He
ran across the valley, delivered the note to Captain von Raschand dropped dead from the
effort.
Reinforcements came that night, and Schneeberger marched his few surviving men back to
the Austrian lines. The Italians charged through the crater a few hours later, lobbed tear gas
into the tunnels and captured the southern end of the Castelletto and most of the relief
platoon. A few Austrians held the northern end for several days, then withdrew.
In the Austrian camp, Schneeberger reported to von Rasch, who stood at his window with
stooped shoulders and wet eyes, hands clasped behind his back.
It was very hard? he asked.

Sir, Schneeberger said.

Poor, poor boy.