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The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919. By Mark Thompson. New York: Basic Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-465-01329-6. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 454. $30.00.
As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, with the public gaze of the English speaking world still fixated on the Western Front, every study of less well-known theatres is to be welcomed. Mark Thompsons takes its tide from lines by the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti: 'Snow is truly a sign of mourning . . . white gives me the sense of things ending, the iciness of death.' It also speaks to the physical realities of a war fought along a mountain arc where the defending Austrian armies sat on mountains up to 7,000 metres in height and temperatures sank to -40 or -50 degrees in winter. On the Isonzo, the Austrian general...