Slovenia Will Make You Remember
I reached Kobarid — Caporetto in Italian — almost a hundred years to the day after the battle. It’s beautiful country. Tall mountains rise on either side of the bright blue waters of the Soca river, which the Italians call the Isonzo. A perfect autumn day, bright and warm, the leaves glowing gold as they fell, dry and rattling, from the trees.
On a lonely mountain road, I stopped my rented car to watch the sun gild the mountains as it guttered like a failing candle into twilight. Across the fields, the chiming of cowbells drifted through the still air. The herds were heading home. The white spire of the village church caught the last of the light before the white-veined mountains cut it off.
Molto bella, no? One more picture to store on my hard drive. But for some men, it was the last thing they ever saw.
War tourism. Doesn’t sound right, does it? It doesn’t always feel right, either. But I’m interested in history, and much of human history is very, very dark. In fact — and this may be a flaw in our species, or maybe it’s a flaw in me — the darkest chapters are often the most interesting.
The First World War is difficult. No longer within living memory, it remains far less understood than the Second. It’s further from us in time, a relic of a different world. And while it had its share of fascinating personalities, they hardly compare to the likes of Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and FDR. But most of all, the First World War is less popular today because it lacks the clear moral lines of the Second. World War Two was one of the rare occasions where real life had good guys and bad guys. And even rarer, the bad guys lost. Admittedly, it would be a stretch to call the Allies genuinely good, but there’s no doubt that Nazism was a great evil. Compared to Hitler, even a monster like Stalin comes off looking good.
World War One is not so easy. Kaiser Wilhelm may have been a pompous and belligerent ass, but so were most other monarchs of his day. Britain fought not to protect neutral Belgium, but to preserve its naval supremacy, so crucial to its international empire. Russia was a corrupt and horribly unequal society, rotten to its core. But Tsar Nicholas cuts a tragic figure in light of what happened to him and the family he doted on. And the American involvement, at a stage when the conflict was so far advanced, can seem more motivated by opportunism than any moral convictions.
Even by the standards of World War One, the Italian Front is often forgotten. The overriding image of the war — for English speakers, at least — is the mud and blood of trench warfare, in Flanders, at Ypres and the Somme, at Passchendaele, at Verdun. We hear far less about the conflict between Italy and Austria-Hungary in the mountains along their borders. Everything that makes the First World War less popular than the second goes double here. On one side, we have the crumbling Hapsburg empire that started the war and then fought it so ineptly. On the other, we have the new nation of Italy, bound by treaty to help Germany and Austria, yet taking up arms against them for purely cynical reasons.
It’s not easy to pick a side here, if you’re the type that needs to do that. But it’s a fascinating chapter of history, for exactly that reason. There’s no easy peg on which to hang your moral judgments. Every man who fought on the Italian Front was fighting for a lost cause, no matter what side he was on. Austria-Hungary didn’t survive the war, but Italy achieved almost none of its aims, either, and instead began the slide into fascism. The Italian Front is messy. No good guys. No bad guys either. No winners, only losers. It’s the entire war in miniature.
Outside of Kobarid, the scars are still there. In the woods at Ravelnik, you can wander through the preserved trenches and into a long cave carved into the hill by Hapsburg troops, and you’ll be entirely alone, except for the dead. A metal detector here could still find ammunition cartridges and shell fragments in the undergrowth just off the narrow trail that winds through the trees. A shovel would turn up foreign bones.
There are more trenches high on the hills at Kolovrat. Here, the trees are few and far between, struggling for thin air on the rocky slopes. A hundred years ago, no trees grew so high. Today’s Italian — Slovenian border runs right along the lines of these trenches, marked only by a low concrete pillar. Industrialized slaughter on a massive scale, for what? Lines on a map, and a border you can now wander across at will.
It isn’t fun, touring these places, despite the natural beauty of this part of Slovenia. It’s sobering. It’s upsetting, sometimes. It’s fascinating. The sacrifices made by these strangers meant something, even if their cause didn’t. It’s the purest luck that you were born in this time, and not theirs, in a country willing to throw away its youth on ignoble ends.
I don’t really believe in progress. The medieval peasant was at least as intelligent as the modern wage-slave, and quite possibly more fulfilled. We’ve known the world was round for millennia, long before Columbus’ voyage. The ancient Greeks had computers. The Babylonians used electricity. The past is a lie. Don’t let them — the advertisers, the propagandists, the cynical cheerleaders of the current order — tell you that people a decade ago were mindless apes, beating one another with rocks over a flyblown antelope carcass. It’s not true.
But in this, at least, we can claim some progress. War goes on. People are dying right now, for reasons as obscure as they are inadequate. But mechanized slaughter on the scale of that of the two World Wars is almost vanished from living memory. That can only be progress.
And now, birds sing over the trenches that still scar the mountains, and the occasional morbid-minded tourist picks his way over the broken ground. I know nothing of war. You could argue that it’s voyeuristic, this interest of mine in the horrors of the past. Certainly, it’s not how most would choose to spend their vacation, which is why A stayed at home for this trip.
But it’s important to remember. It’s important to understand why the world is the way that it is, and how everything that looks so stable and solid can collapse so suddenly. Atrocity begins with ignorance. Don’t forget. Don’t look away. Or else you won’t see it when it comes around again.
This story is published in Writers on the Run. If you’re interested in submitting your travel stories please visit our submission guidelines.
