Only about one-third of the 150,000 men who died on the Alpine front were victims of battle; the rest were killed by avalanches, landslides, frostbite, and illnesses caused by the extreme cold.
Working in brutal conditions, Italians and Austro-Hungarians alike levelled peaks, opened roads, dug tunnels, built cableways, laid telephone lines, and transported tons of material to lofty heights—for combat, but also for the everyday needs of the thousands of soldiers who were living year-round at altitudes where only shepherds, wild herb hunters, and mountain climbers had ever ventured. The Italian and Austrian armies built bunkers, entire shack villages, though officers generally lived in old mountain refuges. On the Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Dolomites, the Austrian Corps of Engineers built an entire
“ice city”—a complex of tunnels, dormitories, and storerooms dug out of the bowels of the glacier.