A good deal of my approach to my project, exploring my own visual responses to Italian experience in the First World War, was encouraged by Mark Thompson’s book The White War. He fixed in my mind, in his account of the war along the alpine frontier between Italy and Austria, pictures of a landscape either deep in winter snow or burning in the glare of sun-drenched, bare limestone. I’m sure there are times when it is like that. (I discovered that in the winter of 1916-7 the alpine troops had to cope with up to 10 metres of snow. Two thirds of all fatalities were as a consequence of avalanches.) My week above the Friulian village of Timau, however, was drenched in rain and swirling mist. They may not have had to cope with Flanders mud, but my word, life in those caves and stone slit trenches must have been dreadful! In places they had to avoid lighting fires so as not to betray their positions to the enemy. They couldn’t even get dry socks …. or worse still, a cup of tea.
The weather, however, was one of the lesser shocks of the trip. I was delighted by the reception I was given by the Museo della Grande Guerra in Timau, who were very helpful indeed. Among their displays, however, I came across a large amount of material relating to the role of women in war. It seems that women from the local villages were recruited as porters, carrying all kinds of necessities up to the troops on the front lines. They carried baskets the size of an expedition rucsac, and I can’t image what these would have weighed when full of ammunition! Sometimes they would do more than one trip a day. We are talking here about steep and rough mountain paths with ascents of around 1,000 m. (I was tired enough after one such trip with no more than a day-sack.) If that were not enough, they often knitted as they walked. The sketches and photos I gathered are certainly going to provide the foundation for at least one of my pictures.
I set out on this project motivated by the realisation that, faced with the standard accounts of that war, “It ain’t necessarily so”. At that time, however, I hadn’t appreciated the degree of “ain’tness” I was going to discover. My photographs have not been edited yet, but I hope to be able to give some flavour of this later.