Across the Dolomites and the Julians, retreating glaciers have begun to disclose their contents from the conflict a century earlier: rifles, crates of ammunition, unsent love letters, diaries and bodies. Two teenage Austrian soldiers have surfaced from a glacier in Trentino, lying top to toe beside one another, each with a bullet wound to the skull. Three Hapsburg soldiers melted out of an ice wall, hanging upside down near the peak of San Matteo at an altitude of 12,000 feet. The problem is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure . . .
