"Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are mad!" - A French lieutenant at Verdun, who would be killed by a shell.
The war in Europe began as a battle between infantry and cavalry, like in old times, and was believed to be quickly over. However, new weapons, like the machine-gun or heavy artillery, made direct attacks almost impossible as soldiers were killed in their thousands. The war quickly became a war of attrition as both sides dug in in a network of trenches and tunnels separated by the “No Man’s Land.”
Front-line trenches, built in a zig-zag to minimize the effect of an explosion in the trench, provided protection against gunfire, but not a direct hit from an artillery shell. Behind the front-line, trenches allowed movements of troops and transport of supplies, with bunkers located in deep dug-outs, 50 feet below ground. Digging trenches and tunnels posed also a problem to the soldiers depending on the encountered rock types.
Along the Western Front in France and Belgium the underground consists of a succession of limestone, mudrock and marlstone. In Ypres and along the River Somme, the ground consists of fine-grained sediments deposited in the sea some 23 million years ago. A short shower of rain and the trenches were full of water, the sides of the trenches were falling in because they were made of little more than clay. During the great battle of Verdun, the troops were ordered to intrench itself on the high plateau of the Còtes de Meuse. Unfortunately, the plateau was underlain by hard limestone and the soldiers were unable to dig trenches there and many lives were lost.
In Verdun alone more than 600,000 soldiers were killed in the summer of 1916. Estimated 60 million rounds were fired on the battlefield, as the Austria-Hungarian troops tried to overrun the French defense positions. The explosions destroyed the local vegetation, reshaped and lowered the landscape, remixed the soil-layers and fractured the underlying bedrock. The effects are still visible today, almost 100 years after the war ended.
Geographers Joseph P. Hupy and Randall J. Schaetzl visited the former battlefields in France to investigate how the great war modified the landscape. When an average WWI grenade exploded, it excavated a crater 40-80 inches deep. However, large mines excavated craters 600 inches in diameter with a depth exceeding 400 inches. The explosion fractured the shallow bedrock and redeposited soil and rock fragments on the outer rim of the crater, forming lenses of gravel-ejecta. With time, the craters filled with new fine-grained clay and litter from the slowly returning vegetation. The two researchers observed also an increased earthworm activity inside the craters. The earthworms and the decaying plants release organic acids, accelerating the chemical weathering of the limestone. Many bomb craters filled also with water, forming shallow ponds. The two researchers, noting that since WWI the use of bombs and explosives by humans is a significant factor in shaping Earth's surface, named the erosion effect by human warfare "Bombturbation."
In 1915 the Dolomites became also a war zone as the kingdom of Italy declared war on the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The Austrian military high command feared that bypassing the Alps the Italian army could march against the city of Vienna, so it was decided to fortify the most important routes and mountain passes in the region. One of these strategic locations was the Falzarego Pass, connecting the Valle del Boite with various other valleys of the Dolomites. This pass is overlooked by the nearly vertical cliffs of the small Lagazuoi, a 2,300 feet high mountain.
There was no experience with combat in such the alpine environment. It was almost impossible to attack the enemy, taking shelter on the mountains. Italy and the Austria-Hungarian empire were deadlocked among the Dolomites, neither side able to dislodge their enemy. Regular forces dig in and reinforced their positions. The military tried to solve this problem with tactics first successfully adopted in the plains of France. Tunnel warfare involves the construction of long tunnels under the enemy's lines, large quantities of explosives are then detonated to form a breach in the enemy's front line. Austrian and Italian forces also detonated mines to purposely release rock avalanches, killing hundreds of enemy soldiers. From 1915 to 1917, when the war in the Dolomites ended, more than thirty-four such operation were attempted, twenty by the Italian army and fourteen by the Austrian army.
In 1917, shortly before detonating a mine, the Italian soldier Luigi Panicalli wrote, “I realize that in just some moments, the results of all these months, in which we worked and suffered, will become visible. I’m like petrified. In the last moments my thoughts are by the enemy – poor guys – do they feel death approaching? Do they know, that the enemy is inside the mountain, ready to blast them from the mountain down into their graves?“
