The Battle of Kobarid: The Isonzo Front, 1917
1917 · event
Before dawn on 24 October 1917 an artillery and gas bombardment opened along the upper valley of the Soca river near the town of Kobarid, in what is now western Slovenia. Austro Hungarian and German troops attacked using new infiltration tactics, moving quickly past strong points instead of assaulting them, and the Italian front line broke. Within days the Italian army had fallen back around a hundred kilometres to the river Piave, and the battle entered several languages as a word for sudden collapse.
Kobarid was the twelfth battle fought on this front since 1915. The Soca valley, called Isonzo in Italian, is a place of turquoise water and steep limestone ridges, and for two and a half years the armies had fought over those ridges at a cost of well over a million dead, wounded and missing on both sides. Soldiers came from every corner of the Habsburg empire and from all of Italy, and Slovenian villages along the valley were emptied of their people.
The retreat cost Italy enormous losses in prisoners and equipment, brought down the government and the high command, and led to the defensive line on the Piave that held until the end of the war. Among the foreigners serving as volunteers with the ambulance services was the young Ernest Hemingway, whose novel A Farewell to Arms carried the retreat into world literature.
The valley today is a place of remembrance rather than triumph. Ossuaries hold the bones of thousands whose names are unknown, the museum in Kobarid has been honoured for the way it presents the war from every side, and a marked route called the Walk of Peace runs from the Alps to the Adriatic along the old front. Farmers in the hills still turn up wire, shell fragments and the occasional identity tag.