The Beginning of Futility

"Based on half a century of interviews with surviving veterans, research trips to official archives in Vienna, Rome, London, Paris, and Berlin, many visits to the sites of battle, and a close reading of secondary sources, this work takes the reader on almost a day-by-day journey alongside the Italian peasants in uniform, and their Austrian and German counterparts, who fought and died in the mountains of Northern Italy during the Great War. The author recounts the complicated military events from the perspective of both sides, assessing the strategic and tactical decisions that led to such carnage on this often overlooked front in the war"--Foreword.