Fighting on Monte Grappa in the First World War

Fighting on Monte Grappa in the First World War is remembered in the novel not as an isolated engagement but as one part of the mountain and river front where Richard Cantwell and the Gran Maestro fought as young infantry officers. It binds military experience to private bereavement: Cantwell’s brother died on Grappa in 1918, while Cantwell himself later visited the ossuary where his brother was buried. In retrospect, the fighting belongs to a larger record of hard-won defensive battles, immense losses, and a soldier’s uneasy effort to distinguish necessary skill from the waste of war.

Front and participants

Cantwell describes himself as a boy when he fought in the sector between Cortina and Monte Grappa, where his force held its position against the enemy. He had the responsibilities of an acting captain, although, as he later qualified it, his actual rank was that of a sub-lieutenant. This contrast between youth, limited formal rank, and command responsibility recurs in his account of the war: he was already expected to make decisions and lead men in a campaign whose consequences he would carry into later life.

The fighting on Grappa was part of a broader series of battles remembered alongside Pasubio and the Piave River. Cantwell and the Gran Maestro had served on these three key points, and Cantwell later grouped them as three major battles in which their side had prevailed despite facing odds of roughly three to four against one. He described a year of fighting and more than 140,000 dead across that larger experience. Those figures belong to the combined campaign as he recalls it, not to Monte Grappa alone; his account presents Grappa as one crucial part of a costly front rather than assigning the entire toll to the mountain.

Cantwell’s family losses

For Cantwell, the mountain was also the burial place of a brother killed in 1918. Years later he went from Bassano on an excursion to see the large ossuary where his brother was buried, returning by way of Feltre. The visit made the landscape both a military place and a family memorial: the route over the mountains led not simply through terrain he remembered, but to the burial site of someone he had scarcely known.

His brother had been stirred by hearing Gabriele d’Annunzio speak and volunteered before his class was called. He went to war early and died so quickly that the family never knew him well. The loss was part of a still larger pattern. Cantwell says that six people had made up the family; two were lost beyond the Isonzo River, one at Bainsizza and one on the Carso, before the brother on Grappa was killed. Cantwell remained. The recollection gives the battlefield a stark personal measure: the family’s surviving member remembers the dead not as a single abstraction, but as losses distributed across named fronts.

Enemy, comrades, and military knowledge

Cantwell’s memory of Grappa also includes an enemy he later came to know personally. He recalls fighting Erwin Rommel in the sector between Cortina and Monte Grappa, when Rommel was a captain and Cantwell was serving in an acting-captain’s role. They did not know one another during the fighting. After the war they met, became friendly, and went skiing together. The later friendship does not erase their wartime opposition; instead, it shows how the identities of enemy and companion could change across the boundary of combat.

The Gran Maestro shared Cantwell’s experience as a young infantryman. One had been a sergeant and the other a lieutenant, and both had fought on Pasubio, Grappa, and the Piave. Their shared knowledge included the practical means by which soldiers tried to avoid being sent into attacks, as well as the way commanders had to train men to shoot and face an approaching enemy. The novel presents such knowledge as professional understanding acquired under pressure, but not as a clean or celebratory expertise. Cantwell’s familiarity with what soldiers endured informs the later respect and trust between the two veterans.

The wider campaign and its moral aftermath

Cantwell sets the Grappa fighting within a contrast between battles he considered defensible and earlier episodes he remembered as shameful. He and the Gran Maestro had also fought in the Isonzo and Carso campaigns, which they regarded as stupid butchery ordered by others. Cantwell says he retained the experience technically, as something from which to learn, while refusing to treat those campaigns as honorable achievements. The distinction is central to his retrospective account: military knowledge may be useful, but it cannot by itself make the purpose or cost of a battle justifiable.

That judgment helps explain why the two veterans founded the Order of Brusadelli. Their shared service on Grappa and the other fronts, their knowledge of the methods by which men tried to escape attacks, and their hostility toward those who profited from war became part of the order’s basis. It had only five members. The Grappa experience therefore survives not only in memories of positions held and comrades lost, but in a later fellowship shaped by a distrust of war’s beneficiaries and by the veterans’ understanding of what ordinary soldiers had been asked to bear.

Memory and significance

The novel returns to the mountain through conversation rather than presenting a continuous battlefield narrative. Its history emerges in fragments: Cantwell’s account of his rank and meeting with Rommel, the Gran Maestro’s shared service, and the family journey to the ossuary. This form keeps the campaign connected to its consequences in the present. Grappa is at once a place where a front was held, the site of Cantwell’s brother’s burial, and one part of a larger military record whose victories coexist with an immense toll.

Cantwell’s recollection also resists a simple distinction between heroic victory and meaningless loss. He acknowledges that the veterans won their major battles against heavier numbers, yet places this achievement beside the deaths and the shame he associates with other campaigns. The significance of the fighting lies in that tension: the skill and solidarity formed on the front remain real, but they do not cancel the grief or settle the moral question of what command and combat cost.