Three old friends and assorted family members set off to climb Monte Pasubio just over a week ago. There were 10 of us. The youngest was just 11 years old. The oldest was 67. We spent the night at 1900 metres in the WW1 military refuge shown in pic 4 above. The following day we set off for the summit. At 2200 metres (pic 2), Cima Palon was strategically important during the battles of 1916-1918. The battlefield is scarred with trenches and underground systems that once contained artillery pieces and machine guns (pic 3). The underground bunkers are beautiful pieces of engineering - such a wasteful need.
The beauty here is hard to reconcile with the battles that raged a century ago. You admire the views and then you ask yourself whether the soldiers appreciated any of that. Was it terror all the time? Some of the soldiers ended up in mountain graveyards like the one shown in pic 5. Many of the men were blown to pieces. Some of them are surfacing now - their bones added to the ossuary at the foot of the mountain on the Vicenza side. Picture 6 shows some of the group on the refugio terrace on arrival.
Of course, inspiration can take many directions. A group of friends scale a mountain. As they do, tensions and conflicts come to the surface like the pieces of shrapnel or the cartridge case I found. It has been done before - many times. Several of my novels concern the impact of past on present. It is a theme that fascinates me. Try as we might, the past will not go away. We can topple statues. We can also destroy statues, but the times and people they celebrate - for good or bad - are not going anywhere. We can also ignore trauma from our own pasts but trauma does not really go away. Trauma lurks. It waits and strikes when it is least expected. A psychologist acquaintance from Frankfurt tells me that a considerable number of old Germans have come to him over the last 20 years unable to deal with traumatic memories, suppressed since WW2 but rising to the surface in old age. I have tried to deal with this theme in "The Schoenbuch Forest" and "Feeling the Distance."
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