Bert's Travels: More of Northern Italy

As I told you before, we recently visited the Montasio Plateau and due to the existance of several buildings and artifacts we were reminded that in this area, but particularly in the area of the Isonzo river, viscous battles were fought during WW1 between the Italian military forces and the Austro-Hungarian military.
The Italian attempts to dislodge the Austrians from their strongholds in the mountains resulted in at least 10 battles of the Isonzo.
The death toll on both sides boggles the imagination.
Of 600,000 Italian soldiers, half died and many more were wounded.
Of 1,200,000 Austrian troupes, about 400,000 were killed and many more wounded.

It is told that a field officer may have decided to capture a certain hill, launched an offensive, causing some 10,000 deaths, succeeded in capturing this target, only to lose it days later in a counter attack, causing a further thousands of men killed and wounded.
The hill, fought over in see-saw battles, had, in many cases absolutely no strategic or other military value

The "Battles of the Isonzo" ( 11 of them ) resulted in over one million dead and many more wounded and resulted in no gain for one side or the other.

( please note, that 'Bertstravels' is neither an historian, nor a military expert and gets his information from reading several books and many entries in Wikipedia. )