Near the pass and along the mule tracks leading up from Ceresole Reale, it is still possible to identify the ruins of the former barracks and stone military posts, - and the engravings
When the waiting finally ended
There’s a second date worth setting beside Chaberton’s, further along the same wall of concrete and silence, three years later. On the night of 8–9 September 1943, hours after Italy’s armistice with the Allies was announced, a GAF colonel named Giovanni Jon — a Piedmontese, in command at Tarvisio on the wall’s opposite end, facing not France but the sudden, unwanted new enemy of Germany — sounded the alarm and gathered his men on the barracks square. He read them Marshal Badoglio’s proclamation and told them, in effect, that their war was starting now. None of the roughly three hundred men present objected. They held the position against an attacking Waffen-SS regiment for six hours. Twenty-four of them died there; forty-eight more were wounded.
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https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-widows-of-the-frontier-the-engravings
