The English government, during the First World War, decides to send some of the best writers of the British Empire to the Italian front. Writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown, Herbert George Wells who had created The War of the Worlds and Joseph Rudyard Kipling of "The Jungle Book", thus end up in the trenches of the Carso or the peaks of Adamello. Why? The idea of ​​inviting Kypling, Conan Doyle and other famous British writers to Italy comes from the English ambassador in Rome, James Rennell Rodd. The Anglo-Saxon public opinion does not perceive the size of the effort that the Italians are making on their front and tends not to attribute very little importance to the war events that are happening in Italy. From the point of view of propaganda this is a negative element. Rennell Rodd therefore thinks of using some of the most beloved writers of the British Empire to tell his fellow citizens what happens on the battlefields of the Bel Paese. Our regions are thus visited by Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, by Chesterton of Father Brown, HG Wells who had created the War of the Worlds and by Rudyard Kypling, the man of "The Jungle Book". What particularly impresses them is the war that is fought in the mountains, a theater of operations that the British public opinion, accustomed to trench warfare, does not know. Let's see what some of them have written. Kipling came to us in May 1917. In a correspondence from Italy, which he wrote for the Daily Telegraph and the New York Tribune and which he titled «Only a few steps higher up», on 16 June 1917 he wrote that the Alpini appeared to him to be «Good devils» and «spirited boys», «recruited from the inhabitants of the mountains, who – he said – know well how they think. They are men accustomed to carrying loads along paths no wider than fifty or sixty centimetres; men who walk around precipices a thousand feet deep. The mountains and the war fought there cannot fail to strike a writer like Rudyard Kypling. It is an extreme environment, which at the outbreak of the conflict is transformed into an unusual and daring theatre of war where the combatants face each other, renewing and broadening the meaning of the word courage. In addition to the challenge with the adversary, man must - like the first mountaineers - also challenge nature, thus giving rise to a confrontation that has something titanic in itself, which strikes the popular imagination. Projected into this dimension, war was first and foremost an adventure, a challenge to nature before it does to the enemy: the dramatic aspect disappeared and the heroic one remained…». The methods of combat in the mountains and the harshness of the natural context in which the adversaries faced each other also deeply affected HG Wells. The author of The War of the Worlds wrote that «the Alpine theatre of war in Italy is extraordinarily different from any other front. From the Isonzo to the Swiss border one has to deal with high mountains, cut by deep valleys between which, usually, there are no lateral connecting routes. […] The type of combat that, so to speak, prevails in this region is mountain warfare. The disposition of the belligerents is more or less the following. The Austrians occupy valley A which opens to the north. The Italians occupy the valley B that opens to the south. They fight to conquer the peak that divides them. Whichever of the two sides conquers it, gains the ability to look down into the opposing valley, bombarding it with its own fire and outflanking enemy positions inside it. […] This is, in a nutshell, the essence of mountain fighting. I could define its peculiarities as among the strangest and most picturesque of all in this terrible world conflict». HG Wells published this description of mountain warfare in a 1917 book, which has remained unpublished in Italy: «War and the future. Italy, France and Britain at war». But who are the brave men «who face each other up there where eagles dare?» To this question HG Wells replies that «the men who fight in the Dolomites are perhaps the most surprising of all those engaged on the various fronts». While climbing the mountain, Wells is surprised to notice two suffering Alpine soldiers descending on muleback. They have been struck by Frostbite despite the fact that it is the middle of August. The British writer observes how men fighting in the mountains often have their only connection to the world below the cable of a cableway or the prospect of a steep climb.