In 1916 Melchior von Fuchsheim has survived twenty months in the trenches of the Western Front when he is abruptly and mysteriously transferred to a remote outpost high in the Austrian Alps. There the Austrians face the Italians in a world of mountaintops, crevasses and howling blizzards. Melchior is instructed to begin work on storage chambers to be hollowed out of the ice on the edge of the glacier. A crystallographer by training, Melchior decides that an entire fortress could be built under the ice, to protect the Austrian troops from the fierce weather as well as from Italian snipers and artillery.
But building the Eisfestung, the ice fortress, involves great personal risks and frequent conflicts with his superiors, who have their own ideas about how to proceed, and Melchior finds himself struggling to defend the Jewish conscripts under his command. In the process, Melchior explores a world "in caves of pure crystal ice, some of them grander and more beautiful than any cathedral on earth. A war so strange that one never believed it; one lived it but could not prove it existed. Unearthly beauty, like the center of a diamond seen through a microscope, mingled with arctic death in every moment."
Genre: Historical
But building the Eisfestung, the ice fortress, involves great personal risks and frequent conflicts with his superiors, who have their own ideas about how to proceed, and Melchior finds himself struggling to defend the Jewish conscripts under his command. In the process, Melchior explores a world "in caves of pure crystal ice, some of them grander and more beautiful than any cathedral on earth. A war so strange that one never believed it; one lived it but could not prove it existed. Unearthly beauty, like the center of a diamond seen through a microscope, mingled with arctic death in every moment."
Genre: Historical
Used availability for Robie Macauley's Citadel of Ice