An Italian Alpini looks at the front somewhere in the mountain coves of the Austrian Front, c. 1917. The Alpini were and are an elite mountain subdivision of the Italian Army. The first Alpini appeared in 1872, therefore being the oldest active mountain infantry in the world. Their original mission was to protect Italy's northern mountain border with France and Austria, which was exactly what they did after the breaking of World War I, as they fought a three-year campaign on the Alps against Austro-Hungarian Kaiserjäger and the German Alpenkorps in what has since become known as the "War in snow and ice". In this kind of warfare, whoever occupied the higher ground first was almost impossible to dislodge, so both sides turned to drilling tunnels under mountain peaks, filling them up with explosives and then detonating the whole mountain to pieces, including its defenders. The remains of these soldiers are still being uncovered today.