For four years, ''The Great War,'' World War I, raged across the planet. Millions were sent to their deaths in pointless battles. The Italian Front stretched along the borders of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, in treacherous mountain regions. In the last months of 1916, a private in the Italian Bersaglieri returns to his childhood home in the Trentino mountain range to find it no longer a place of adventure and wonder as it was in his youth, but a place of death and despair. Among the weapons of both armies, none is more feared than the White Death: thundering avalanches deliberately caused by cannon fire... which, like war itself, consumes everything in their path.