1914: Giacomino "Mino" Rasi is the ten-year-old son of a Milan university mathematics professor.

His family is friends with the aristocratic Austrian consul Karl Stolz and his much younger wife Freda.

That Italy, a member of the Triple Alliance, has remained neutral at the outbreak of the war causes a slight alteration between Karl and Minos father.

For the Christmas holidays Minos family goes skiing to the Great Saint Bernard Pass in the Aosta Valley.

They spend Christmas at the Great Saint Bernard Hospice and the next day set out on ski to Courmayeur.

Unbeknown to Mino his parents have survived and in May his father returns to look amid the melting snow for his sons body.

Bastiano tries to convinces his brother to flee to Switzerland, but Rico chooses to go with all his friends for the "one-two months" of war.

But Mino soon elopes to find Rico, who has departed with the battalion for the Isonzo front on the other side of Italy.

After some time on the road he arrives in a small town in the Friuli – Venezia Giulia region and meets a young girl Nena and her blind grandfather, who scrape by as street musicians.

In the meantime his father, who has become a captain in the 44° Artillery Regiment, once more returns to Aosta to look for his sons body and by chance learns from Bastiano that Mino lives and left some months earlier.

In a poignant scene Mino walks up the eerily silent mountain, whose slopes are covered with hundreds of dead soldiers, to find Rico dying.

Mino stays with the battalions priest Don Giuliano behind, who teaches him to pray not only for his Italian friends, but also for the Austrian soldiers, as the realm of god is a single nation.

When the Italian base comes under artillery fire Mino runs to find Don Giuliano, but he gets lost in the fog and smoke and gravely injured by shrapnel becomes unconscious.

Major Lupo and Giuseppe come to visit him- Pin has run away, but the rest of the men are fine.

Mino arrives at the summit station in the middle of the first artillery barrage of the Austrian summer offensive of 1916.

Mino hurries to call his father on the observations posts telephone and learns that his mother is alive and in Treviso.

The phone cable and the aerial tramway are destroyed by the intense shelling and Mino runs away to meet his father down in the valley.

Michele stayed behind to blow up the guns and ammunition of the regiment, when the Austrian advance swept the Italian army off the Asiago mountain plateau.

That night the batman takes Mino to the first trench, where he calls out to one of his friends fighting on the Austrian side.

Mino claims to be the nephew of Karl Stolz, who by now is a Colonel in the Austro–Hungarian Armys general staff and an aide-de-camp to emperor Franz Joseph I.

Proudly he shows him the maps with the plan of the attack drawn up by the Bavarian general Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen.

Mino successfully crosses the front line, but it is already to late and the Italian Army is already in full flight.

During the day Mino works in an inn with Naide and in the night he sneaks into an abandoned villa to retrieve ciphered messages hidden in Schopenhauers The World as Will and Representation.

Vavra returns from the battle shaken and distraught as his friend Delkin has died and because it is obvious the Italians were aware of the Austrian attack preparations, as the Italian artillery opened fire 30 minutes before the opening of the offensive all along the front inflicted heavy casualties on the crowded Austrians in the front line trenches.

He visits Minos father to express his desperation at the nearing end of the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire.

Mino quickly finds his father, as the Austrian guards already have deserted the prisoner of war camp.

As he reads the names of the hundreds of tags, he realizes that only Giuseppe is left of the battalions soldiers he knew.

Just at this time the news of the Armistice of villa Giusti spreads through the hospital and all present celebrate the end of the war, save for Mino who sits with the name tags alone in a tent.

The war is over and Mino is decorated by General Diaz with a Gold Medal of Military Valor for his and his fathers service.

The last scene of the movie is Mino and his mother dancing through their empty Milan flat to the tunes of an Austrian waltz.