In 1916 Captain Melchior von Fuchsheim is abruptly transferred from the horror of the trenches to a remote outpost in the Austrian Alps. There he is assigned to build an incredible fortress beneath the massive Ortler Glacier, where the Austrians are locked in a stalemate against the Italians while battling nature’s cruelest extremes of cold and altitude. But Major Stutz sees Melchior as a charlatan, and a struggle erupts as Melchior fights to defend the Jewish conscripts under his command, deep in the tunnels and caverns of the ‘Eisfestung’, the Citadel of Ice. Based on the true story of the construction of a military base inside a glacier on the Austro-Hungarian front during the First World War, this novel explores the inspiration of Captain Melchior to provide Austrian troops with a safe refuge as they defend the front and try to outwit the Italians in one of the world’s harshest climates. As Melchior supervises the construction of the base, he confronts problems of architecture, temperature, and the mysterious shifting of glacial ice, while grappling with combat, avalanches, frostbite, blizzards and an incompetent commanding officer.