“I’ve still in my ears and even in my brain the crunching of snow under my boots,” wrote Mario Rigoni Stern. His experiences during one of the most harrowing episodes of the Second World War, the retreat of the Italian 8th Army from Russia, formed the basis of his memoir Il sergente nella neve (The Sergeant in the Snow, 1953), a minor masterpiece of observational writing.

Rigoni Stern was from the “other Italy”, the northern highlands of mountains, meadows and woods that provided the hardy recruits for Italy’s crack Alpine regiments. In the summer of 1942 Mussolini unwisely agreed to reinforce substantially the token Italian expeditionary force in Russia, but the mountain troops intended for the peaks of the Caucasus found themselves diverted by the Germans to the flat country north of Stalingrad.

By December about 235,000 Italians were holding a line on the Don, woefully under-equipped for the rigours of the season or to resist any attack by Soviet armour. When, towards Christmas, the Russian breakout came, the Italians were speedily encircled. The Tridentina Division, in which Rigoni Stern was serving, was one of the few units able to punch its way out.

It began a march of 300 miles westwards through a monochrome landscape, in temperatures of minus 40C, harried all the way by Soviet attacks, starvation and Mother Winter. Only 45,000 men returned to Italy in the spring of 1943, and within six months Mussolini had fallen from power.

One critic has called Il sergente nella neve “the Anabasis in dialect”, and certainly it stands comparison with the trek homewards of Xenophon’s mercenaries. The men are forever asking Rigoni Stern, their 21-year-old sergeant-major, in their local tongue when they will “rivarem a baita” — get home again. Rigoni Stern’s writing is quasi-Homeric too in tone, laconic and unaffected yet poetic, a celebration of comradeship and a denunciation of the futility of war and the vanity of politicians.

He does not make out his men to be heroes, but ordinary men far from their families, in a cold so intense that mice creep under the blankets with them for warmth. Much of the action revolves around the search for food. In one memorable scene Rigoni Stern enters a shack to find Russian troops, and women, at lunch. Wordlessly, they offer him a bowl, and he eats in silence with them.

The previous autumn Rigoni Stern had won a gallantry medal after taking charge of a platoon that had lost its officers and, despite being wounded, leading it in a successful attack on a strongpoint. Yet it was not this, nor that his books became set texts for generations of Italian schoolchildren, nor even that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, that Rigoni Stern considered the high point of his life: but that in the initial escape from the Don he had managed to lead the 70 soldiers in his charge out of the noose around them without losing a man.

Mario Rigoni Stern was born in Asiago, north of Vicenza, in 1921. The third of eight children (seven of them boys), he grew up in the foothills of the Dolomites, where his family dealt in highland produce, such as wood, wool and linen. Much of the area had been devastated by fighting in the First World War.

At 17 he enrolled in the military academy at Aosta, and joined the Vestone Battalion of the 6th Alpine Regiment. When Italy joined in the war in 1940, he fought first in France, then in Albania and Greece. Though an adventurous child, who loved skiing and walking in the mountains, he also read voraciously, and all through his time in Russia he kept a copy of The Divine Comedy in his knapsack.

After Italy’s surrender in 1943 Rigoni Stern was interned along with his fellow soldiers by the Germans, and then sent to labour camps in Prussia and Austria. He kept himself sane by beginning to write about his experiences. At the end of the war he walked all the way home to Asiago, where he married his wife, Anna, built a home with his own hands and busied himself in his orchard.

His books emerged slowly, despite the acclaim given to Il sergente nella neve, which won the Viareggio Prize in the year of its publication. Although he wrote a screenplay, his next work, Il bosco degli urogalli (1962, The wood of the capercaillies) did not see the light for another decade, and indeed until 1970 he worked as a local official until he felt capable of supporting his family by his writing.

While later volumes did cover more of his wartime service, he became best known as the chronicler and defender of the traditional highland way of life. His tales were of deer, honey and snow, of the balance between the rights of nature and those of man.

His dozen or so books, many of them collections of short stories, included: Storia di Tönle (1978), a portrait of an archetypal mountain man and the effects on him of the Great War; Uomini, boschi e api (1980, Men, woods and bees); and Le stagioni di Giacomo (1995, The seasons of Giacomo).

Though Rigoni Stern — once described as looking like Heidi’s grandfather — frequently won literary prizes, he shunned literary circles, preferring the solitary pleasures of his woods. Primo Levi, however, sought him out and became a close friend.

His wife and three children survive him.

Mario Rigoni Stern, writer, was born on November 1, 1921. He died on June 16, 2008, aged 86