We saw earlier that Mussolini ascribed a central place to injured soldiers in his literary construction of an Italy reborn in the real and symbolic confrontation with death. Of the ninety countable injuries men mentioned in his war diary between September and November 1915 (others are quantified as ‘a few’ or ‘many’ and are therefore excluded from our calculation), seventy-three (81.1 per cent) were from artillery, twelve (13.3 per cent) from bullets and five (5.5 per cent) from hand bombs. We need not for the moment draw any conclusions from these figures. First, rather, it is important to note that the early war diary entries confirm Mussolini’s lack of knowledge of the weapon which predominates in the above figures - artillery. On 13 September he wrote of ‘a cannon of spectacular proportions’ without, however, specifying its calibre. Four days later he heard shells whistling through the air and only described their ‘formidable’ character, not their type. Things began to change on 20 September: ‘Climbing back up the hill, I pass near the kitchens. There is an enormous unexploded 305.’ Even greater aptitude is evident by 14 October when he heard ‘twenty strikes of the [Austrian] 280’ after which he stated that the daily firing of the Austrian ‘cannonette’ (cannoncino) meant that ‘it has become familiar to us: it’s a 75 mm mountain cannon.’ In the entry of 18 October his expertise was undoubted:
There go our 75s. They have a hissing sound and a dry and angry explosion. The 149s are powerful. The detonation of their shells is almost jovial in its profundity. The 210s have a brief and muffled roar. Then there’s our rather nice 305. It comes from afar, from beyond the mountains, like a pilgrim. It passes over our heads slowly and solemnly. You can follow it along its journey with your ear. The parting blow cannot be heard so far off is it, but we hear its arrival. The explosion of an Italian 305 makes the mountains tremble.
By 25 October he could add to the list: ‘Guns of all calibre types are in function: 65, 75, 155, 280.’
Again, we need not for the moment conclude anything from this and will proceed, rather, to bring these considerations to bear on the categories of movement and death. In the very first war diary entry (9 September) we discover not only that ‘nobody can say’ where the soldiers were going, but that ‘this doesn’t matter. The essential thing is to move.’ Knowledge of what one was doing in the war was here subordinated to movement towards undefined destinations. We have no overt mention in this section of the war diary of the vast territorial claims which Mussolini argued for before Italian intervention. Elements of a Mazzinian irredentist war are present, for example in the chorus of a soldier’s song transcribed on 14 October which went: ‘“Trento and Trieste, I will take you back.”’ As regards deaths, there is nothing akin to mass industrialized extermination in this section of the war diary. In Mussolini’s account there are twenty-nine countable deaths (again, there were more, but as with injuries these are specified as ‘a few’ or ‘many’), of which artillery was the biggest single cause, accounting for ten. Mussolini accorded a privileged position to the dead in his war diary. On 18 September he noted that four or five crosses of a collective grave bore no names: ‘Poor dead’, he wrote, ‘buried in these impervious and solitary mountain ranges. I will carry your memory in my heart forever.’ Crucially, too, on 19 September the company captain said: ‘“These lands were and are ours. We have re-conquered them. Not without spilling blood. Just this night a bloody Austrian mine buried many of my Bersaglieri.”’ Blood, death and vague territorial discourses (‘these lands’) are here combined, pointing to the possibility that unspecified territorial expansion lies at the heart of the present and future kinship morality of the idealized warrior community being forged in the second phase of the rite of passage. What evidence is there for this?
The theme of ‘movement’ is central here. In the early war diary entries, when the concept still prevailed as Mussolini was on the move from the rear to the front and from mountain to mountain, trench life formed part of the forging of national spirit. In the 19 September entry we read that:
When, in Italy, one spoke of trenches, thoughts ran to the English ones in the low plains of Flanders, furnished with all the comforts, not excluding, or so it was said, heating systems. But ours, here, 2,000 metres above sea level, are rather different. We’re talking about holes dug in the rocks, dugouts exposed to bad weather. Everything provisional and fragile. It’s truly a war of giants that the extremely strong soldiers of Italy are fighting.
But by early October Mussolini had come to realize that this was a war of stasis, a fact of life which conflicted with his overriding concern to see an offensive get underway. On 8 October he was convinced that ‘an advance is imminent’, but with no prospect of this in the immediate offing we discover a more negative side to trench life. He wrote on 11 October that ‘life in the trenches is the natural life, primitive. A bit monotonous’, and the following day he remarked that rain and fleas were ‘the real enemies of the Italian soldier’. Against this, word of possible manoeuvres was said to reanimate the soldiers. On 13 October Mussolini wrote that ‘news is spreading among the squads that soon there will be “action”. The news does not depress, but raises spirits. It is the prolonged inaction which unnerves the Italian soldier. Better, infinitely better, to be firing upon than to be fired upon’ (Mussolini’s italics). In the same entry Mussolini transcribed a passage from a Bersaglieri song which called on the traditional plumes in the corps’ hat to ‘kiss my burning cheeks . . . and repeat to me: Forward! Forward!’ But it was the Italians who were subject to enemy fire, and on 17 October Mussolini documented:
High calibre [enemy] artillery causes less victims, perhaps, than those of medium or small calibre, but it exercises a depressing influence on the spirit of the soldiers. The infantryman feels disarmed, impotent against the cannon. When artillery strikes our position, everyone is like a condemned man. The whistle announces the projectile and each soldier asks: ‘Where will it explode?’ Against the cannon no defence is possible, beyond, that is, the ‘shelters’ which are not very deep and even less solid. They are stones piled together with sods of earth. You must remain immobile, count the hits and wait for the bombardment to finish. The cannon also upsets the soldier for another reason: the type of injuries it produces. Rifle or machine gun bullets do not mutilate in the same way as the projectile of a cannon.
In a rather contradictory fashion, therefore, the modern technology required for national regeneration and community building through the ‘baptism of fire’ and the confrontation with real and symbolic death through injury was the same technology that was contemporaneously depressing the morale of the men and impeding the ‘movement’ required to achieve a resurrected nation. How did this tension in Mussolini’s text fare in the context of the Third Battle of the Isonzo? On the day the offensive began (18 October) Mussolini wrote:
The advance seems imminent. It’s symptomatic! The Bersaglieri don’t say ‘combat’, ‘action’ or ‘battle’; no: they say ‘advance’. It seems that for them it is already axiomatic, intuitive, necessary that one of our battles resolves itself in an advance. It isn’t always like that. But the general and singular use of the term is another symptom of the spirit of aggressiveness that animates the Italian soldiers and their certainty of victory.
We are now well and truly out of the ambit of a supposedly spiritual, fraternal, self-sacrificing, altruistic and anti-militarist community and have entered one in which victory was to issue from an offensive which in turn was to be fuelled by a ‘spirit of aggressiveness’. Mussolini noted how, against the depressing effects of enemy cannon, the sound of Italian guns made the Bersaglieri ‘jump with joy’. But his optimism was soon belied. On 21 October Mussolini and his fellow soldiers were still undergoing ‘long hours of waiting and immobility’. Two days later he completely overturned his earlier positive assessment of trench life, and now unequivocally expressed a growing conviction that the war of stasis and attrition undermined the recomposition of the soldiers into a new, idealized military community premised on the triumphant offensive:
Our war, like that of all the other nations, is a war of position, of attrition. A grey war. A war of resignation, of patience, of tenacity. By day you stay under the ground: it’s only by night that you can live a bit more freely and tranquilly. All the decor of the old type of war has disappeared. The rifle itself is about to become useless. Enemy trenches are assaulted with bombs, with deadly hand grenades. This war is most antithetical to the ‘temperament’ of the Italians.
A detailed history of the Bersaglieri makes no mention of Mussolini’s regiment in the fighting during the Third Battle of the Isonzo (Sema, 1997: 57-60). The official regiment diary counts 134 casualties (AUSSME, entries of 21 October-4 November inclusive), which is 0.2 per cent of total Italian losses in the offensive. With nothing to show for present military operations Mussolini reminisced on 2 November about the past, and in particular about the 11th Regiment’s August 1915 conquest of the Plezzo basin and then Plezzo itself:
In the first months of the war, the Bersaglieri crossed the border, with songs on their lips and with fanfare heading the battalions. After two months rest at Serpenizza, the order to continue the advance finally came, and, despite a whirlwind of enemy cannon fire, the Bersaglieri quickly conquered the Plezzo basin and dug in 400 metres beyond the city which the Austrians then almost completely destroyed with grenades. Whenever the Bersaglieri narrate the episodes of that offensive, the satisfaction and enthusiasm of the conquest still vibrate in their words.
Rounding up all these considerations, and adopting literary-critical terminology supplied by Terry Eagleton (1976: 89), we could say that an aesthetic mode of presentation, in this case the original positive estimation of trench life, was forced to cede to the predominance of stasis. Mussolini’s text rediscovered its lines of meaning, or resolved its ‘problem’, only by finding a ‘solution’ which, in reassessing trench life as negative, revealed the ideology of which the diary was an expression and which it was in turn reproducing. Dominant social and political relations were to be reaffirmed via politically passive, charisma-based mass mobilization and territorial expansion premised on a successful offensive. The nature of this authorial strategy is further evidenced by the fact that while Mussolini was prepared to negatively reframe his previously positive assessment of trench life, he did not use his increased knowledge of the power of modern artillery to alter his pre-war position on offensive warfare. Rather, he reaffirmed those assumptions by citing the excruciating effects of artillery as the fulcrum of his symbolic system of national rebirth through the spilling of blood, the incurring of serious injuries, the sacrifice of life and the nation-forging effects of emotional bonding deriving from the shared confrontation with real and symbolic death in the liminal phase of the rite of passage.