TWENTY-EIGHT
everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound
WALLACE STEVENS
Looking south from the ski-lift at the head of the Isonzo valley, after summer storms, a striped tower glimmers in the farthest distance. It is the power-station at Monfalcone, more than 60 kilometres away, across a panorama of peaks and ridges; from this angle, the entire Isonzo front can be framed on the cover of a book.
The buzz of people fades when you take the path to Rombon, winding around boulders, through hollows filled with snow, across limestone amphitheatres. At this height the light is ultramarine, the air tingles. Your own breathing and the crunch of pebbles are the only sounds. Except for strands of rusty wire poking over the path, there is very little detritus. After the war, communities along the old front earned money by retrieving military scrap and human remains from the mountains. Corpses fetched 10 lire each, and 10 kilos of barbed wire sold for 1 lire. Steel, cast iron, brass and copper were more lucrative but harder to find. On the higher battlefields, foragers camped in old tunnels and dug-outs during the summer. Farmers dug up animal carcasses to sell the bones, fuelled their stoves with the stocks of old rifles, and sold the breeches and barrels. Today’s foragers scour the hillsides for memorabilia. It is a risky pastime: someone dies every year from exploding ordnance.
A couple of hours’ walking and scrambling get you to the top of Rombon, an airy field of boulders, halfway between the sky and the valley. Faint Habsburg trenches lead down towards the spur called Cukla, which overlooks Bovec, formerly Flitsch. The Isonzo is a silver line, nearly 2,000 metres below. The trenches are grooves in the rubble, more like a natural feature than man-made defences. Another hundred years will smooth these wrinkles away.
You get to Čukla by clambering down a rocky cleft, then running the scree at its base. Your boots turn up cartridge cases and bits of shell casing. Looking back, it is obvious why the Italians never took the summit. The path down to Bovec zigzags over the open hillside, then on mule tracks through woods that cloak the lower slopes. It is half an hour’s drive to Kobarid, formerly Caporetto, where the valley opens out. Kobarid is recognisably the same town that changed hands so suddenly on 24 October 1917. The south-eastern skyline is dominated by the peak of Krn, soaring like a shark’s fin.
A mule track loops up to Krn from a corrie above the valley floor. The route is popular with hikers; a hostel below the summit does a brisk trade in bean soup and beer. The summit is ten minutes away, a turret pointing at the Julian Alps. The onward path to Mount Mrzli passes a plaque to the handful of Yugoslav partisans – communist-led guerrilla forces – who died here in the Second World War. There is no plaque to the thousands of First World War dead; for more than seventy years, the nations that fought Italy from 1915 to 1918 did not care to recall the Great War. As well as the pain of defeat, there was embarrassment for the states that emerged from Austria-Hungary: their peoples had died defending the empire. The duty of remembrance fell to veterans, penning memoirs that burn with resentment at the official amnesia. After these states became Communist, they had even less incentive to examine their role as mainstays of the dynastic rule.
Matters only changed after the end of the Cold War. For Europe’s ‘new democracies’, trying to recover their pre-fascist, pre-communist history, the imperial cause is no longer awkward. On the contrary, a mild Habsburg nostalgia pervades the area from Trieste to Vienna and Prague, flattered by tourist-board posters of art nouveau cafés and rediscovered statues of Franz Josef’s beautiful empress. New monuments have been added to the Habsburg cemeteries, paying respect where it is due, yet the polished marble facets look odd amid the mossy turf and lichen-covered crosses. These places remind us that states, too, have their life-span.
The information on the plaques – name, corps, rank and date of death in German (‘the language of the army, in death as in life’) – proves that the men came from all corners of the empire. ‘What the state failed to achieve in time of peace became a reality in these war cemeteries. Here they all are, united by death in an indissoluble brotherhood.’ The mystery of obedience hangs in the air.
The Isonzo has become a recreational river. Its turquoise waters are flecked with kayaks in summer; hikers throng the paths, and the cliffs are hung with climbers’ ropes. The tree cover is thick on Mount Mrzli, above Tolmin; the stanchions of wartime cableways rot in the shade, sinking into the leaf mould. The summit is still jagged from Italian shellfire. Overhead, paragliders ride the thermals, unhurried; someone tells us they are Czechs, holding a competition. If their great- grandfathers could revisit the front, the greenery would amaze them. In their time, the tree line was lower and the grass much thinner. Even so, the grim beauty of the front made a deep impression on many of the troops, as their diaries show. Even in the worst situations, soldiers caught the scent of thyme high on the limestone ridges; the sight of comrades dying did not blot out the last patches of snow gleaming blue in the moonlight, or the constellations wheeling overhead. The ‘indescribable joy’ of battle that filled young Ferruccio Fabbrovich in June 1916 was a real thing, and it was felt more readily in the mountains. What one veteran called the ‘exhilaration of extreme situations’ could reach a pitch of ecstasy when vistas opened at your feet. The Austrian troops felt it when they went out of the line, marching to the edge of the Carso, and saw the Adriatic Sea below, azure to the horizon.
While soldiers in other theatres experienced this sensuous, heightened awareness of the natural world, it may have been more widespread on the Italian front. The Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote a story, ‘The Blackbird’, about his service in the Tyrol.
… on every one of those nights I poked my head over the edge of the trench many times … I saw the Brenta mountains light blue, as if formed of stiff- pleated glass, silhouetted … the sky stayed blue all night … sometimes I could stand it no longer, and giddy with joy and longing, I crept out for a little nightcrawl around, all the way to the golden-green blackness of the trees… It is as if the fear of one’s demise, which evidently lies on top of man forever like a stone, were suddenly rolled back, and in the uncertain proximity of death an unaccountable inner freedom blossoms forth.
This ‘unaccountable inner freedom’ enlivens much Italian literature about the war, offsetting the documentary element, the chronicling of unprecedented torment. Italian historians sometimes regret that their writers produced no classics to rank beside Jünger, Barbusse, Remarque or Hemingway. What sets their books apart is perhaps an inability to sustain the despair. Excitement keeps breaking through – not so much the Homeric bloodlust of Jünger, though this is present, as a sense of boyish adventure within an enterprise that is felt as essentially worthwhile, whatever its horrors. When the aged Emilio Lussu saw the fine film of his autobiographical novel, A Year on the Plateau, one of the best books about the Italian front, he objected that it was too grim. ‘That’s not all there is to war,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we even sang, joked and dreamed our dreams.’
Consider Eugenio Montale, Italy’s greatest modern poet, stationed in the spectacular valley of Vallarsa in the Trentino, linking Mount Pasubio to the valley of the Adige. Today it is a green chasm with a narrow road unspooling along the northern side, plunging through tunnels and propped on stilts. Untouched by political passion, the young Montale felt uncomfortable in uniform, like ‘an outcast’. The nearest settlement was a hamlet called Valmorbia. The valley sides were strewn with corpses, dead mules, slews of rock and mud, spilled munitions. Night transformed the brutal scene; Montale lay in the entrance of a cave, listening to the river. As the moon rose and sank, the valley seemed to set sail. Snuffling sounds and an acrid smell revealed the proximity of wolves. He turned this memory into a short poem, the only one he ever published about the front. Here is the last stanza:
The lucid nights all through were dawn
and brought wolves to my cavern.
Valmorbia – a name – and now in wan
remembrance, a land unknown to dusk.
Why does this feel patriotic when it dwells on a private moment, remote as a fairy-tale? Perhaps because the poet’s survival enacts Italy’s own, after the ravening threat of Caporetto.
The central British feeling about the First World War is elegiac indignation, fed by a certainty that the war was, in Siegfried Sassoon’s phrase, ‘a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation’, or what Hemingway called ‘the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery’. Although that phrase passes a fair judgement on Cadorna’s leader ship, Italian war writing does not by and large share this disillusion.
When the last British veterans were interviewed ninety years after the war, few had anything to say about politics or patriotism. Over time, the war had become a byword for futile sacrifice. ‘The First World War was idiotic,’ said one, typically. ‘It started out idiotic and it stayed idiotic. It was damned silly, all of it.’ Whether their younger selves would have agreed with this verdict is, of course, another matter.
The last Italian veterans were not haunted by this sense of meaning lessness. One, in his 107th year, recalled his soldier self, ‘a bit afraid, but full of hope and indomitable will’. The only woman interviewed spoke of carrying the love of her fatherland in her heart. Pasquale Costanzo (b. 1899) explained that people felt proud of the war, for ‘the Italians repulsed the enemy with honour’. Paolo Bonomini (b. 1898) praised D’Annunzio’s grandeur and charisma, and his power of discovering ‘the will to believe in the highest values of the fatherland’ in the ‘farthest recesses of our soul’.
Testimony of this kind explains why the Great War was Italy’s ‘first true collective national experience’. More than five million Italians were mobilised, and many of them welcomed the collective endeavour as something precious which mitigated the hardship. A poet in the trenches, Piero Jahier, expressed his emotion at hearing the mixture of dialects. ‘Brava Italia, che si lega per sempre nel sacrificio.’ ‘Splendid Italy, binding herself forever in sacrifice.’ These lines are displayed in the Museum of the Risorgimento, in Rome. Warm bonds of comradeship, which gave soldiers on all fronts an intimate motive for persevering, had an added political dimension in Italy. Nor was the experience limited to men in uniform. A teenaged boy from Friuli who spent the year after Caporetto as a refugee ‘left as a Friulan and returned as an Italian’.
Were nationalists right, then, to say that the war completed the Risorgimento? Liberals denied it. A counter-argument was provided by the journalist Luigi Salvatorelli, another veteran of the Isonzo, for whom the Risorgimento was a project that would only be fulfilled by ‘the formation of a national democracy’. The vision of Mazzini and Garibaldi had been dedicated to something greater than enlarging the territory under the House of Savoy. They had had a moral goal: the liberation and unification of a nation, realising rights to which other nations were equally entitled. Tragically, this project was opposed by a range of conservative and illiberal forces, clerical, landowning and nationalist.
On this view, far from completing the Risorgimento, the First World War had confirmed, by contrast, the lost greatness of that epoch. For May 1915 had seen the birth of ‘a mixture of Nationalism and Fascism’. Hence the war, which ‘was called – and in a sense, was – the last war of the Risorgimento’, began with ‘a profound moral scission, into which the anti-Risorgimento thrust its poisoned steel’. The Risorgimento was libertarian, patriotic, democratic, enlightened and still unfinished, forever wrestling with its antithetical twin: authoritarian, manipulative, nationalistic, conspiratorial and aggressive. From 1915 to 1944, the anti-Risorgimento had the upper hand. Perhaps the two still contend for mastery of Italy’s dark heart.
The price of Italy’s nation-building achievement in the war was a sense of betrayal by the state. The government and the newspapers lied to the common people while the army under-paid, under-equipped and under-fed them, before getting them killed in hopeless offensives; even the Church failed to protect them. It was an experience marked by brutality, contempt, corruption and oppression, fatigue duty like slave labour, rations filched or sold on. At the end of the war, their pensions were not paid, the economy was in melt-down, and they were at daggers drawn with their eastern neighbours, the Yugoslavs. It was as if national consciousness could only grow by undermining national institutions and sharpening political divisions. The interment of the Unknown Warrior in Rome was one occasion that focused these antagonisms. Socialist posters mocking the ceremony, in November 1921, were torn down by the police. If the nameless warrior could rise from his tomb, leftist agitators said, he would curse the war. Proletarians should honour him by cursing it themselves.
In this riven atmosphere, Mussolini offered a positive myth of the war. As early as December 1916, he had looked forward to the day when Italy would be governed by a ‘trenchocracy, a new and better élite’. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, he vowed to rebuild the state on the basis of the soldiers’ achievement. This was a potent promise in a situation where, as the leading scholar of Italian fascism argues, ‘Most veterans were convinced they were the aristocracy of “new men” bound to regenerate society and the State.’ From the outset of his regime, Mussolini claimed a monopoly on the meaning of the Great War. Entering the Quirinale Palace on 30 October 1922, he bowed before his sovereign. According to Fascist myth, he said ‘Sire, I bring you the Italy of Vittorio Veneto.’ It meant that the mantle of victory – the one that, in Orlando’s boast, overshadowed all others in recorded history – was in his gift and nobody else’s. He then paid homage at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
For the Fascists, the war was a portal to revolution and rebirth. As a new political religion, Fascism needed a ‘sacred history’, and the dates of Italy’s intervention and victory were celebrated with ritual pageantry. The revolution had, in Mussolini’s phrase, ‘reconsecrated’ the victory. The Duke of Aosta, who adapted seamlessly to the new regime, called the war ‘the glorious epic of the great Redemption’. After the ‘Golgotha’ of Caporetto, Vittorio Veneto brought resurrection to ‘crucified Italy’.
The place of the Great War in this ersatz theology is graphically clear at Redipuglia, site of Italy’s biggest military cemetery, built in the 1930s, between Gorizia and Monfalcone. This ‘shrine’ to the ‘undefeated’ Third Army stretches implausibly up the western slope of Mount Sei Busi, scene of ferocious bloodletting in 1915 and 1916. It is a limestone landscape in itself: a geometrised model of the Carso, complete with its fatal gradient. Beyond a deep apron of stone, the Duke of Aosta lies at the foot of the slope within a 75-tonne block of porphyry: a tomb worthy of Achilles. Behind him, the bones of 100,187 soldiers are gathered inside 22 colossal terraces, each 140 metres wide, flanked by cypresses like dark flames. From below, visitors look like fleas on a stairway to Fascist heaven. In raised lettering on the edges of the terraces is the word PRESENTE, reiterated over and over: the soldier’s reply at roll call. Ceaselessly summoning the dead to defend Italy’s frontier, the monument taps into legends as old as warfare, of fallen soldiers returning to the battlefield. New accounts of such ghostly resurrection were heard during the war and for years afterwards, such as the tale of a labourer trudging home over the Asiago plateau and seeing an endless column of men move across the landscape. They were Italian and Austrian soldiers, pale and unarmed, marching noiselessly. All night the labourer watched them pass, until dawn dispersed them.
The original cemetery at Redipuglia was very different. Looking down from the terraces, you see a low green hill on the other side of the road to Trieste. At the end of the war, the regimental cemeteries on the Carso were emptied and the remains brought to that hill. The dead men’s families fashioned little monuments from battlefield detritus: a broken propeller blade for a pilot, crossed pickaxe and shovel for a sapper, or simply a battered helmet, with a nameplate on a plinth of boulders and sprigs of wire like ivy. Infinitely sad and truthful, this cemetery expressed the native genius that nationalists had boasted about before the war (‘We are for the ephemeral … We hate methods, we are for disorder against discipline.’) Mussolini decided the Fascist myth about the Great War needed something more grandiose and streamlined, less ramshackle – and less honest. Redipuglia became the showpiece of Fascist commemorative architectonics, one of the few places where a visitor still feels the urgency of Walter Benjamin’s warning in 1940: ‘Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.’
By the end of 1923, nearly 6,000 committees were preparing com memorative pathways and parks in cities, towns and villages. Monuments appeared in front of town halls, cathedrals and village churches. The inscriptions commemorated the ‘sons’ who ‘gave’ (treacherous verb!) their lives to the Fatherland, often figured as a Mother. The expression Madre Patria sacra, confusing in English, turned the nation-state and its dead young men into a holy family. By 1938, there were 40 major monuments to the Great War dead. This civic activity did not mean that ordinary Italians wanted to remember. The anti-fascist Carlo Levi, exiled to remote Lucania in the 1930s, was struck that local people never mentioned the war. Nearly 50 names were carved in marble on the town hall; every family had lost someone. Even so, the war held no interest for the farmers; it had nothing to do with their way of life. The state, meaning ‘Rome’, had sent them off to fight for incomprehensible reasons. ‘It had been a great misfortune, the people bore it as they always did.’
The Fascist visual language of commemoration has not been super seded; it is still definitive, embedded in the culture. Written history, by contrast, moved on. Even under Mussolini, serious work saw the light in a few specialised journals and privately published books. From the 1950s, historians began to dismantle the nationalist versions of the war. The most tenacious of these was the myth or cult of the ‘umile fante’, the humble soldier, figured as a deferential patriot, superbly energetic and aggressive, scorning safety, meeting death with a song and a smile.
Even in its more intelligent guises, this cult was based on a presumption about the innermost motivations of several million men who, with few exceptions, did not or could not speak for themselves. A telltale sign is the attitude taken towards the other ranks’ low level of awareness of Italy’s reasons for fighting. Time and again, junior officers remarked that the men did not know why they were fighting at all. Standard accounts of the war did not condemn this ignorance as a failure of the Ministry of War, the Supreme Command or even the press; it was seen sentimentally as proof of the men’s good-hearted innocence. One of the finest war memoirs is Days of War by Giovanni Comisso, a lieutenant in the engineers. He ends with a last description of the men: black as smoke, ragged, exhausted. Convinced that he will never see their like again, he stamps their image on his memory; they smile wearily, ‘as if they themselves did not know what they had done, or why’.
The feeling of never-such-innocence-again was not uniquely Italian. In Britain, it refers to the volunteers of 1914 who expected a swift and glorious campaign; and it implies that the industrial slaughter on the Western Front stained our civilisation with a new kind of knowledge, some dark revelation about the human capacity for causing and enduring pain. Although Italy also expected a swashbuckling ‘Garibaldian’ war in 1915, the feeling about lost innocence that lingers in Comisso’s and other memoirs was more insidious: never again, they implied regretfully, would vast numbers of conscripted peasants and workers sacrifice themselves on the basis of blind trust in their social, intellectual superiors. It is easy to see why officers might be moved by this feeling, and how the men’s lack of understanding flattered the educated minority, confirming a sense of themselves as Italy’s elect, destined to steer the nation onwards and upwards. To be sure, an officer’s perception of his men as objects of the war was not necessarily self-serving. When the poet and future priest Clemente Rebora, whose sense of duty to the men glowed like a vocation, refers to ‘the anonymous flesh of the infantry’, he sounds quite unlike the agitator and future dictator Mussolini, praising ‘the simple and primitive souls, who, despite everything, still make up a splendid human material’, or the journalist Luigi Barzini, whose despatches did so much to propagate the myth of the humble soldier. ‘Who are these valiant souls that spend their life’s last spark in lighting a fuse?’ Barzini asked. ‘They can no longer be told apart, they have a single name, they are a single thing; they are the army.’ It is the difference between empathy and presumption, or worse.
It is impossible not to bridle at the paternalism that refused to see the men’s ignorance as a moral affront, or even as a practical problem. For there is no evidence that the infantry were charmed by their own blankness. Pasquale Costanzo (1899–2007), who served with the 119th Infantry throughout the war, told interviewers near the end of his life: ‘I did not know why there was a war at all, for that matter they didn’t let the troops in on anything. You had to find your reasons for yourself, on the spot.’ This remark is worth quoting a second time because it says more about the infantry’s real heroism than reams of memoirs, let alone monuments like Redipuglia.1
*
The most influential revisionist work was a movie. Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra (1959) follows the comical progress of two conscripts from the rigours of boot camp to the relative ease of life at the front, between battles. One is a naïve patriot, the other a cheeky slacker. On the Piave in 1918, they get separated from their platoon and are taken prisoner. A vicious Austrian officer will spare their lives if they reveal the Italian battle plans. Overcoming their terror, the bumbling pair choose death, so saving their honour and their country. The film’s satire is mild by later standards, but the lack of piety was novel at the time. Its gallows humour resembles a folk ballad or a trench song, immune to official sentiment. The general staff took umbrage and the newspapers stirred up controversy.
When the movie showed in Rome, one of its older viewers was a corpulent, silver-haired man with startled eyes, slab cheeks, and dark furrows pulling down the corners of his mouth. Since we left him in Caporetto, as a prisoner of war in October 1917, Carlo Emilio Gadda had become a great writer, master of a baroque and multilayered style, more respected than read. An eccentric figure, persuaded against his better judgement to see the film, he was appalled. By scoring easy points against Italy’s lack of military preparation in 1915, Monicelli disparaged ‘the purity of intention and certainty of heroic sacrifice’ that marked the tragedy. While some scenes at the front were accurate, others – dwelling on the squalor and bureaucratic pettiness – were ‘too implacably severe’ and above all too late. For ‘duty’ was felt at the time as an emotion and an obligation; only later did it turn into hollow rhetoric. As for the comedy, it was too derisive. ‘Whoever lived through those “facts” and those years, whoever wanted to sacrifice himself, cannot endorse those facile gags and farce.’ He was equally dismayed by the youthful audience. ‘They split their sides laughing. No French or German public would laugh like this.’
Had he forgotten his own satire of the war as a ridiculous quarrel between ‘Maradagals’ and ‘Parapagals’? Or was he claiming a veteran’s privilege, as if nobody younger could strike the rightly anguished note? A veteran in Gadda’s novel finds his service pistol in a chest in the attic, years after the war. Greased and glinting, the weapon fits his hand snugly, sparking instant recall of the Carso in summer, ‘the noonday heat without trenches, ready, in the stink, among the scaly rocks, five minutes after the counter-attack’. Ambushed by memories that were better left undisturbed, the veteran’s brain swarms with violent fantasy.
Perhaps, watching the film, Gadda could not bear the implication that the ideals of 1915 had been swallowed up by fascism, then discredited along with it, making the veterans’ values incommunicable. His essay on the film included a swipe at Hemingway. Presumably he resented the fact that so many Italians got their idea of the war from A Farewell to Arms, with its debunking of patriotic ideals and in difference to Italy’s victory. I would wager that Gadda, an expert self-tormentor, and ashamed of his own seduction by fascism, was haunted by the possibility that Hemingway’s outsider vision was more accurate than his own, even if it was based on only a few weeks at the front as a Red Cross volunteer.
As soon as he was demobbed, in 1919, Gadda planned to write something that would ‘break the circle of silence’ about the reality of the war, and make it impossible for anything like it to happen again. Not surprisingly, he never wrote that book, though he managed a chapter of steely aphorisms for his novel, The Castle of Udine (1934), such as this: ‘Speaking of war and peace as if they were myths, or earthquakes, is a disgusting thing in a man and a citizen.’ Maybe A Farewell to Arms made him so uncomfortable because he had shared its anti-hero’s distaste for patriotic rhetoric:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression, in vain … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory … There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity … Abstract words suchas glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
If it is true that nobody in the Europe of August 1914 would have understood what Hemingway was talking about in this famous passage, it is equally true that by 1916, even pro-war Italians were saying very similar things, in revulsion at the deceitful rhetoric that swilled around the nation like a polluting tide. That September, Gadda told a friend that, if he died, the announcement should be as laconic as possible, avoiding words and phrases like ‘fatherland, honour, fervent youth, flower of his youth, hated enemy, proud and grieving, etc.’ Fell in the course of combat would suffice. Another officer told his wife that he avoided using the word ‘fatherland’ in front of his men. ‘I never use big words: faced with the real vision of death, my men are suspicious and unresponsive.’ At the Supreme Command, Father Gemelli argued that the men’s indifference to ‘inspirational’ speeches did not mean they were immune to high ideals. Rather, it confirmed that bourgeois rhetoric was of very limited use for communication with peasants and workers. Following events from afar, Professor Alfredo Panzini wondered with sharp flippancy if Italy’s salvation depended on abolishing adjectives. It was in 1916, too, that Ungaretti wrote the pared-down poetry which passed a creative judgement on the bankruptcy of conventional expression. Unlike these men, Hemingway was not saturated in Italian war-language; but he did not need to be. His American artist’s ear caught the poisoned sonorities of European nationalism, which his hard-bitten style satirised automatically in A Farewell to Arms, his best novel. It was a style that became influential around the world. Modern literature owes a debt-by-reaction to Italian war discourse.
Wandering over the Carso today, it is hard to recover much impression of the barren harshness that tormented the soldiers. Above the coast, the plateau has been scored with roads; traffic roars between the Rocca and Mount Cosich. The ambient temperature rose by two degrees over the last century, and the bora lost its edge. Sumac trees, planted as windbreaks, protected the thin soil; hornbeam, evergreens and stunted oak flourish. The undergrowth is like rainforest, impassable in summer. It is good to follow the old Habsburg highway from Redipuglia to Trieste on a clear afternoon, take the fork to Aurisina and find a path to the cliff top. Light flashing off the Adriatic lingers in the branches overhead, like ‘a cast of the imagination’.
Source Notes
TWENTY-EIGHT End of the Line
1 ‘everything we say’: Stevens, 302.
2 foragers camped in old tunnels and dug-outs: Sacco, Monticone & Rigoni Stern, 105.
3 someone dies every year: According to staff at the war museum in Kobarid. On one estimate, the war left 12,000 tonnes of Italian lead embedded in the Slovenian landscape. Pirc & Budkovič.
4 ‘the language of the army, in death as in life’: Abel.
5 ‘exhilaration of extreme situations’: Comisso.
6 soldiers in other theatres experienced: See, e. g., Private Fred Hodges’ memories in van Emden, 304.
7 ‘on every one of those nights’: Musil [1995], 135–6.
8 Italian historians regret that: Bonadeo [1989]; Fabio Todero [1999].
9 ‘That’s not all there is to war’: Rigoni Stern. Lussu’s book has been translated as Sardinian Brigade (London: Prion Books, 2000). Francesco Rosi’s film, called Uomini contro, was released in 1970.
10 valley seemed to set sail: Cortellessa, 465.
11 ‘a dirty trick which’: Sassoon.
12 ‘The First World War was idiotic’: Arthur. The other book of interviews is by van Emden.
13 the ‘farthest recesses of our soul’: These quotations are from Bultrini & Casarola.
14 ‘first true collective national experience’: Minniti; also Giuliano Procacci, 236.
15 ‘left as a Friulan’: Romano, 29.
16 ‘a profound moral scission’: Salvatorelli [1970], 188.
17 an experience marked by brutality: Malaparte [1967].
18 ‘trenchocracy, a new and better élite’: O’Brien, [2004], 116.
19 ‘Most veterans were convinced’: Gentile [1986], 112.
20 According to Fascist myth: Bosworth [2002], 170.
21 then paid homage at the tomb: Schindler, 321.
22 ‘sacred history’: Gibelli, 361.
23 ‘the glorious epic of the great Redemption’: Gentile [1996], 38–9.
24 New accounts of such ghostly resurrection: Cortellessa, 356–7.
25 until dawn dispersed them: This story is told by Mario Rigoni Stern in his preface to Frescura, 5.
26 ‘We are for the ephemeral’: Carrà.
27 ‘Even the dead will not be safe’: Benjamin [1979], 257.
28 into a holy family: Canal.
29 ‘It had been a great misfortune’: Levi, 119.
30 ‘the anonymous flesh of the infantry’: Rebora, in a letter dated 28 November 1915.
31 ‘the simple and primitive souls’: O’Brien [2004], 117.
32 ‘Who are these valiant souls’: Fabio Todero [2003], 231.
33 ‘I did not know why there was a war’: Pte. Pasquale Costanzo, quoted by Bultrini & Casarola, 65.
34 ‘how a man can create a new soul’: Malaparte [1981], 54, 65.
35 ‘the purity of intention and certainty’: Ungarelli, 110–14.
36 ‘the noonday heat without trenches’: Gadda [1963].
37 a swipe at Hemingway: ‘Hemingway’s was not the only eye that saw Italian soldiers marching to the trenches through the mire and driving rain’. Ungarelli, 110.
38 ‘break the circle of silence’: Roscioni, 126.
39 nobody in the Europe of August 1914: Fussell, 21.
40 Fell in the course of combat would suffice: Roscioni, 129.
41 ‘I never use big words’: This was the future historian, Adolfo Omodeo. Bonadeo [1989], 95–6.
42 Father Gemelli argued: Labita.
43 Panzini wondered with sharp flippancy: Panzini, 270.
1Captain Kurt Suckert of the 5th Alpine Regiment was one veteran who found seeds of hope in the soldiers’ desolation. In Viva Caporetto! , still a startling ook, Suckert – known by his pen-name, Curzio Malaparte – argued that the war had ( continued on p. 392 ) humanised the soldiers by burning away their Catholic pieties about death, and teaching them ‘how a man can create a new soul and a new life for himself’. Caporetto was the result of the growth of class consciousness among the infantry, ‘the proletariat of the army’, rebelling against the hierarchy personified by Cadorna, ‘the enemy of the infantry’. Malaparte’s thesis was too revolutionary for Giolitti’s Liberal government, which suppressed his book. The Fascists banned it as well, even though Malaparte was a party member until 1931.