It is
extraordinary that nobody has written a narrative history of Italy's Great War in English before. For this was not
a minor sideshow in the First World War: Italy entered it more or less
gratuitously, without the imperatives of survival that animated the other
combatants, and was duly sneered at in London and Paris for being both venally
calculating and lacking in military fervour. But once
it got stuck into the vertiginous task of trying to dislodge the
Austro-Hungarian empire from its strongholds high in the Alps, its soldiers
began learning inch by inch the same lessons about barbed wire, trenches,
grenades, poison gas, cretinous leadership and jingo
journalists as were being learned hundreds of miles to the north in Flanders.
As in the rest of
Europe, the industrialised
savagery of the war laid the beastly foundations for the rest of the 20th
century. Yet Italy,
though late to the fray and late also to the vicious games
of nationalism, had in important ways anticipated those lessons. In the
grotesque demagogue Gabriele D'Annunzio,
one of several anti-heroes in Mark Thompson's
marvellous book, modern warfare had found its
pornographer and prophet. With the Italian invention of Futurism in 1909, the
lust for blood, speed and annihilation exhibited in D'Annunzio's
works went on to infect painting, design and architecture, too. Nor did the
cruelty and misery of the war bring Italy to its senses. On the
contrary, the humiliations inflicted by the Central Powers and the perceived
insults at Versailles
led swiftly and directly to the rise of Mussolini and the creation of Fascism.
Thompson's book is beautifully written, and he skilfully interweaves vivid accounts of military progress
with telling vignettes about the more extraordinary figures caught up in the
fighting: from the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, Italy's answer to Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg, to the
precociously brilliant German Lieutenant Rommel; from Ernest Hemingway, whose A
Farewell to Arms sprang from his brief experience as a volunteer ambulance
driver at the front, to the miserable General Luigi Cadorna,
Italy's supreme commander, who
serenely presided over one fiasco after another until the ultimate debacle of Caporetto, which led to his demise. On the other side of
the Alps, "doing a Cadorna"
"became British soldiers'
slang," Thompson writes, for "perpetrating an utter fuck-up and
paying the price."
The shambles at Caporetto, in which tens of thousands of Italians threw
away their rifles and surrendered without a struggle, cemented their reputation
as "a wretched people, useless as fighting men", in the words of
General Haig. But The White War reveals how unjust the stereotype was. Despite
leadership that was out-of-date, sluggish and sadistic the Roman practice of decimation,
shooting one soldier in ten as punishment for insubordinate behaviour,
was re-introduced by Cadorna millions of Italians fought like lions at
the war's most impossible front.
"Imagine the
flat or gently rolling horizon of Flanders,"
Thompson writes, "tilting at 30 or 40 degrees, made of grey limestone that
turns blinding white in summer". Throughout the war, the Italians were at
the bottom, the Austrians at the top. Those who had the apparent good fortune
to be captured by the enemy often died of starvation: alone among the
combatants, Italy refused to send food parcels to POWs, believing that to do so
would encourage more to surrender.
If Italian war
fever was stoked by the ravings of D'Annunzio
and the mendacious reporting of Luigi Barzini for Corriere della Sera, the unspeakable brutality had the same
paradoxical effect as in Flanders, of
stimulating great literary art. The greatest, however, did not like its British
equivalent condemn the war, but distilled from the hell minimalistically
mystical perceptions such as those of Ungaretti. They
still sound modern today: "In this gloom/ with frozen/ fingers/ making
out/ my face... I see myself/ abandoned in endlessness."
Peter Popham is Rome
correspondent of 'The Independent'