The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919
Mark Thompson
Language: English
Pages: 488
ISBN: 0465020372
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With elegance and pathos, historian Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front, the nationalist frenzy and political intrigues that preceded the conflict, and the towering personalities of the statesmen, generals, and writers drawn into the heart of the chaos. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to the brutal and heart-wrenching war that inspired Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
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burned with contempt for the moral nullity of science, while reactionaries and Marxists alike preached faith in revolutionary action and the necessity of conflict for spiritual renewal or social progress. The compromises of parliamentary democracy were reviled. Perhaps Italian vitalism was the index of three volatile quantities: nationalist anxiety, territorial appetite, and military inefficiency. The reality of the unified kingdom – Giolitti’s despised Italietta – felt to many Italians like a
life. Extreme anguish for the fatherland.’ Capture is, above all, shameful. Over the next year, as he slowly starves, disgrace feeds on him. Reflecting endlessly on the defeat, he blames it on the Italian generals and their lack of foresight. Yet Gadda feels that prison is a justified punishment; the army has not risen to meet history’s challenge. Marches, battles and retreats haunt his sleep. He imagines family and friends reproaching him: ‘You let them get past … ’ Rommel looks up at the
ridge, sparkling in the sunrise on 25 October. The battalion commander has arrived and approved his plan. He leads his detachment along the hillside, traversing below the ridge. They stumble on an enemy outpost, fast asleep in a clump of bushes. His tally of prisoners is mounting. The Italians higher up the ridge are no better prepared; the possibility of being attacked before lower positions have fallen has not occurred to them. Beyond the next summit, called Kuk, the ridge falls sharply to the
glove. ‘Boulders grey with rain and lichen, contorted, split, whetted.’ The cold north-easterly wind called the bora. Fierce sunlight and bristling grass. Grief turns into leave-taking: burn her pale corpse on a pyre of pine branches, cover her grave with junipers. When this mood, too, works itself out, he discovers a work ethic. Her suicide wiped away the petty truths he once lived by. Realising that ‘work is a vain quest for something that has been lost’, he resolves to be strong and to toil
men exhausted. He sent a graphic report to General Frugoni, commanding the Second Army. As the rations were cold by the time they reached the men, and short as well, the mud-soaked infantry could not ‘restore their strength with hot, abundant rations’. Some units went more than two days without food. They were not so much men as ‘walking shapes of mud. It is not the will to advance that’s lacking … what they lack is the physical strength.’ Even the reserves had spent days in water and mud, hence