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A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the author's experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JYnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu's memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy, the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu's memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.… (more)
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Anyone familiar with the literature of WWI (Sassoon, Blunden, Owen, Graves, Remarque, Aldington, Manning, Mottram), not to mention miles of bookshelves of histories, is familiar with the frequent incompetence and poor planning of military leaders, with the waves of men treated as nothing better than cannon fodder when soldiers were forced to attack in impossible situations, sometimes to win a trench against all odds, only to have to retire from it that night because the rest of the front did not move. The Italian experience, as described by Lussu, is heartbreaking in its description of the extremes of these experiences. Drinking brandy seems to have been a commonplace amongst the officer core (except for some wine when available, Lussu stood out as a teetotaler), with many getting through their days and the horrors of the war drunk. Some senior offices, in particular one commanding general, were barking mad and should not have been in charge of organizing an afternoon stroll in the park, much less military initiatives involving the lives of thousands. Some became mad because of their experiences in the war while others seem to have come to the war that way; but the system would never let incompetence and incapacity stand in the way of connections, noble birth, and good breeding.
The slaughters on the western front were bad enough, but on the Italian-Austrian front they were so extreme that on six different occasions (according to Thompson), sickened by the killing, the Austrians actually stopped shooting and urged the Italians to desist, to go back to their lines. Lussu describes one such occurrence when the Austrians stopped firing, stood on their parapets and waved the Italians back, crying out, “That’s enough! You’re brave men. Don’t let yourselves be shot down like this!”….and meanwhile the mad General Leone was continually urging his troops forward. The same General Leone thought he had a marvelous idea that would sweep aside the Austrian infantry: Farina cuirasses, heavy steel armour that covered a soldier from head to below his knees; of course these had proven ineffective in previous attempts (but General Leone believed in an improved product), of course they were extremely heavy so the soldiers could hardly move at even a walking pace, especially over the rough ground, and of course they were useless with the soldiers cut down, “as if they were wearing cotton shirts” before they even got past their own wire. It is surreal and would make you laugh if it weren’t flesh and blood under the useless steel, a son, a boyfriend, a man who wants to live as much as the next one and whose life is thrown away as casually as one might step on a bug.
Lussu describes all of this, and more madness, but he also describes the things that kept men sane and that demonstrate, again and again, the ability to recover, to recuperate and the willingness to return to the front: friendships, respect for some, a sense of duty despite the madness, leave, however short, in a village with normal people and women, moments lying on your back on a warm spring day with a friend because, as Sassoon said, “…a blackbird song cries aloud that April cannot understand what war means.”