IN OCTOBER 1917, after the Italian army's crushing defeat at Caporetto, Field Marshall Haig declared: "The Italians seem a wretched people, useless as fighting men but greedy for money." Two years earlier, as Italy secretly negotiated its betrayal of
the Central Powers, and entry into the war on the side of Britain, France and Russia, Churchill had described Rome as "the harlot of Europe". This magnificent book by Mark Thompson is a sobering tale of jingoism and incompetence.
In its campaign to "redeem" South Tyrol and Trieste, Italy mobilised the same number of men as Britain, with a ratio of blood for territory gained that would make 'Butcher' Haig blanch.
The Italian commander, Luigi Caderno, sent his men on frontal assaults up the blinding white slopes of the Alps and the Carso, only to be mown down by Austrian machine guns. A million casualties did not soften the command's resolve: three times as many Italian soldiers were executed for desertion or mutiny as on the Western Front; prisoners of war, considered cowards and defectors, were denied food parcels. Even the 'liberated' Italians fared badly: considered potential spies and traitors, they were interned and deported.
But, as Thompson eloquently shows, this was a war waged with enthusiasm. For prime minister Antonio Salandra, it was an expression of "sacred egoism". A Socialist journalist, one Benito Mussolini, abandoned pacifism for the mania for expansion. There were no Wilfred Owens scratching protest poems in the Carso. The glamorous and psychotic D'Annunzio, self-styled "poet of slaughter", transferred his vital energy from steamy novels to a politico-military career.
The war was eventually 'won', thanks to a change of command, the arrival of Allied troops and the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. But nationalism sowed the seeds of future conflict. Unattainable territorial demands made Italians despise their victory and turn to Mussolini, whose disastrous campaigns 20 years later led to the definitive expulsion of Italians from Yugoslavia.
In 2002, Silvio Berlusconi put on the new euro coins a sculpture by the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, who fell in the Alps in 1916. Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space impresses some with its "bursting vitality" and "virile determination". It can also make you nostalgic for the Habsburgs.
The full article contains 383 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
