Penetrating study of one of the forgotten fronts of the Great
War.Italy went to war with the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire
in 1915 for complex reasons, writes British historian Thompson
(Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and
Hercegovina, 2003, etc.), not least of them the irredentist view
that ethnic Italians belonged to a greater Italy. The Allies
abetted this view, promising to render Tyrol, Trieste and the
Dalmatian coast to Italy, as well as portions of the Greek islands,
Turkey and Africa. Italy's politicians pitched an inadequately
prepared and provisioned army against a tactically superior enemy,
which held most of the high ground. The "white war" of Thompson's
title refers to the snowy peaks along the alpine front, but also to
the sheer limestone walls that gleamed white in summer and had to
be scaled - the Western front, Thompson memorably notes, tilted 45
degrees. In any season, the front was terrible, and thousands of
men died - in sheer percentages, at a higher rate of casualty than
in much better-known battles in France and Belgium. A few future
historical giants turn up in Thompson's pages, including Benito
Mussolini, Gabriele d'Annunzio and Erwin Rommel, but mostly his
informants are the forgotten soldiers of the forgotten war, one of
whom recalled, "We kill each other like this, coldly, because
whatever does not touch the sphere of our own life does not exist."
Many of the ethnic groups in which those soldiers figured would
reappear in the history of Europe, among them Bosnian Muslims,
Serbs and Slovenes, "whose alleged pacifism would be a stock joke
in Tito's Yugoslavia" but who drew rivers of Italian blood.
Ironically, Italy never got its promised empire, though Mussolini
would spend much effort and countless lives seeking it.A
much-needed addition to the literature of World War I, which is
undergoing substantial revision nearly a century after it was
fought. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Western Front dominates our memories of the First World War.
Yet a million and half men died in North East Italy in a war that
need never have happened, when Italy declared war on the Habsburg
Empire in May 1915. Led by General Luigi Cadorna, the most ruthless
of all the Great War commanders, waves of Italian conscripts were
sent charging up the limestone hills north of Trieste to be
massacred by troops fighting to save their homelands. This is a
great, tragic military history of a war that gave birth to fascism.
Mussolini fought in these trenches, but so did many of the greatest
modernist writers in Italian and German - Ungaretti, Gadda, Musil,
Hemingway. It is through these accounts that Mark Thompson, with
great skill and empathy, brings to life this forgotten conflict.
General
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