Mark Thompson's superbly researched account of this little known appendage to the wider 1914-18 war is a stark reminder of the impact of political ideology and the cost in human life, misery, suffering and deprivation caused by conflict. Starting from the blatant opportunist expansionist ideals of Italy's minority intellectual and political elite, double dealing and secret negotiations which finally brought Italy into the war on the side of the Allies, through to political ignominy in Paris in 1919, he paints a picture of a dysfunctional political Italy during the decades either side of the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, which laid the roots for fascism. The Italian military was in no better state, with its antiquated command structure cum strategy, an army under resourced in essential equipment and the inhuman treatment and knowing sacrifice of its own men. A side show this may have been, but one which had little support or understanding within the population at large and who paid with casualties comparable to the Allies on the western front for little or nothing to show in territorial or political gain.
Thompson leaves little doubt that the Austro-Hungarians are the aggrieved party in this conflict, with Italy the aggressor. Indeed Italy's claim to centuries' old Habsburg territory appears akin to German claims over the Sudetenland in 1939 and the Russian justification of their intervention in South Ossetia in 2008. There is also little doubt that the Habsburg's held what moral high ground there was in the conduct of the war and it is perhaps fortunate for Italy that she chose to be on the, ultimately, winning side in the larger 1914-18 war, for she was going nowhere on her own. However, with the subsequent rise of fascism under Mussolini it is questionable whether the rest of the world would agree.
Perhaps the lasting legacy of Thompson's account, however, will be the graphic and harrowing testimony of those participants caught up in a conflict they didn't understand or want and the wanton destruction and loss of life inflicted. Just one example, from many, illustrates the stark reality of the war, when in 1917, in a diversionary attack on Ortigara, `
The Italians have taken at least 25,000 casualties over the 19 days of the battle, on a front of three kilometres, for no gains whatsoever'.
Shorn of its basic facts this same attack is put more poignantly by Paolo Monelli, a captain in the Alpini, when the last enemy bombardment stopped, `... a vast silence spreads... Then groans from the wounded. Then silence once more. And the mountain is infinitely taciturn, like a dead world, with its snowfields soiled, the shell craters, the burnt pines. But the breath of battle wafts over all - a stench of excrement and dead bodies.'
Thompson's book is yet another lesson in the futility of war and should be mandatory reading for all political leaders and governments around the globe.
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