White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 [Paperback]

It has been a privilege to read in the past year two sweeping, magisterial accounts of a sadly forgotten front, the Italian front in world war I. Last year i read the wonderfully detailed, blow by blow account by John Schindler, Isonzo the Forgotten Sacrifice and i loved it. I would have given it more then 5 stars if i could have. This year a second monumental work has come out. Mark Thompson's The White War is a triumph of artistic prose. This book goes into detail of the spirit, psyche, and morale of the Italian army and its people, as well as covering the Isonzo, Asiago, Ortigaro, and Dolomite fronts in good detail. This wonderful volume in tandem with Schindler's classic account are the two books to read on this front. Reading here about the savagery of Luigi Cadorna's command style, the duplicity of Antonio Salandra and Sidney Soninno, and the sheer lust for war embodied by the likes of Gabriele D'Annunzio, Benito Mussolini, Scipio Slataper and other paragons of early 20th century Italian history and culture are mind boggling in this day and age to comprehend. Contrasting sadly is the stoicism and heroic but silent sacrifices made by the men of the army, slaughtered for a few meters of blood soaked ground, usually in the rocky desolate Carso plateau, or the taking of an insignificant hill or rocky precipice at the cost of thousands of lives. The cost of all this was 700,000 Italian lives and over a million wounded. Austrian casualties were roughly half this number. The civilian dead was over half a million more. The bloodletting was savage and amazing, the gains trivial by comparison. In the end, Austria was destroyed, the Slavic nation state of Yugoslavia was born, and the Italians felt cheated by their own allies leading to the rise of Mussolini dominated Fascist Italy. This is a tale that should have been told decades ago, thank goodness it is coming to the English speaking world now. This book is destined to be a classic just as Schindler's book is. The difference between the two is Schindler's emphasis on the military aspects of the campaign, whereas Thompson emphasizes the human story although the military story is always present in his work as well. A wonderful story here, it should be read by all World War I buffs as well as those interested in Italian and Austro Hungarian, as well as Slavic history. This is a story that needs telling as both a cautionary and an inspirational tale of a nation coming of it's own for the first time since the days of the Caesars, and of the great war which brought out both the best and the worst of men in both Italy and Austria Hungary. All in a theatre little written about or read in the west, but a front which took more lives then in the American Civil War, and far more American lives then in all of America's 20th century wars combined. On a last personal note, my late grandfather, dead for many years before my birth unfortunately, on my mother's side, fought for the Italians on the great Isonzo front and later on Monte Grappa. He was wounded on Grappa and came to America shortly after the war. I believe he would have been proud of these two great works and proud of the fact that in Thompson's work the human tale of the common soldier is so well told and sympathetically done. I'm sure the war was the great and horrific defining point of his life, and it is high time justice is done to him and the veterans on both sides in this front. Kudos to Thompson for this masterpiece of writing.

I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.

First of all, the storytelling in this book is spectacular. Thompson is an excellent writer, downright beautiful at times. His well woven- narrative keeps this undertold story moving and the book reads surprisingly quickly.

Some flaws:

One, the author can be almost childishly judgmental of the actors at times, and sometimes it doesn't ring true. While there is no denying that Italy's war was an ill-conceived, bungled exercise in slaughter, sometimes the author seems to suggest that the whole thing was the product of a vast right-wing conspiracy of thoroughly contemptible people whose every word or action is base and vile. I have no doubt some of that is judgment is justified, but there's only so many times one can go to that well before it sounds over the top, and the author goes there way too often. Virtually no one is all good or all bad, let alone a vast group of people. The effect is that the actors in this tragedy seem less human, so the portrayals of them seem less believable.

Two, I would have appreciated more about the post-Caporetto/post-Cadorna campaigning, and how the significant changes in Italian military strategy which followed Cadorna's ouster changed the tactical balance sheet and enabled the final Italian victory. The author treats these issues very cursorily, so that the book kind of falls flat at the end. It's as if the Italian story ended with the defeat at Caporetto, and this was very much not the case.

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