The First World War was a conflict marked by intense international mobility. In this regard, the mobilisation within the British and French armies of large colonial contingents drawn from across the globe is well known. By contrast, relatively little is known about the mobility involving a number of emigrant soldiers: metropolitan citizens of European states residing abroad who were recalled to their homelands on the eve of the war to be enlisted in their respective national armies. Among these, a virtually unique case was that of the roughly 300,000 Italian emigrant soldiers who departed from North and South America, North Africa, the British Isles, and continental Europe to fight with the armed forces of their mother country in 1915. These 300,000 men corresponded to around 25 per cent of the 1.2 million males aged between 21 and 39 residing abroad who were required under Italian law to perform military service in the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy. Statistically, by the end of the war they would account for approximately 7.2 per cent of the total 4.2 million Italian soldiers called to fight during the conflict. This represents a proportion greater than that of the colonial troops incorporated into the French army during the same years, or that of the Australian and New Zealand contingents serving within the British armed forces. Nevertheless, the concrete experiences of these emigrant soldiers, both on the Italian battlefields and in the difficult postwar years, have generally received scant attention from historiography.
Daly’s volume offers, for the first time, a comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon, through a ‘global micro-history’ approach (p. 13) that foregrounds the transnational trajectories of four Italian emigrant soldiers from Brazil, the United States, Great Britain and France, within a long-term chronological framework extending from 1915 to 1945. Alongside this restricted sample, the author also draws upon a wider range of cases reconstructed through a broad array of diaries, personal memoirs, and accounts published in the Italian and foreign press. The chosen perspective proves effective, and the analysis of the phenomenon is articulated and convincing, particularly in its deconstruction of the often mythographic and hyper-patriotic narratives that have accumulated over time.
The first two chapters frame the situation of Italian communities abroad on the eve of the conflict and during Italy’s first year of armed neutrality. The third examines the departures for Italy of the emigrant soldiers and their individual motivations. The idea – frequently advanced by wartime propaganda – that such a choice was grounded only in sincere and conscious patriotism is called into question by the author, who highlights the complex nature of the very sense of national belonging nurtured by these emigrant soldiers. Not only did some of them – particularly those born and raised abroad – display a form of ‘dual allegiance’ (p. 68) to their host country, but their attachment to Italy was often an expression of regional identity and of familial nostalgia for their local communities of origin, rather than a genuine sense of national belonging. It is no coincidence that the decision to report for military service was frequently stimulated by pressure from family members, who regarded the prospect of a transoceanic journey at the Italian government’s expense as an opportunity to visit relatives in Italy – something that some soldiers indeed did upon arriving in the peninsula.
Naturally, other motivations also lay behind the decision to depart: some were simply driven by economic reasons, others by a spirit of adventure and by the naive conviction that the war would be short and end in a swift victory. Once in Italy, however, many of these expectations were dramatically scaled back, a process reconstructed in all its implications in the fourth and fifth chapters. Although they endured the same hardships and privations as all other Italian soldiers, integration into the Italian army was generally more challenging for these emigrants. Linguistic limitations, a certain nostalgia for the habits of home, and the relationships they established with the Italian population – sometimes indifferent or even hostile towards them – generated resentment and occasionally facilitated desertion. Moreover, contrary to what some of them claimed, these emigrant soldiers were not volunteers but conscripts: their enlistment, even prior to departure, had already encountered significant resistance abroad, a subject analysed in detail in the sixth chapter. Contributing to these developments was the inability of the Italian authorities to offer meaningful incentives for enlistment or to enforce such measures. The lack of coherent policies and adequate welfare provisions on the part of the Italian state also shaped the difficult demobilisation processes at the end of the conflict, discussed in the seventh and eighth chapters. In general, the absence of economic opportunities in Italy and of effective welfare policies for veterans compelled most Italian emigrant veterans to return to their countries of residence, where their military service sometimes facilitated their integration into the host society, occasionally at the expense of their Italian identity.
By contrast, the subsequent policies of cultural penetration abroad launched by the Fascist regime –addressed in the penultimate chapter – sought to reinforce the emigrant veterans’ sense of national belonging to the mother country. Through the promotion of Fascist organisations overseas, the regime attempted to bind Italian veterans’ associations to itself, though without securing their full political loyalty. In any case, the regime did little to improve the well-being of emigrant veterans, instead exploiting their experience for propaganda purposes to encourage the recruitment of foreign volunteers during the 1935 war of conquest in Ethiopia. The crisis in the regime’s international relations triggered by that campaign, together with Mussolini’s later decision to enter the Second World War alongside Germany, exposed emigrant veterans in certain allied countries to the stigma of ‘enemy aliens’ and to restrictions on their freedoms and episodes of internment – circumstances that, for some, further exacerbated the already complex problem of their Italian identity.
For these reasons as well, the story of the 300,000 emigrant soldiers was condemned in the postwar period to a long memorial oblivion – one that was not dispelled even by the 2018 centenary commemorations marking the end of the First World War. Yet their experience remains crucial for understanding the complex and non-linear processes underpinning the development of Italian national identity. The case of the emigrant soldiers, indeed, seems to elude the thesis that participation in the First World War enabled the full nationalisation of Italians. For some Italian emigrant soldiers, military service on the Italian front ultimately weakened, rather than reinforced, their pre-existing ties to the country, in some cases revitalising hybrid or multinational identities forged through migration, or even prompting the rejection of their Italian roots.
