With this edited collection, Vanda Wilcox aimed to ‘showcase’ current research, provide a work of reference, and introduce some ‘core debates’ (p. 2). She has succeeded. Any student who wants to think about and around the subject will gain by consulting this book. The chapters move from military matters through politics, women's roles, the Church, and economics to end with culture and memory.
On military matters, Fabio Cappellano shows that the Comando Supremo did learn tactically from experience. However, the ‘gradual refinement of principles’ had scant effect before Caporetto (p. 41). One wants to know why, and the idea that poorly trained junior officers were the key problem seems implausible, despite testimony in 1916 from the minister of war (p. 42). A haunting sentence is quoted from General Cadorna's manual, Attacco frontale e ammaestramento tattico (1915): evoking the ‘sense of emptiness’ on the modern battlefield, it hints at the scale of the generalissimo's bewilderment on the Carso (p. 33). Andrea Ungari provides good coverage on the birth of the airforce, especially the wrangling over budgets and the decisiveness of Fascist support. One wonders if other European chiefs of staff agreed with General Pollio about ‘aviation's subsidiary nature’ (p. 61). Bruce Vandervoort's chapter on the invasion of Libya does not quite pull its weight, though the clarity about Pollio's ‘delusional’ optimism is tonic (p. 25). If counterinsurgency was the ‘main lesson’ for the military (p. 26), did tactical innovations ensue? Irene Guerrini and Marco Pluviano are painstaking on military justice. They conclude: ‘the data suggests that discipline was a major tool for keeping combatants in line … Nonetheless it would be wrong to imagine that only this pitiless discipline kept the Italian army fighting’ (p. 95). How major was major? They are too responsible to speculate.
According to Stefano Marcuzzi, anti-Italian prejudice was responsible for Italy's fraught relations with its allies (p. 99). In other ways too, Italy was a victim with diminished agency, and ‘the very survival of a nation’ lay at ‘the root of sacro egoismo’ (p. 101). Evidence for these quaint notions is slender, for example about British pressure for intervention (p. 104). In almost similar spirit, Francesco Caccamo extenuates Orlando's suicidal demand in Paris for Fiume: he ‘felt unable to disappoint public expectations’ (p. 143). Spencer Di Scala's supportive profile of Orlando simply overlooks Fiume as a factor in postwar ‘splits between the Allies and Italy’ (p. 207). Also oddly, he believes Salvemini maintained that the parliamentary system was ‘the ultimate evil’ (p. 186); perhaps Mosca – another Gaetano – really went that far. These authors are illuminating on other matters, including the salience of Sykes-Picot, the vicissitudes of Wilsonian idealism, and civil-military relations (pp. 111, 138 and 198). A mist of academic neo-nationalism never settles, but these hints remind us of the dismaying degree of acceptance when a statue of D'Annunzio was unveiled in Trieste last September.
Appraising Italy's astute colonialism in the Aegean, Valerie McGuire contends that the Dodecanese ‘count among Italy's most important, but least noted, victories of the First World War’ (p. 162). Paul O'Brien, meditating fruitfully on Mussolini in the First World War, argues that the ‘foundation of the fascist project’ was in place by May 1915 (p. 165). Not only were the ideas embryonic in Mussolini's head: ‘state-society’ relations during the months of neutrality had sketched a proto-fascist pattern of anti-institutional mobilisation and incendiary nationalism.
Claudia Baldoli and Carlo Stiaccini disentangle Catholic (popular and papal) attitudes to homeland, justice, and peace. Examining the White Leagues in Lombardy, Baldoli finds a Left Catholic pacifist movement that was both socialist and ‘truly religious’ (p. 231). Giulia Albanese helpfully complicates our ideas about demobilised veterans and their political options. Allison Scardino Belzer, having surveyed writing by and about women in the war, finds a seamless continuity between ‘the ideal woman’ of the Great War and of Fascism (p. 271).
On economics, Douglas Forsyth adds to the stock of wisdom about liberal Italy's downfall: its leaders ‘chose macroeconomic stability over democratic political consensus and the economic and social reforms which would have been necessary to consolidate it’ (p. 293). Fittingly, for theirs is the most neglected area of study, he and Fabio Degli Esposti do the heaviest lifting in the book.
Selena Daly corrects several misapprehensions about the Futurists, some of which are traceable to the group's own mythmaking. By separating ‘artistic activity’ from ‘political engagement’ (p. 333), a choice that merited explanation, she can interpret Marinetti's embrace of war in 1914 (‘the finest Futurist poem’) as a move to justify an imminent ‘turn’ to less challenging forms of expression (p. 334). Was it not, though, thunderously consistent with his 1909 manifesto, hailing war as sole cleanser of the world (p. 329)? Irene Lottini's excellent chapter is informative about news films from the front. But, if film was unable to ‘record the horror’ of war, the reasons were surely political before they were ‘technological’ (pp. 354–355).
Oliver Janz traces political influence in commemorative architecture. Aside from the pharaonic ossuaries, like sentinels around the redeemed north-east, these monuments were designed and built by local authorities. Hence their diversity, which Fascism let be. The suggestion that monuments ‘constituted’ a post-facto consensus that ‘did not exist’ during the war (p. 377) smacks of overreach. Besides, as Wilcox has shown, significant nation-building did occur during the war, ‘in the imagination of peasant and working-class Italian soldiers’ (‘Encountering Italy’, Bulletin of Italian Politics 3/2, 2011, p. 283).
Edited volumes ought to be bumpy; however, this one does not always converse with itself. Communication might have been a useful thread. Marcuzzi says Rome failed to create ‘a narrative of the Italian war’ to convince its allies (p. 113). That failure was internal, too: many soldiers did not understand why they were fighting. Daly says Italy was a latecomer to propaganda (p. 344). In fact propaganda flourished all along – it helped lever Italy into the war – but of course it became more strategic after Caporetto. Degli Esposti asserts that Italy would have collapsed if everybody had not been given ‘the impression’ that the entire nation ‘was making sacrifices’ (p. 328). A chapter about propaganda could have analysed that impression and its diffusion. Otherwise I missed only Nicola Labanca synthesising a century of historiography, and Wilcox herself on morale, identity, and emotion.
