HISTORY: The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919by Mark Thompson, Faber & Faber, 464pp. £25 ON ENTERING THE Quirinale Palace in 1922, Mussolini is said to have bowed before the Italian King and said: "Sire, I bring you the Italy of Vittorio Veneto". He was evoking Italy's final (and only) great victory over Austria-Hungary, one which came at the end of a devastating and, for far too long, forgotten war, at least in the English-speaking world.
No longer. Mark Thompson's brilliant book offers an immensely detailed history of this, the so-called "White War", fought over four gruelling years between 1915 and 1918, on the Eastern front, between a feeble but ambitious Italy, eager to stake its claim as a major European player, and an enfeebled but proud Austria-Hungary, determined to defend its ramshackle empire with stubborn bravery.
In presenting this conflict with such uncompromising focus and detail, Thompson has successfully accomplished a necessarily uncomfortable act of remembrance. His is not simply the chronology of a war - of, for example, the 12 terrible battles of the Isonzo, which are, in any case, described in sufficient detail - rather he seeks always to cast light on the human side of the conflict, alternating present tense vignettes with past tense narration, drawing on an impressive range of personal reminiscence, interviews and memoirs, in order to craft a multi-voiced narrative which is compellingly complex and authoritative.
He is also a convincing geographer, offering clear descriptions of the sites of conflict, from the rough Carso hills to the unforgiving terrain around the Isonzo river, to the pitiless Alpine peaks.
Italy began this war in May 1915, just 50 years after its own unification. Under its policy of "sacred egoism", the country broke with its old allies, Germany and Austro-Hungary and set about completing its risorgimento by reclaiming what it believed were its natural borders with Austria-Hungary, the so-called "unredeemed lands" that stretched 400 miles from Trieste on the Adriatic right across Trentino to the South Tyrol, and with them a new status in Europe.
It paid precious little heed to the complex mix of ethnic minorities that inhabited these variegated lands which were destined, almost mystically, to be Italian, with Trieste, in the words of second lieutenant Amleto Albertazzi, the "white city of our dreams".
What mattered in Italy's mania for expansion was "place", the inhabitants were mere "décor, not essential". Initially Italy was foolishly confident of an easy victory, of being "in Vienna for Christmas". This proved delusional and by the autumn of 1917 the Italian army, under the inept Generalissimo Cardorna (his is one of the many illuminating and unforgiving portraits of the protagonists), had been pinned back almost to Venice.
From this terrible reversal - in particular after the battle of Ortigara, in Spring 1917, and after the rout at Caporetto, Italy's lowest point in the conflict - final victory was somehow conjured by Cadorna's more efficient and more human replacement, General Diaz, and Italy managed (with considerable Allied aid) to defeat the Austro-Hungarian army just as the old empire began to crumble. Not only was Italian pride saved but so too was Italy itself.
A central concern of this book is, therefore, an analysis of the vital role the war played in Italian national definition. If it has a flaw it lies in the fact that the depictions of the key Austro-Hungarian figures are much less colourful, detailed and nuanced than those of their Italian equivalents. But what a merciless portrait is painted of Italy, a country led, often in diametrically opposed directions, by three central powers - the government in Rome, the King, and the Supreme Command based in Udine.
Its army was slave to the doctrine of frontal assault, a primitive tactic relentlessly pursued with heroism by what was the worst-paid, most ill-equipped, poorly trained and worst-led infantry in Europe. Italy's treatment of her prisoners of war, who were regarded as defectors, is condemned and we are also given a justly chilling account of the draconian treatment of deserters or even would-be protesters in the army (summary execution on a uniquely large scale).
Thompson also exposes the habit of internment adopted by Italy, citing the 70,000 who were interned on the flimsy grounds of disloyalty to the Irredentist cause (i.e. the redemption of lands that had not been Italian for more than 400 years, cast in almost spiritual terms as "the religion of the fatherland"), a cause most ordinary Italians neither understood nor believed in. Certainly the conscripts had little idea of what they were fighting for. Some 400,000 men were lost in 1915 alone under Cadorna's disastrous leadership, which sent them out to almost certain death.
Those who survived were often left starving and were forced to fight in fields of filth while a pampered coterie of officers enjoyed all the comforts available at the Supreme Command.
The huge losses incurred by Italy came to be mythologised as, in the words of General Garloni, "a necessary holocaust" that would ultimately build character and strengthen the army. This was the Italy where the gospel of energy, ardour and willpower as preached by Cadorna (the first Duce), the warrior-poet D'Annunzio (the second), and later, of course, Mussolini himself, was the order of the day.
One of the strengths of this book is its portrayal of this belief system, of the pro-war propaganda of writers like the futurist poet Marinetti, and of the critique of this type of vitalism which is to be seen in Italo Svevo's The Confessions of Zeno (1923). It also offers a useful analysis of how this war was set in myth by the servile newspapers of the time that cravenly accepted a military model which allowed for no criticism, and later by fascist historians and leaders.
It was only in the 1980s and 1990s that Italian historians really began to get beyond the myth and admit the many ugly sides of the senseless slaughter which saw 689,000 Italian soldiers die (as well as 600,000 civilians) in order to claim land (much of which would be lost again in the second World War) which was home to just 650,000 Italians and 750,000 foreigners. These numbers alone add up to a devastating indictment of Italy's endeavours.
Thompson's book will not be liked by everyone in Italy but it should be hailed as the best account yet of what Hemingway described as "the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery" of the Great War and of the experiences of the vast majority of Italian soldiers who, in Giovanni Comisso's words, had little or no knowledge of "what they had done, or why".
John McCourt teaches at the Università Roma Tre and is director of the University of Triestes Joyce School. His James Joyce in Context will be published by Cambridge University Press in January 2009.