ITALIAN OFFICER, POLITICIAN AND WRITER OF THE GREAT WAR AND BEYOND
A UNIQUE WORK
Perhaps the best novel written about the Italian Great War front – not in English is The Sardinian Brigade by Emilio Lussu. The book’s title in Italian Un anno sull’altipiano which translates to A Year on the High Plateau with other English editions are titled A Soldier on the Southern Front.
Un anno sull’altipiano was first published in Paris in 1938 with an English edition the same year. The book was re-published in 1945 and again in 1960 in Italy and regularly afterwards. The book could not make much of an impression during the period of fascism. It did not do well even with the first reprint following the end of World War Two. Critics did, notice the book in the subsequent years. The antiwar message of the book was magnified as the book became popular in the 1960’s.
Lussu’s effort does stand as an interesting counterpoint or companion to the message one receives from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. There is very little written in English about the battlefields of the Italian Alps and the Slovenian Kras, magnificent landscapes still scarred a century after the fact.
A NOVEL, BUT NOT QUITE
The book is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel covering the period Lussu served on the Asiago front in 1916-1917. It is the first work in Italian to talk of war’s senselessness and irrationality. Originally an interventionist, he soured of the war. He saw high command constantly making the same mistakes sacrificing thousands who had little idea what they were dying for.
It is important to remember the work is a novel even though Lussu writes in the beginning:
“It consists of simply of personal memories, put together in somewhat haphazard fashion and limited to one year only, out of the four during which I served on the Italian front. I have recounted nothing but what I saw and what made the deepest impression on me …”
“I have not allowed my subsequent experiences to influence my attitude but have described the war as it actually was to us then, with all that we believed and felt at the time….”
“It is not a work written around a theme; it has been written simply with the intention of providing an Italian account of the Great War.”
Emillio lussu
THE YOUNG MAN
Emilio Lussu was a young officer with the 151st Regiment. That regiment along with the 152nd made up the Brigata Sassari, the Sardinian Brigade. Those regiments in the book are the 399th and 400th. He came from a small village in southern Sardinia not far from the capital of Cagliari. Matriculating from a high school in Rome, Lussu returned to Sardinia to study law in Cagliari.
During his studies, Lussu served his military obligation, becoming an officer serving in Torino and then back to Cagliari. With the start of WW1 in July 1914, Lussu identified with democratic interventionists wanting Italy to get into the war. Their goal was to advance territorial ambitions of irredentism – Trento e Trieste. Victory also meant defeat for what they thought of anti-democratic regimes in power in Austria and Germany. The war would change Lussu’s opinions.
THE SASSARI
The Sassari Brigade was Italy’s most decorated during the war. Each of the two regiments received gold medals for valor for their flags among other awards. Individually, the men of the brigade earned nine Gold Medals, 286 Silver, 417 Bronze. Another six officers received the Military Order of Savoy. To achieve such heights meant costs. The Brigade lost some 12,932 men as casualties – dead, wounded and missing. This meant the rebuilding the brigade twice, since there are only 6,000 men in a brigade. Lussu, himself, accounted for two Silver medals and two Bronze finishing the war as a captain. The brigade was also unique among the Italian army. The two regiments drew men mainly from Sardinia letting them maintain their unique local identity. Other Italian regiments intermixed men from different regions in an attempt at ‘italianizing’ both the army and the country.
THE WAR
The Sassari started the war in the Carso along the Isonzo River. Their first actions were as part of the fruitless Second and Fourth Isonzo offensives. To help stave off the Austrian Spring Offensive of 1916, the Sassari were transferred to the the high plains of Asiago. Fighting for a year around Asiago, the brigade took part in multiple battles in various locations. The actions of that year take place in his novel. The brigade returned to the Carso taking part in the Eleventh Isonzo. Next, after the Italian catastrophe at Caporetto, they took part in the long retreat. The brigade ended up back on the Asiago altipiano where they had been a year before. Seeing action in the Battle of Three Mountains in January 1918, Lussu was wounded. The brigade finished the war being moved to the Piave River where there were more battles.
POST WAR POLITICS
Lussu served for a couple of years after the war before leaving the army and going into politics.
As a co-founder of the Sardinian Action Party, a party with socialist and federalist philosophies, Lussu was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1921. However, time was against him with the rise of Benito Mussolini the next year following the successful March on Rome.
Re-elected to the Chamber in 1924, Emilio Lussu was one of the 130 members who walking out of the Chamber in protest to the Fascist role in the death of fellow deputy Giacomo Matteoti in June. An unsuccessful attempt on Mussolini’s life in Bologna in 1926, led to a total suppression of political parties other than the Fascist.
EXILE
The day after that attack, a squad of local Fascists attacked Lussu’s home in Cagliari. Defending his house, Lussu shot and killed one of the attackers. He was arrested and tried for murder, but was acquitted. Total suppression of political parties in 1926 followed an unsuccessful attempt on Mussolini’s life in Bologna. Retried by a fascist jury, Lussu was found guilty, Lussu was sentenced to five years on the island of Lipari off northern Sicily.
AUTHOR IN EXILE
From Lipari, Lussu managed to escape to France where he would live until 1938. He took part in the final stages of the Spanish Civil War. Lussu served as a political leader of the Colonna Italiana, a unit of Italian anti-fascist volunteers. With the Republican defeat, he went to Switzerland to recover from tuberculosis he had contracted during his prison stay. While recovering, he used the time to write Un anno sull’altipiano.
In writing Un anno, Lussu works against the fascist ideal that war was good for a nation to experience. To show war could be anything, but a nation-building exercise went against the political theme of the time. The book is not in the same mold as Hemingway, Remarque or Barbusse, all who wrote to decry war, itself. Lussu wrote many years after those authors and while the novel is certainly antiwar, there are other streams running alongside.
Un anno sull’altipiano
He shows men, mostly peasant soldiers, fighting a war for rich interests. Men with no understanding of their role as tools against the Austrians. He also shows the ineptitude of the Italian General Staff. Some actions ordered, seemed only to have their own troops massacred in vain, revealing the generals were the real enemy. Many papers written in Italy deal with themes within the text. Others note inconsistencies between actual events and those recounted in the story. But remember, it is not a history, but a novel.
In reading the book, you notice the importance cognac has – appearing some 61 times. Cognac was important so soldiers could stun themselves before seeing action – the deus ex machina. The totally craziness of the war, the actions, the preparations and the orders all made simple by drinking enough cognac.
RETURN TO POLITICS
Lussu returned to France living there until June 1940. After the German conquest, he forced fled to Portugal and then on to Britain. He worked throughout the Second World War to try bring about the fall of fascism. As a top member of the Sardinian Action Party. Lussu was a minister in the first government following the end of the war. As is too common with political parties in Italy, The Action Party split into different factions. Lussu found himself and his splinter group as a part of the Socialist Party. Re-elected to the Senate four times, he served from 1948 until 1963. Splitting from the party in 1964 he finally retired from political life in 1968. He spent the rest of his life writing mostly about politics.
Rewritten from an article in WFA – Pacific Coast Branch Listening Post Issue 76 Summer 2020 pages 8 – 10.
I’ve never heard of Lussu or his book, but I’ll put it on my list.
Lussu was a very interesting fellow, changing from a hard-driving gung ho interventionist to one who became disillusioned of the war’s purpose and definitely how it was run. Hard to come up with a novel written like his about the Italian experience in WW1 during the climate of fascism. Fascism holding war being essential to the well-being of the nation. Ideas like Lussu’s were definitely not in fashion in Rome between the wars. Only in exile could Lussu have it published.
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