The Kingdom of Italy: The History and Legacy of the Italian State from Unification to the End of World War II by Charles River Editors

Author:Charles River Editors [Charles River Editors]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charles River Editors
Published: 2019-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

World War I

Italy chose war and finally entered the conflict on the 24th of May, 1915 with the promise under London's secret pact that all desired territories on the northern borders and the Balkans would become Italian after the Austrians fell. Italy stumbled into war pushed by many forces, but at the highest level of government, many were unsure of the optimistic interventionist view, thinking that maintaining neutrality would prove to be the better choice. The Italian middle-class rose up and marched on the front just as their German and French peers had done before them. A century of middle-class love was spent in the First World War, wrote Francis Scott Fitzgerald decades later in his novel Tender is the Night , giving readers one of the best summaries of the enthusiasm moving entire generations out of their universities and comfortable houses and into the trenches. Mussolini joined the army with his age class on August 31, 1915, and made corporal, but his Socialist connections kept him from joining the officer schools at which he aimed. It was the standard operating procedure in an army still under an absolute conservative rule, where devotion or connections to Socialist ideologies was unacceptable.

Mussolini faced political obstacles during his World War I experience, but his natural violent attitude and ability to adapt to extreme situations made him an excellent soldier, praised by his officers. He never forgot about his political ambitions during the war and fervently worked to better his position, even while occupying the trenches. He wrote a day to day war diary which he sent back to his Popolo d’Italia for publication, presenting himself not only as a war hero but a charismatic leader, working to unite the nation from the trenches where different social classes joined in a single entity. [97]

Mussolini’s “great war” experience was fundamental, in many ways, to his future political ascendance and rise to power and is, therefore, something we should spend time defining. On the Italian front, the war contained technological and tactical advancements implemented on all its fronts in which a combination of barbed wire and artillery would turn the idea of romantic, chivalrous warfare into a horrifying experience, the closest thing the world had ever seen to hell on earth. The Italian front was located on the Eastern Alps, some of the highest mountains in Europe. Soldiers fought from peak to peak, hiding in caves and desperately trying to push supplies up the dangerous slopes. [98] On the 23rd of September, 1917, Mussolini suffered multiple injuries after being hit by a wave of shrapnel. While the most direct effect of this was the end of his direct participation in the war, this is also the first moment in which his narcissistic tendencies came to the forefront. In Popolo d’Italia , he wrote about how he had allegedly refused painkillers while the medical team removed shrapnel from his body. While it can be argued that Mussolini was always dramatic in his writing, this was the beginning

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