America, a land harboring so many of our emigrants, still calls to the spirit of new youth.
I look to her youth for her destinies and the preservation of her growing ideals, just as I look to the youth of Italy for the progress of the Fascist state. It is not easy to remember always the importance of youth. It is not easy to retain the spirit of youth.
It was fortunate for me that in the trenches of the Carso—one of the bloodiest and most terrible spots of all the Allied battle fronts and in the vicissitudes of difficult experiences in the struggle with life, I did not leave my own youth behind.
CHAPTER IV
WAR AND ITS EFFECT UPON A MAN
I WRITE of war and my experience in and with war. I write of popular misconceptions as to war. I write of my convictions as to war. And I write of war from two points of view—the politics of the world and the reality of the trenches, where I have been and have learned the torture of pain.
It is impossible for me to show my development and feelings from war without showing how my nation entered war, felt war and accepted war. My psychology was the Italian psychology. I lived it and I cannot suppress it.
It was nonsense to believe that war came unheralded and as a new experience.
The European war, which suddenly burst out in 1914 during a period of apparent economic and moral peacefulness, was not a sudden return to barbarism, as many optimistic socialists and believers in democracy wished—and still to this day wish—people to believe. One must not forget that in 1904 and 1905 Russia fought with Japan a long, disastrous and exhausting war. In 1911 there was the Libyan war. In 1912 and 1913 two Balkan Wars had kept the awakened attention of Europe on the destinies of these nations. These wars had in them the characteristics of an extraordinary drama, as in the incident of Lule-Burgas and in the siege of Adrianople.
The real truth of the matter was that an intense spirit of war was all over Europe—in the air—and everybody breathed it. It was the imponderable; we were at the dawn of a new tragic period of the history of mankind. The beginning of that hard historic event, the World War, was at hand. The gigantic development drew in peoples and continents. It compelled tens of millions of men to live in the trenches, to fight inch by inch for years over the bloody theatre of tragic conflict. Millions of dead and wounded, victories and defeats, complex interests—moral or immoral—spirit of resentment and hate, bonds of friendship and disillusionments—all that chaotic and passionate world which lived and made the Great War was part of a cyclopic ensemble which is difficult to grasp, to define, to circumscribe in mere autobiographic memoirs like these.
When one thinks that Germany alone has already published on the war sixty official books, and considers many that the other nations have published or will publish, one may lose himself in the labyrinth of speculative thoughts. This tremendous chaos gave birth among the defeated nations to the dissolving intellectual scepticism from which sprang the philosophy of realities.