I wanted to create the impression of a complete and rigid consistence with an ideal. This was not a scheming on my part for personal gain; it was a deep need in my nature of what I believed and still hold on to as my life’s dedication—namely, that once a man sets up to be the expounder of an idea or of a new school of thought, he must consistently and intensively live the daily life and fight battles for the doctrines that he teaches at any cost until victory—to the end!
Time has effaced many things; the easy spirit of forgetfulness has erased so much. Victory, which came after forty-one months of hard fighting, has awakened many deep resentments.
As soon as war was declared, as I have said, I asked the military authorities to accept my services as a volunteer. They answered that I could not be a volunteer. That was a tragedy. They said that they refused on the ground that an article of the military by-laws considered as possible volunteers only those who had been rejected for physical unfitness, or were exonerated for other reasons from compulsory military service. I could not be accepted as a volunteer. I was to wait my turn to be called to arms until the order from my superiors should be sent me. I was disconsolate.
Happily, my turn came quickly. On September first, only three months after Italy declared war, I donned the simple uniform of a private Bersagliere. I was sent to Brescia, in Lombardy, not far from the raids of airplanes, to drill.
Almost at once I was, to my great relief, despatched to the thick of the fighting on the high Alps. For a few months I underwent the hardest trials of my life in mountain trenches. We still had nothing to soften our hardships in the trenches or in the barracks. We were simply stumbling along. Short of everything—carrying on—muddling through! What we suffered the first months—cold, rain, mud, hunger! They did not succeed in dampening in the slightest degree my enthusiasm and my conviction as to the necessity and the inevitableness of war. They did not change the direction of one hair of my head, one thought in it.
I was chosen to be the amanuensis of headquarters. That I refused. I refused flatly. I amused myself instead by joining the most dangerous reconnoitering expeditions. It was my will and my wish. I gained through that. Within a few months I was promoted corporal by merit of war action, with a citation from my superior in these words: “Benito Mussolini, ever the first in operations of courage and audacity;”
My political past, with the suspicions of cautious and sometimes unseeing authorities, still followed me; it was enough to keep my superiors from sending me to the training school for officers at Vernezzo. After one week of leave I went back to the trenches, where I remained for months. The same life, feverish, adventurous, desperate—and then typhoid fever sent me to the military hospital at Cividale. When I was better I was packed off to Ferrara for a brief, stupid period of convalescence. From there I again took my place on the high pinnacles of the Alps where at night one looking into the dark sky with its shimmering stars felt nearer to the great dome above.
My battalion was ordered to an advance post on the Carso—Section 144—to take up the offensive. I was then made one of the company of soldiers who had specialized in hand grenades. We lived only a few dozen yards from the enemy, in a perpetual and, it sometimes seemed, an eternal atmosphere of shell fire and mortal danger that would be our life forever.
After the first period of hardship I became perfectly and almost comfortably accustomed to all the terrible elements that life in the trenches involves. I read with hungry eagerness the Popolo d’Italia—my newspaper. I had left it in the hands of a few friends. Precipitously separated from it, as one leaves suddenly a beloved relative, I had given orders to keep alight the lamp of Italy’s duty and destiny.
I commanded: “Continue always to call for war to the end.”