In every corner of the land the church-bells rang, saluting the new day. War, so long and so taxing, had ended!
It ended with a full undeniable victory of Italy in spite of the bankruptcy of Russia and of the abominable work of slackers and professional destroyers of ideals. For me, every family wore the badge of a dear one dead or wounded. Widows and orphans of war were proud to show the symbols of sadness and glory. We were in Trento and Triest. Fiume was half conquered, while Dalmatia was still in the scale.
Over Italy reigned almost supreme a spirit of pride and of serenity typical of those who have won. War had lasted longer than we thought, had diminished our wealth, had supposedly reduced to the minimum our future.
Victory, however, warmed our hearts and our souls. It exalted Italians and spurred them to higher work, honoring the dead as well as the living. From October to December, 1918, Italy seemed like a factory working in full blast in complete accord with progress. War had left, beyond its inevitable griefs, a deep poetical vein in our national life. No one sensed it better, no one seemed more a part of it, than I.
It was in this great historical moment immediately after a victory achieved with untold hardship that our young nation—younger as a nation than America—with traditions not yet seasoned by age, in spite of having thrown into the glowing brazier of the conflict men and wealth, was treacherously deceived. Its fundamental trustfulness was played upon in the making of the Treaty of Versailles.
This is the awful toll that Italy paid in the Great War—652,000 dead, 450,000 mutilated, 1,000,000 wounded. There is not in our country one single family which during the forty-one months of the war had not placed in the holocaust, on the altar of the country, a part of itself. I know every day, ten years later, that the mutilated, the wounded, the widows and orphans of war form a vast proportion of our population, inspiring the respect and homage of the multitude.
I never forget. We have gone through a thousand phases of internal troubles, from aberrations to a purifying revolution, yet—from Mount Stelvio to the sea, in our mountain cemeteries which the hand of time slowly effaces—there remains the most powerful citadel of the fortune of our nation and of our people. I never forget.
I had been the most tenacious believer in the war. I had fought with all my warm soul of Italian and soldier. I lived the joy of victory. I lived in the midst of the unrest of after-war. But in every event, happy or sad, I have always had as a touchstone, as a lighthouse, as a source of every advice and of deep wisdom, the memory of the dead. They are from every region and from every walk of life, even those who were under foreign yoke or emigrated to other countries. They gave their blood and were willing to offer the supreme sacrifice for the mother country. Until the time when a nation has the right of sitting with proud head among other nations, the surest sign of its strength, the highest title of its nobility, the vital food needed to reach greatness, will always be given by those who laid down their blood and life for their immortal country.
These are the marks that war made upon one’s body, one’s mind and one’s soul.
Above all, it gave to one, who was still young, an understanding of the essences of mankind.