A Soldier on the Southern Front: The Classic Italian Memoir of World War 1

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Italian Memoir of WWI
Infantryman
Sardinian officer

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Description

A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the writer’s experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu’s memoir is likely one of the most affecting accounts to return out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown within the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army at the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy, the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.

For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was once a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes frequently tragic and from time to time grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was once as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu’s memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, frequently ironic style that sets his tale wholly except for the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly brand new voice to the literature of the Great War.
Italian Memoir of WWI
Infantryman
Sardinian officer
Great War
1916

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