The nation ‘from below’

National identification, according to Geoff Eley and Grigor Suny, is ‘grounded in everydayness and mundane experience’. They suggest that national consciousness is something constantly affirmed in the details of daily life, shared habits and in the language of everyday conversation. But in the ordinary writings of Italian soldiers in the First World War, this routine, everyday kind of national awareness was conspicuously absent. Compared to the strong emotional connections with family and paese, national consciousness was extremely weak. Ordinary soldiers did not usually discuss the purpose of the war, and one suspects that most fanti-contadini had extremely feeble perceptions of what that purpose was. Occasionally, we find starkly anti-patriotic sentiments expressed, and this is usually in a letter that was intercepted by the censor. As one soldier wrote home to Cattolica (Forlì province) in 1916: ‘I will never give my right arm for the motherland but rather I will give it to save myself and my comrades.’ Such defiance is rare. Soldiers certainly spoke of the war sometimes as a scourge (castigo), as disgusting (schifoso), but their most common reaction in their correspondence was fatalistic resignation. ‘Bisogna avere pasiensa’, Emilio Barbieri-Todeschi urged his father, ‘anche di fronte alla morte’ (You have to have patience, even in face of death). The war was endured, not resisted, and not understood either.

This chapter uses soldiers’ writings to examine perceptions of the nation ‘from below’. Common perceptions of the enemy are one benchmark of national solidarity and, as in the French case, linguistic conformity serves as another. The complexities of national identity will be investigated in the case study of writings by soldiers and civilians from the contested Trentino region. This border territory was, along with Trieste, known to nationalists as Italia irredenta – unredeemed Italy – and annexing these regions was one of Italy’s priority objectives in the war. Just as French nationalist ideology asserted that Alsace and Lorraine were fundamentally French, so too, official Italian discourse assumed that the Trentino and the valley of the upper Adige were essentially Italian. Wartime writings by ordinary people reveal a far more complicated picture of the war experience of the Trentini. Their story, for long excluded from view, constitutes a historical memory which is now at last achieving recognition.