The White War

by Mark Thompson, Faber, 464pp, £25
"The Italian front, often regarded as a sideshow, saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the First World War," said Piers Brendon in the Guardian. A million men died in what Hemingway, who wrote about it in A Farewell to Arms, called "the most colossal, mismanaged butchery" of the conflict.

Eyewitnesses described poorly equipped Italian troops advancing through the snows of the southern Alps into the Austrian guns as if they were attempting mass suicide. On occasion, "in gestures of mercy unique to this front", Austrian machine-gunners simply ceased fire, and shouted to the Italians to go back.

But in General Luigi Cadorna, Italy had a supreme commander unconcerned by pointless slaughter. He revived the Roman custom of decimation - randomly killing men from units "deemed to have shown a lack of pluck and dash".

Like Stalin, he also mounted machine guns behind his own lines to encourage the stragglers. "Mark Thompson's account of all this is original, masterly and definitive. He has not only read everything about the subject, he has also tramped the battlefields and talked to centenarian survivors."

Italy entered the First World War as it did the Second, said David Gilmour in the Sunday Times: "It waited to see which side was likely to win and joined it in the hope of sharing the spoils." But in 1915, the Italians chose the right side, abandoning the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. Its leaders were keen to grab territory for the new state, only unified in 1870.

As Prime Minister Antonio Salandra put it, "sacred egoism" demanded that they seize Italian-speaking areas of the Habsburg Empire, such as Trentino and the city of Trieste. "The price of egoism was 689,000 dead Italian soldiers", many of them southern peasants indifferent to northern nationalist concerns. It was a "tragic and relentless" conflict: there were, for instance, 12 separate Battles of the Isonzo.

The last, known as Caporetto, ended in a heavy Italian defeat, which finally led to the incompetent Cadorna's removal. Italy's ultimate victory was achieved only with French and British support, and when Austria was already seeking an armistice.

This "magnificent" book tells "a sobering tale of jingoism and incompetence", said Gavin Bowd in Scotland on Sunday. It is striking that Italy's War was fought in such a different spirit from Britain's. There were "no Wilfred Owens scratching protest poems"; instead there was the "glamorous and psychotic" Gabriele d'Annunzio, and Marinetti, the Futurist who wrote ecstatically about the blood "spurting from the veins of Italy".

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 25, 2008