Carso is one of the battle-scarred landscapes through which the book makes the First World War’s mass death present in postwar Italy. Its trenches and remembered combat ground the veterans’ political world in loss, while later fascist rhetoric recasts the dead as witnesses to national rebirth.

Battlefield and Mass Death

In the opening vision of a meeting at Piazza San Sepolcro, Carso is named alongside Ortigara and the Isonzo River as a source of the war’s immense toll. The battlefield is not treated as a distant setting: its dead seem to lie beneath the gathering, making the meeting take place on ground imaginatively saturated by sacrifice. This image connects the small number of men in the room to the far larger community of veterans and the fallen.

The passage also places Carso within the war’s trench system. The landscape stands for a conflict in which soldiers were exposed to destructive fire and death on an industrial scale. The veterans who gather after the war are described as survivors shaped by that experience, unable to return unchanged to ordinary political life.

Combat and the Arditi

The account of the Arditi sets their close combat against the defensive character of trench warfare. In a conflict dominated by distant weapons and entrenched positions, these assault troops restored a form of personal, hand-to-hand fighting. Carso belongs to the wider battlefield world in which this contrast matters: modern war made individuals vulnerable to anonymous mass violence, while the Arditi’s methods offered an image of direct action and exceptional courage.

That combat identity did not end with the armistice. In another recollection, Amerigo Dùmini waits silently and drinks from a flask, remembering the Carso’s artillery fire. The brief reference makes the former battlefield part of his postwar life: waiting, silence, and the habits of a veteran persist after the fighting has stopped. Carso thus links the public story of combat to the private routines of men who have returned from it.

From Battlefield Memory to Political Myth

The book places Carso’s dead within a political language that divides the old order from a coming generation. The opening passage imagines millions of returning soldiers pressing against existing political arrangements, and presents veterans as the people to whom the speaker belongs. The battlefield supplies this claim with authority: the new politics is represented as emerging from the experience of those who survived and from the memory of those who did not.

Later fascist rhetoric turns death and sacrifice toward the promise of national rebirth. At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini describes a project to make Italians into a unified nation and to pursue imperial greatness; elsewhere, the movement’s growth is cast as the resurrection of a people into a state. These speeches do not identify Carso as their setting, but they echo the book’s earlier association between battlefield sacrifice and political renewal. The landscape’s narrative significance lies in that movement from physical place to political inheritance: Carso first bears the burden of the dead, then helps explain the authority claimed in their name.