Great War

The Great War persists in the book as more than a completed military campaign: it is a store of losses, credentials, symbols, and unfinished political business. Its survivors bring military experience into postwar violence; its dead are made the subjects of public commemoration; and its language of victory is revived in political ceremonies. The war’s effects also extend into private grief and economic dealings, while disputes left in its wake remain available for diplomatic settlement years later.

War and the postwar political stage

The war’s victory anniversary becomes a public test of who can command national symbols. On November 4, 1920, the second anniversary of the victory, Leandro Arpinati enters Palazzo d’Accursio and displays the tricolor. Police officers allow him to do so despite orders. He then joins uniformed officers in climbing the tower of the Palazzo del Podestà to ring the big bell. At the close of an assembly at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, a patriotic procession moves through the streets amid flags and ringing bells. The date that marks the end of wartime struggle is thus repurposed as an occasion for a new confrontation.

The procession’s authority is enforced in ordinary streets. Fascists order spectators to remove their hats and salute the flag, striking those who refuse; cattle prods are also used. They stop trams and decorate them with flags, beat drivers who object, and prompt the socialist tram operators to abandon service in protest. The fascists then ride through the city in the captured trams until the prefect has the overhead electricity switched off. The sequence makes the war’s national emblems part of a coercive postwar performance: the flag and victory procession do not simply recall the past but establish who can occupy public space in the present.

That relationship between military spectacle and political power recurs at the first anniversary of the March on Rome. In Milan, Benito Mussolini appears on horseback in a militia uniform, wearing a fez, black shirt, Arditi jacket, and dagger. Thousands of decorated men welcome him as he reviews the assembled troops and associations. The ceremony marks a political anniversary only a year after the march, yet it draws its force from the visual language of war: uniform, medals, armed display, and command from horseback. The book sets this spectacle against the passage of time, making the commemoration a measure both of the regime’s consolidation and of the continuing hold of wartime forms.

Veterans, ambition, and loss

The war’s consequences enter the postwar story through the people who survived it. Italo Balbo, then a twenty-four-year-old captain of the Alpini, happens to attend the funeral of fascist dead in Ferrara on December 22. His military distinction has been earned in the final offensive on Monte Grappa, where he led an assault battalion and survived by pretending to be dead for a day after his unit captured an enemy trench. He received one silver and two bronze medals. After discharge in May 1920, he served as a prefectural commissioner before returning to his native city for Christmas. His attendance at the funeral is accidental, but his war record and political passion precede his later role among the Ferrara fascists, whose squads are financed by agrarians. A decorated combatant’s passage into postwar politics links military service to a new arena of action.

Roberto Sarfatti’s story makes that passage more painful. Born in Venice in 1900, he died at seventeen on Col d’Echele on January 28, 1918, with a bullet wound to the forehead. At his commemoration in Milan on January 30, 1921, Benito Mussolini recalls that Roberto, already promoted to corporal, had visited him at his newspaper office while on special leave in January 1918. Roberto had reported high morale and confidence in victory. The account of the visit is set beside his mother’s memory of a distressed boy who insisted that he was acting for himself, his duty, and his conscience, rather than for Italy. Her recollection preserves the distance between a public image of the young hero and a mother’s memory of his anguish before returning to war. A few days after his visit to Mussolini, Roberto led Alpine troops in an assault on Col d’Echele, seized an enemy machine gun, and advanced toward the last stronghold before being killed.

The book also identifies war service as a credential in the political landscape beyond these individual stories. Giacomo Acerbo, a conservative interventionist from the provincial bourgeoisie, was decorated for military valor before abandoning an academic career for politics and founding the Fasci di Combattimento in his province. Aldo Finzi, an aviator from the Polesine, received a gold medal for flying over Vienna with Gabriele D’Annunzio. Emilio De Bono, a highly decorated general, turned to political ties after being pensioned off. These biographies show military distinction carried into divergent political careers; the war provides a shared credential, not a single political destination.

Memory, mourning, and civilian life

The dead remain politically present through ceremonies that refuse the finality of burial. At the funeral of fascist “martyrs” in Ferrara, the procession and religious rites are described as serving not to put the dead to rest but to keep them available for vindication. Afterward, roughly a thousand fascists return to the city center in columns, singing their anthems, while members of the bourgeoisie make way for them. The juxtaposition turns mourning into public organization: the dead are commemorated through a procession that gathers the living into a display of allegiance.

The commemorations of Roberto Sarfatti offer another version of this tension. His mother’s memories remain distinct from the speeches honoring his military courage, even as the audience applauds Mussolini’s recollection of the young soldier’s confidence. The scene does not erase the public tribute; it places that tribute beside a family memory that complicates it. The war’s meaning therefore remains contested even at a ceremony designed to celebrate sacrifice.

Civilian recreation offers a contrasting image of popular life after the war. Giacomo Matteotti brings his wife, Velia, to the Palio in Siena during a rare moment of diversion. Some socialists criticize the race for its spectacular brutality and the injuries it can cause horses, but Matteotti values the popular ardor he sees in it. The crowd fills the center of Piazza del Campo, while wealthy spectators watch from stands and balconies. The scene is not a battle commemoration, but its account sets collective experience against elite spectatorship and shows the varied meanings attached to public spectacle in postwar Italy.

The war’s material and diplomatic afterlife

The Great War also persists as a market in its discarded equipment. In Trieste in September 1923, the narration describes surplus arms, ammunition, medical supplies, vessels, vehicles, clothing, and fuel sold by the state at low prices and resold by traffickers for large profits. Although associations of former combatants, wounded and disabled veterans, and unemployed workers are formally meant to receive preference at auctions, the best lots go to companies concealed behind dummy fronts or phantom associations. Filippo Filippelli, a lawyer and newspaper editor who had served as Arnaldo Mussolini’s personal secretary, and the Milan operator Carlo Bazzi prosper through this system. Material declared surplus one evening can be reused the next morning, giving the war’s abandoned stock a second life in a trade built around speculative access.

A different kind of unfinished business is settled by diplomacy. In January 1924, Benito Mussolini signs an accord with Yugoslavia granting Fiume to Italy, addressing a dispute that had remained open since 1919. The agreement is presented as a diplomatic accomplishment that repairs a wound left by the Great War, in contrast to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s earlier poetic and military enterprise. Together, the settlement and the surplus trade show two sharply different afterlives: one attempts to close a political conflict through agreement, while the other keeps the war’s material remnants circulating for profit. Across these episodes, the Great War is neither a remote backdrop nor a finished chapter. It continues to shape political legitimacy, private remembrance, public ritual, and the possibilities of postwar settlement.