Italy’s entry into the First World War matters in this account not only as a wartime decision but as the origin Mussolini assigns to a new political order. Looking back, he presents the country’s intervention on May 10, 1915, as a revolution already accomplished—one that made the surviving combatants, rather than the prewar political class, the claimants to the future. The episode becomes a point of reference for the Fascist movement’s identity, its appeal to veterans, and its effort to turn the memory of war into political authority.

Intervention Recast as Revolution

In a retrospective passage, Mussolini answers workers calling for revolution by insisting that Italy has already had one: the country was dragged into war on May 10, 1915. He then identifies the people he represents with the war itself, declaring that the future belongs to them. The formulation collapses the distinction between the historical event and the political identity built around it. Intervention is no longer merely a decision that began a war; in Mussolini’s account, it is the founding act of a new community.

That claim also gives the passage its contrast. Workers invoke a revolution still to come, while Mussolini presents the war as a completed revolution whose consequences remain active. His image of himself as able to smell the coming times casts the future as an extension of wartime experience, not a return to peace. The event is thus recalled as a precedent and a source of political legitimacy, rather than narrated through the circumstances of the decision itself.

The Dead, the Survivors, and the Political Audience

The war’s cost supplies the grim setting for that claim. The narration evokes eleven million dead and names the Carso, Ortigara, and the Isonzo as landscapes from which the dead seem to rise. Those who gather in the meeting room are described as former soldiers and survivors, a damaged remnant who speak briefly and fall silent. They are not presented as a confident victorious public: they are bound together by losses that have made ordinary political language seem inadequate.

Mussolini nevertheless identifies this audience as his own. He describes himself as the protector of the demobilized and the lost, and reads the nearly empty room as the beginning of a public whose pulse he can still feel. The contrast between the small gathering and the immense dead gives the meeting a politics of absence: the movement’s living adherents appear to speak in the name of those who cannot return. In this account, the war’s legacy is therefore both a constituency of survivors and a symbolic community of the fallen.

The passage sets that veterans’ world against the older political class, whose liberal speakers and cautious politicians are portrayed as exhausted and incapable of facing what follows. Five million returning soldiers, it predicts, will bear down on the country’s borders. The image turns demobilization into a looming political force: men coming home from war are not simply returning to civilian life but entering a contest over who will shape the postwar nation.

From Wartime Commitment to Fascist Program

The organizational consequences appear in the movement’s early program. At a meeting of interventionist groups in March 1919, Mussolini proposed validating the war and those who had fought it, opposing foreign imperialisms judged harmful to Italy, and making the war issue the basis of electoral struggle against parties and candidates opposed to intervention. The gathering approved these proposals, with cities from across Italy represented. The memory of the war had become a political test: allegiance to intervention and recognition of combatants were presented as foundations for collective action.

The later Fascist program broadened this inheritance. Mussolini described Fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism after earlier methods had been buried through violence, and called for the nationalization of Italians across regional identities. Beyond the national borders, he tied national greatness to an imperial idea; within them, he described the state as the vehicle of political unity. These later propositions do not supply further details about the 1915 decision, but they show how the movement’s account of intervention could be carried forward into a program of national consolidation and expansion.

Afterwar Conflict and the Meaning of Mobilization

The book places this political language amid a country where mass organization and coercive action were reshaping public life. In Bologna, socialist organizations and labor bodies pressed demands that affected employers, tenants, and access to bread; in the countryside, leagues controlled hiring and agricultural work, while disputes over labor rules could bring boycotts and forced departures. These conflicts are not presented as consequences of Italy’s entry into the war alone. They do, however, establish the unsettled postwar setting in which rival movements claimed to speak for workers, peasants, and the nation.

In Ferrara, Fascist squads later organized a punitive expedition with military methods, assembling armed men and using trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association to strike several rural targets at once. In 1922, Italo Balbo mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished farm laborers from the surrounding countryside into Ferrara, where they camped in the streets and pressed the prefect for public works. These episodes belong to a later political struggle, not to the event of 1915 itself. Their recurrence of military organization and mass mobilization helps clarify how the war’s vocabulary of action and collective discipline remained available to movements competing for power.

Memory and Political Significance

A later account of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s address to his legionnaires gives the postwar divide a different image: 1919, he argues, would be remembered as the year of Fiume rather than the negotiations at Versailles. Fiume signifies youth, life, and a future accompanied by the dead; Versailles stands for a faltering and distrustful Europe. This is not a description of Italy’s entry into the war, but it echoes the same effort to make wartime sacrifice the measure of political renewal.

The event’s significance in the book lies in this contested afterlife. Mussolini turns intervention into a revolution that has already happened, the basis for claiming the veterans and the future; the movement’s public program then makes loyalty to the war and its fighters an organizing principle. The war’s dead and survivors lend that claim its force, while the postwar conflicts show that no single movement possessed an uncontested right to speak for the nation.