Myth of War and the Combatant

The Myth of War and the Combatant is the political story through which the book’s postwar world gives meaning to mass death. It recasts the First World War not as a catastrophe that should end political violence, but as an unfinished experience whose veterans, dead, and supposed lessons authorize a new national future. The myth draws on the Arditi’s reputation for individual courage, the disorientation of demobilized soldiers, and the promise that a leader can turn a scattered, wounded society into a disciplined people. Its power lies in joining grief to action; its cost is that peace itself can appear as a betrayal of the war’s meaning.

A Postwar World Measured by the Dead

At the gathering in Piazza San Sepolcro, fewer than a hundred men face Benito Mussolini. The scene is framed against millions of war dead and the prospect of five million returning veterans. The smallness of the audience does not make the group’s ambitions seem small: in Mussolini’s vision, the old political world has lost its actors, while veterans constitute the mass that will displace it. Men who survived the trenches are presented as the people of a new era, even though they are described as socially marginal and unable to offer a settled program. The contrast between their number and their imagined historical importance is central to the myth.

The war’s aftermath is not treated as a clean break. The survivors carry the front into civilian life in memory, habits, and expectations. The book sets their belief in combat’s formative power against the ordinary political language of moderation and delay, which appears exhausted beside a generation schooled in crisis. The result is an unstable promise: the veterans are valued as the material from which history can be made, but they are also depicted as debris, exiles from the world that follows the armistice. The myth makes that exclusion a claim to authority rather than a reason to withdraw.

The Arditi and the Making of the Combatant

The Arditi give this idea its most concrete model. Their wartime identity rests on the distinction between specialized assault troops and the mass of soldiers held in defensive trench warfare. They cultivated the image of themselves as the fighters who had truly won the war, a claim expressed in their own publications and sustained by their place in the final advance that broke the Piave front in November 1918. The book shows both the basis and the exaggeration of that self-image: their role mattered, but their legend set them apart from the wider army.

Their fighting methods seemed to restore a personal dimension to a conflict dominated by distant artillery, gas, and industrial-scale destruction. The dagger became a defining emblem, associated with direct physical action and an individual combatant’s capacity to affect events. In the Arditi’s remembered world, the warrior could recover agency where ordinary soldiers appeared powerless. This was not simply a recollection of military effectiveness. It was a claim that courage, aggression, and closeness to danger made a person more fully alive than the routines of civilian peace could allow.

That ideal collided with demobilization. The Arditi had enjoyed a privileged place behind the lines and were celebrated as an elite; after the war, they struggled to find a place in civilian society. The book depicts veterans gathering in two empty rooms on Via Cerva, sleeping on the floor, drinking, and exchanging stories of battles to come. It gives their postwar predicament a pointed numerical scale: forty thousand men are characterized as loose cannons. The combatant myth lets their former status survive the loss of its military setting, but also makes that loss harder to accept.

From Veteran Identity to Political Force

After his expulsion from the Socialist Party, Mussolini turned toward the Arditi as a constituency. On November 10, 1918, during the victory celebrations in Milan, he sat with them on a truck carrying a black flag marked by a skull and raised a toast to the men he had defended against their critics. The encounter mattered because it joined two forms of political isolation: the veterans’ resentment at being discarded after service and Mussolini’s estrangement from the socialist movement that had once been his base. The book presents their mutual recognition as an early basis for political alliance, not as proof that they shared a detailed doctrine.

The April 1919 clash in Piazza del Duomo shows how different memories of the war could divide the street. A socialist procession, led by women carrying Lenin’s portrait and a red flag, advances with hopes of liberation and a better life for their children. Opposite them stand a smaller group of officers, Arditi, and Futurists, men accustomed to understanding political conflict through combat. A cordon of carabinieri separates the columns before it opens; the confrontation that follows is brief. The imbalance between the crowds does not erase the deeper contrast: one group imagines a social transformation still to come, while the other sees itself as already formed by violence and prepared to act.

The book also places the combatant myth beside Gabriele D’Annunzio’s account of Fiume. In his retrospective, the city stands for youth, beauty, and life, while the peace negotiations at Versailles represent a failing and distrustful Europe. The dead are imagined as accompanying the living, and the unborn as a future multitude. This language gives defeat and exclusion a forward motion: the war’s sacrifice becomes a warrant for renewal. It also shows that the myth was broader than Mussolini’s organization, circulating through a political culture that made youth, danger, and national destiny signs of a new age.

Ritual, Nation, and the Reuse of War

As the movement becomes a party, the myth changes scale. Mussolini’s later program presents Fascism as capable of absorbing earlier political traditions, unifying regional identities into an Italian national identity, and pursuing an imperial future. It also places the state, the church, the masses, and national health inside a single account of political reconstruction. The combatant’s action is no longer only a veteran’s answer to civilian neglect; it becomes an imagined instrument for remaking the nation. This shift converts the authority claimed by a marginal group into a claim about the whole population.

Public ceremony gives the dead a role in that conversion. At the burial of the Unknown Soldier, a body chosen by lot represents all the unrecognized fallen. The ceremony turns an unidentified individual into a national focus for grief and reverence, matching the book’s account of war as collective and anonymous. Five days before a later Fascist gathering, the party’s founders kneel for more than half an hour at the soldier’s tomb. The juxtaposition makes politics look like ritual: the movement invokes the war dead not only as memory, but as a source of collective identity and authority.

The myth does not end with soldiers’ bodies or victory ceremonies. When Giacomo Matteotti is returned to the earth in Fratta Polesine in 1924, his wife refuses a political burial in Rome. Tens of thousands of workers gather in his home region, calling for justice and liberty. This is not a continuation of the combatant myth in a narrow sense; it is a later scene in which public mourning again gives the dead political force, now in opposition to Fascist violence. Read alongside the ceremonies for the Unknown Soldier, it reveals a contest over who may speak in the name of the dead. The myth’s historical reach lies in that continuing struggle: war memory can authorize national discipline, but the dead can also become a claim against the power that invokes them.