Emilio Lussu (1890-1975) served as an infantry officer in WWI and was decorated several times for valor. A fervent antifascist, he spent much of the 1920s in exile in France, fought in Spain against Franco, and returned to Italy in 1943 to join the resistance. Mark Thompson is an award-winning British historian. He is the author, most recently, of The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919.
"This beautiful, harrowing, moving, occasionally comic memoir of
the experiences of the Sardinian writer, Emilio Lussu, on the
Italian-Austrian front...in the First World War has remained
largely unknown to English-speaking readers. ...Its republication
in a new translation...means it should now find a place on the
bookshelf alongside Robert Graves and Erich Maria Remarque." -Times
Literary Supplement
"Any avid student of history, particularly military history, will
be enthralled with A Soldier on the Southern Front...this book will
not soon be forgotten." -New York Journal of Books
"The recovered memoir of a brave Italian soldier in World War I. It
is a story of trench warfare in 1916, but more importantly, it is
the story of the men who fought and their derision of their
commanding officers. The author’s memory is vivid, and the
characters demand it. The author writes about a war of maneuver to
save lives rather than a war of position that would cost them.
Lussu’s philosophy of war was born in the days he lived through and
wrote about." -Kirkus Reviews
"Part lyrical Italian mojo, part authorial descriptive genius, part
100-year-old stoicism, this eminently readable book ungraphically
describes the infantry experience." -Library Journal
"...Emilio Lussu’s A Soldier on the Southern Front, stands as a
closely observed critique of wartime generalship that is
demonstrably inadequate to the task at hand...Lussu’s own
recollections of combat stand out, because he retains throughout a
tone of remarkable dispassion even while recording instances of
senior officer ineptitude likely to mortify even the most obdurate
donkey.
Soldier recounts a single year in the combat history of the
Sardinian brigade to which Lussu was assigned throughout the
war...by stitching together a series of loosely-related episodes,
Lussu provides a detailed and compelling picture of what it was
like to fight the Austrian army in the mountains of northern Italy.
Mostly, it was miserable. As on the Western Front so too on the
Southern one: Service in the trenches combined filth, deprivation,
exhaustion, and periodic terror, reinforced by an acute awareness
of being at the mercy of forces utterly without mercy." -Andrew
Bacevich in Raritan
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