The White War

by Mark Thompson

  He moved to Milan to concentrate on his exams, but political passion would not let him go. Europe’s crisis of nations had sparked a crisis of his own. Like other Italian émigrés at this time, he discovered a yearning to merge with the land of his forefathers, in his case Tuscany – the ‘promised land’ of childhood fables. ‘I’m a lost soul’, he confessed to a friend.

  Which people do I belong to? Where am I from? I have no place of my own in this world, no neighbours. Wherever I draw close to anyone, I hurt myself. How to live like this, forever shutting myself up like a tomb? … Is this my fate? And who should take any interest if I’m suffering? Who could hear me? … I talk oddly, I’m a stranger. Everywhere. Am I going to destroy myself in the blaze of my desolation? And what if war ordains me an Italian?

  The last question is so important that he rushes at it and stops short, as if hardly daring to hope.

  He volunteered for the infantry only to be rejected for active service, being six years older than the first conscripts. Stuck behind a desk, he wrote despairingly to a friend that ‘everything is at stake’, for the prospect of getting to the front was his ‘only joy’. The army relaxed its standards after the first bloodbaths, and by Christmas he was at the front, near Mount San Michele. He would spend two and a half years there. Military service was the most emphatic way of affiliating with Italy, in whose uniform he could – as he wrote in another poem – lie down ‘as in my father’s cradle’. The war, he would later say, gave him his identity papers, and ‘The Rivers’ marked a moment when he felt sure of belonging. Much more often the sense of isolation was almost overpowering, perhaps held at bay by the act of composing poetry:

  Another night

  In this gloom

  with frozen

  fingers

  making out

  my face

  I see myself

  abandoned in endlessness

  In the trenches, he grew immune to nationalist passion. ‘There is no trace in my poetry of hatred for the enemy, or anyone else,’ he said later, truthfully. ‘There’s an awareness of the human condition, men’s brotherhood in suffering, the extreme precariousness of their situation.’ His prewar letters sometimes sound a Futurist note; he told a friend in 1913 that he was a Nietzschean, because he wanted ‘a more heroic humanity’ and a ‘new aesthetic’. In his writings from the front, this note is no longer heard. Although he was friendly with some of the most extreme nationalists, he did not lapse into the ranting that poisons so much Italian wartime writing. Like many artists, he was drawn to absolutes of experience; ideology was a means to emotion, not an end in itself. In fact, ‘The Rivers’ can be read as a humanist redemption of a nationalist motif – the Isonzo itself, named in a thousand bellicose speeches and articles. In May 1915, D’Annunzio told a crowd in Rome that Italian soldiers would soon turn the Isonzo red with barbarian blood. In Ungaretti’s poem, by contrast, it is the uniform that is ‘foul with war’, not the river, which washes the squalor away.

  When Private Mussolini reached the Isonzo on 16 September 1915, he recorded the moment for his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. ‘I have never seen bluer waters. Strange! I bent down over the cold water and drank a mouthful with devotion. Sacred river!’

  Ungaretti met Mussolini in late 1914, admired him, and near the end of 1918 would become the Popolo’s erratic correspondent in Paris. Profoundly naïve about politics, he joined the Fascist Party in the 1920s, along with so many other disillusioned veterans. The admiration was mutual to some degree, as the Duce wrote an offhand preface for his poems in 1923, a single ambiguous paragraph, devoid of interest beyond its byline. Now and then he petitioned the dictator for favours, and in 1930 chose ‘Benito’ as his son’s middle name. An excruciating letter came recently to light, appealing to the ‘carissimo Duce’ for help in gaining election to a prestigious academy. He flattered the dictator’s revolutionary vitalism (‘life is what we need, not people who write to amuse the bourgeoisie’), hailed himself as the best of Italy’s younger poets, and signed off as ‘your most devoted warrior’. No reply has been found. Mussolini came good in later years, however, getting charges dropped after Ungaretti’s several run-ins with the police for criticising the regime and speaking up for a Jewish poet. Desperately chasing regular work, he took his family to Brazil in 1936. The self-styled anarchism of his later years was a twice-burned poet’s way of sending all politicians to blazes. His real politics were summed up in lines that end a poem from France in May 1918:

  I seek an

  innocent country.

  In autumn 1915, Ungaretti would probably have read Il Popolo d’Italia when it came his way. To be sure, Mussolini’s banal veneration is very unlike Ungaretti’s private ceremony. For the poet, the river’s sacredness is inseparable from the feel of it flowing over weary flesh. For the future Duce, it is automatic, almost abstract. Where he bowed over the river to scoop up the holy water, Ungaretti crouched beside it after his dip, as if taking Holy Communion:

  and like a bedouin

  bent down to receive

  the sun

  By smuggling his Egyptian childhood into the scene, he dispels any nationalist atmospherics.

  Other poems by Ungaretti come closer to our usual idea of war poetry.

  Brothers

  What’s your regiment brothers?

  Word trembling in the night

  Leaf barely born

  In the tortured air

  involuntary revolt

  of man facing his

  own frailty

  Brothers

  This conjures a situation with marvellous economy, far beyond the wordy poetic norms of the day. Columns of infantry swap greetings as they file past each other. These words hang in the air, defying the silence and the risk of drawing enemy fire as new leaves uncurl despite the risk of frost, and as his own words unfurl despite artillery and barbed wire.2 These tiny affirmations of shared humanity and common purpose, involuntary because instinctive, hinge on the title-word ‘brothers’, so rich in meaning for the poet. Politicians and demagogues boasted that the war was bonding Italians together for the first time. Ungaretti lived that process with a rare intensity. In a wartime elegy for an Arab friend who had taken his own life in Paris, Ungaretti suggested that the other man had destroyed himself by getting stranded between nations.

  He loved France

  and changed his name …

  but he was no Frenchman

  and no longer knew

  how to live

  in his family’s tent.

  Identity, like war, is a matter of life and death. Ungaretti had swayed on the brink of losing this crucial knowledge. War was the crucible where he fused with his people.

  When brutal details do enter his poetry, their purpose is not documentary.

  Vigil

  One whole night

  thrown down nearby

  a slaughtered

  comrade his mouth

  rigid and upturned

  to the full moon

  his swollen hands

  delving into

  my silence

  I wrote

  letters full of love

  Never have I held

  so hard to life

  Many soldiers were haunted by the memory of dead comrades’ hands, particularly when they died clutching at barbed wire, and asCatholics readily saw such victims as Christ-like. Ungaretti revered the soldiers who, just by being their uncomplicated selves, soothed his insecurity. A letter to a friend, the writer Giovanni Papini, in March 1916 started cheerfully: ‘My comrades and I are writing, curled up in our dens in the midst of a racket that has simply become monotonous.’ A few months later he wrote, again to Papini: ‘The other night I had to march ten km or so in a downpour; I let myself go singing with the other soldiers; I forgot myself; what happiness.’ Their kindness moved him deeply (‘if my knapsack is hurting, they’ll take it off my back and try to take my rifle as well’). They would have thought the old man needed taking care
of. He was amused when they called him ‘sir’, for he was a private like them and insisted on staying one. Many officers wrote about this bond with the men, inevitably with a paternalist awareness of their authority or other advantages over them. Ungaretti’s enjoyment of the bond was as free of condescension as it could be. When the army sent him on the officers’ training course in 1917, he flunked out; ‘unfit for command’ was the verdict. Which he was, and wanted to be. He needed anonymity in the ranks. ‘The least thing that would have distinguished me from the next soldier would have seemed a hateful privilege,’ he explained long after the war.

  Pilgrimage

  Stuck

  in these guts

  of rubble

  hours and hours

  I dragged

  my bones

  given to mud

  like a boot-sole

  or a seed

  of hawthorn

  Ungaretti

  man of sorrows

  an illusion’s enough

  to make you brave

  A searchlight

  over there

  makes a sea

  in the fog

  What was this illusion? Not the interventionists’ promise of rapid victory. (Even in his old age, when scathing criticism of the war was commonplace in Italy, Ungaretti preferred not to discuss the ‘humbug’ that was mixed with the ideals of spring 1915.) It was the beguiling distraction of a visual metaphor – those waves painted on the fog by a searchlight beam. A trick of the light, over in a moment, leaving the soldier no better off but enriching the poet.

  Distrust of ‘literature’ was another lesson of life in the trenches. For if he owed his comrades his education in humanity, he must also have been indebted to them for his plain idiom and staccato rhythm, as well as to his beloved friend Apollinaire, who showed how to quit punctuation. These poems were written when Ungaretti’s ears echoed day and night with the speech of peasants and labourers. To Papini, again: ‘My dear comrades have looked death in the face without knowing why.’ Surely he wanted to write poetry that was true to the unquestioning acceptance that was, for him, the hallmark of his companions’ experience. True, that is, to the ‘community of suffering’ that he felt proud to join. While he shared their disgust at the politicking in Rome, he was no more inclined than they were to oppose the war. Ungaretti’s artistic courage was not matched by independent thinking about the calculus that turned so much slaughter into so little gain. His nationalism was conventional. Healing immersion in the life of the troops was what he wanted, and got.

  Life at the front encouraged modernist concision; for ‘There was no time: the words you used had to be the decisive, absolute words, there was this necessity to express yourself with the fewest words, to cleanse yourself, not to say anything except what had to be said.’ With their startling lack of connective tissue, his poems measure a duress that threatens to cancel individuality altogether, drowning out the personal voice – the voice of poetry. They imitate the posture of the infantry, crouching to minimise their exposure. The wondrous musicality of Italian has been internalised, driven inside the word or phrase. Rhythms lie low until the pulse of speech releases them. Syllables are cherished like comrades’ lives, and spent reluctantly. These poems skirt the brink of silence: heroically minimal, revealing depth in paucity. Commitment to his material is gauged by devotion to its purity.

  They might never have seen print. Ungaretti’s first collection was published thanks to a chance encounter. Ettore Serra, a lieutenant with literary interests, was strolling through Versa, ‘a fly-bitten, dusty little village’ where the 19th Infantry happened to be resting. His eye was caught by a ragged, insouciant soldier who was taking such pleasure in the sunshine that he failed to salute the passing officer. Serra wanted his name, which led to a conversation about a few early poems that Ungaretti had published in a magazine. Asked about his recent work, Ungaretti dug in his pockets for the scraps of paper. Serra took them away and turned them into a book that changed Italian poetry. Not that The Buried Harbour, privately printed in Udine late in 1916, made much impact at the time, even on the poet’s avant-garde friends in Florence and Rome, except Papini, who announced with relish that Ungaretti had ‘strangled rhetoric’. Slipping onstage without benefit of manifestos, the implications of this debut would have been hard to see even without the distraction of war. The poet himself may not have grasped them at the time. For he was not having a quarrel with poetic tradition when he wrote his ‘book of desolation’, as he called it; he was saving his sanity.

  His poems still carry the charge of new expression, minted for new experience. Written as a sort of journal, not meant for publication, they have the self-communing quality of something kept for no one else’s eyes. Early in 1917, he wrote to a friend about an enthralling discovery: ‘liberty is in us’. Nothing can prevent him ‘marvelling at life’s marvels’, and this compensates for his woes.

  I’ve lain down on muddy stones where mice the size of cats run over me as if I’m one of them, while the lice, charming creatures, tenacious as Germans, chewed on us contentedly. But my imagination had nothing to feed on except contemplation of itself, rejoicing that I’m still myself.

  Perhaps Ungaretti kept his status as Italy’s foremost war poet because he proved that lyrical transcendence survived on the Carso, shrunken, introverted, but intact. He spared his readers from reflecting on Italy’s conduct of the war and imagining the horrors inflicted on the soldiers. More than this: by clinging ‘so hard to life’ in the midst of death, he partly redeemed those horrors. Half a century later, he identified ‘the almost savage exaltation’ in his war poems, powered by ‘the vital impulse and the appetite to live’. This is the source of consolation in his work. His poetry, he said, ‘burst like starlight from violence’. Starlight reaches the eye across gulfs of space and time, aeons from the explosion that creates it. Poetry like Rebora’s is more like phosphorus: searing and intolerable.

  Ungaretti valued two kinds of calmness and found them both in the war. Away from the trenches, a receptive stillness of soul let him

  yield

  to the drifting

  of the limpid universe

  as he wrote early in 1916. The reprieve from danger cast a halo around sunlight on dewy grass, purple shadow thrown by mountains, the carnal pink of sunset, a green glade amid blitzed woodlands above the Isonzo. We hear the din of battle in the white silence around his words. There is a seven-syllable poem, ‘Morning’, written in the quiet village of Santa Maria la Longa. When the sky is clear, the mountains to north and east serrate the horizon: a glorious view.

  M’illumino

  d’immenso

  became the best-known Italian poem since Dante.3 Today, it stands on signposts along the main road through the village.

  Then there was the endless resignation of the men in the trenches. The word that linked these states of being was docile: docile, meek, yielding. After Caporetto, he described the soldiers in retreat: ‘They went in silence, meekly, as the Italians go, dying with a smile.’ Despite his ready grin, Ungaretti did not impress others as particularly docile himself. Explosive, rather; truculent; his own man. A friend was working at the Supreme Command when Ungaretti dropped by in June or July 1917. The poet was soon complaining loudly about the soldiers’ conditions and plummeting spirits. The friend told him to lower his voice: General Diaz was in the next office. But Ungaretti’s nerves were shot after a year and a half on the Carso. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on in your general’s head,’ he shouted. ‘What’s going on in all their heads, here? The soldiers are worn out, they’re at the end of their tethers, and as for morale, that’s been stagnant for a long time. Where’s this all leading? Where?’

  Three months later, the Twelfth Battle supplied the answer.

  Source Note

  SIXTEEN Starlight from Violence

  1 not war poems but a soldier’s poems: Cortellessa. Other poems cited in this chapter are from this superb anthology.

/>   2 ‘You smile upon the land that is your prey’: Cortellessa. Laus vitae means ‘Praise of Life’.

  3 ‘kiss the noiseless vulva of the sky’: Cortellessa, 142.

  4 some of the most radical propagandists for war: Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini and Ardengo Soffici.

  5 ‘the holy city of modern man’: Piccioni [1979], 79.

  6 ‘I don’t like war,’ he said: Ungaretti [1981b].

  7 ‘I’m a lost soul’, he confessed: Ungaretti [1981b].

  8 ‘everything is at stake’: Mauro.

  9 ‘a more heroic humanity’: Piccioni [1979], 81.

  10 ‘I have never seen bluer waters’: Mussolini cited by Svolšak [2003], 93.

  11 he petitioned the dictator for favours: Piccioni [1980], 105.

  12 An excruciating letter came recently to light: Zingone, 172.