Scenes From Italy's War
By . Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1919. 8vo, xvi+240 pp. $3.50.
THIS pleasant book, written with discernment and profound sympathy by a distinguished heritor of that tradition of Anglo-Italian good feeling which the great poets did so much to mould and to sustain, will find a task before it. At the present moment Italy lies under an eclipse in the world’s mind. Her bold and honorable refusal to make common cause with the assault upon European peace, her renunciation of an unfortunate past, to which she was bound by economic chains whose weight we fail to realize, her military effort with all its courage, endurance, blood, and pain — these things we are most ungratefully, perhaps a little basely, forgetting. It is good to find them once again, within this book.
The title, with its smack of the ‘war-book,’ does but half justice to Mr. Trevelyan’s work. Not that the author’s memories of the military operations which he witnessed, as head of the first British Red Cross Unit in Italy, are uninteresting; for these are told with an attractive simplicity; but the real richness of the book lies rather in its insight into the Italian character, in its sympathy with the Latin nature, and in its understanding of peculiarly Italian problems. A case in point is the excellent first chapter on those ‘Days of May,’1915, which saw the popular soul of Italy struggling to free itself from the net of Giolittian intrigue, and to pledge itself to the Allies. In no European country did the people— the real popolo — so decisively force its will upon a half-hostile, half-reluctant government. ‘The Italians,’ says Mr. Trevelyan with genuine appreciation of the Italian mind, ‘are not a great parliamentary nation, but they are a great democratic nation.’ These are facts which the contemner of things Italian will do well to recall.
The most valuable part of the book for the historical student will probably be found to consist of the chapters on the taking of Gorizia and the appalling disaster at Caporetto. The actual break-through of the Austrians Mr. Trevelyan did not witness; but he was present with his Red Cross ambulances during the retreat. He does not dwell on the dark incidents of the disaster, being content to note them and pass on, but strives to explain the break by analyzing the mind of an imaginary Italian soldier. Mr, Trevelyan takes this peasant soldier of his own fancy, shows him war-worn, ignorant, and betrayed, and pleads for him so well that, the splendid rally in the mountains passes the sponge over the darker part of the record. This is not history as a science, perhaps, but it is history as one of the humanities.
The book closes well with the great advances of 1918. Let us hope that the military history of Italy will prove of happy omen, and that from the disaster of Paris our sister nation-in-arms will rally to the call of her old idealism, once more to hold the mountain-tops of national and international honor. A. B. B.