A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: War and literature (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Much has been written about the fact that the Great War determined a 
clear break between a before and an after. The duration, the high number 
of nations and individuals involved, the impressiveness of the material 
used and destroyed, the experimentation of new technologies and war 
systems, the mobilization of intellectuals as influencers of public 
opinion, the physical and psychological wear and tear in the trenches, 
the massive involvement of civil society, both as a military objective 
and to fuel industrial war production, the characteristics of total, 
mass and impersonal war with the dematerialization of the enemy's body, 
people becoming useful figures for statistics, marked the beginning of 
an Age of Catastrophe, according to Hobsbawm's definition.

It was a war of governments against peoples, of the rich against the 
poor. And the governments and the rich made use of the power of 
persuasion of poets and intellectuals. Those who tried to describe its 
horror were accused of fomenting defeatism.

As the war gradually showed its true face and every patriotic impulse 
faded, the most lucid intellectuals distanced themselves from the easy 
rhetoric with which the power elite concealed and legitimized a massacre 
of the people. Even the war stories of Pirandello and De Roberto offer 
an anti-rhetorical, anti-heroic and demystifying vision.

In Berecche e la guerra, the corrosive criticism of the 19th-century 
utopias and the ideals of the Risorgimento of the "old" is combined with 
a pitiful skepticism about the fate of the "young". Professor Berecche's 
ancient veneration for German discipline and culture clashes with a very 
different reality: "How many, wounded and uncollected, dying in the snow 
and mud, recompose themselves while waiting for death and look before 
them with pitiful and vain eyes, and no longer know how to see the 
reason for the ferocity that has broken at best, all of a sudden, their 
youth, their affections, everything forever, like nothing! No sign. No 
one will know. Who knows, even now, all the small, innumerable stories, 
one in every soul of the millions and millions of men facing each other 
to kill each other? Even now, a few lines in the bulletins of the 
General Staffs... No: this is not a great war; it will be a great 
slaughter; it is not a great war because no great ideal moves and 
sustains it. This is a market war: a war of a beastly people, grown up 
too quickly and too busy and know-it-all, who wanted to attack to impose 
their merchandise on everyone and, well armed and dashing, their 
know-it-allness».

In some of Federico De Roberto's stories published in various magazines 
between 1919 and 1923, La retata, Il rifugio and La paura, among the 
highest achievements of his work but also of the genre, the testimonies 
of diaries or letters from the front seem to come to life again. The 
Sicilian writer made use of the technical advice of soldiers and 
veterans, from whom he also asked to be able to view war objects. Thanks 
to a maniacal documentary rigor, a raw and unadorned realism and a use 
of language and dialects also in an expressionist direction, the 
narration of an upside-down existential condition takes shape where 
heroism displays the medals of a champion of the word (The roundup), 
betrayal conceals an original vocation to human solidarity (The refuge), 
fear and courage converge in the only possible gesture to express a 
dignified protest, suicide (The fear).

The refuge tells the story of a young fop who systematically disregards 
superior orders by avoiding every effort, sabotaging every task and 
facing the punishments inflicted on him with apparent bravado, only to 
then find great dignity at the moment of death by firing squad. In the 
second part, the superior charged with bringing the sad news to the 
relatives, surprised by a storm during the journey, finds casual refuge 
in the welcoming farm of the deserter's family. Cared for and fed, he 
involuntarily finds himself wearing the same clothes as the boy he had 
to have shot. In the resulting reversal of roles, he is the hasty and 
embarrassed fugitive in front of the recommendations of the soldier's 
mother. The officer experiences the Pirandellian feeling of the opposite 
in having to recognize himself on the side of the executioners and in 
understanding the reasons of the deserter, a victim, in reality, of the 
absurd inhumanity of war.

(extract from an article by Sebastiano Pennisi published in n.4 of 
Scorci, December 2022)

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