Emilio Lussu's One Year on the High Plateau: review of a book that tells the war without rhetoric

I read it in three evenings, in an old 1971 Oscar Mondadori edition, with yellowed pages and that smell of paper that book collectors know well. It is not a long book, nor a difficult one. But it is one of those that stay with you.

Emilio Lussu's One Year on the High Plateau (Un anno sull'altipiano) tells of a year of war, from June 1916 to July 1917, on the Asiago Plateau, as lived by a young officer of the Sassari Brigade, a brigade made up almost entirely of Sardinian soldiers. It is not a novel of battles, although there are battles in it. Above all it is a book about how men lived, and died, inside a machine none of them controlled.

Who Emilio Lussu was

To understand the book you need to know who wrote it, and when.

So there is a Swiss connection too: one of the most important books on Italy's war was born in the mountains of Graubünden, twenty years after the events, written by an exile whom Mussolini's regime had tried to silence. It was the historian Gaetano Salvemini who urged him to put his experience on paper.

War without rhetoric

The first thing that strikes you, reading Lussu, is the tone. There is no emphasis, no patriotic speech, no music. Death arrives suddenly, often in the middle of a sentence, and the story goes on. A comrade is alive on one page and dead on the next, and Lussu records it in the same spare voice he uses for rations or the cold.

It is precisely this near-normality of death that makes it unbearable for the reader. The war is not turned into spectacle: it is shown for what it was to those who fought it, an absurd routine of waiting, incomprehensible orders, attacks against intact barbed wire, and men falling by the dozen without anyone higher up seeming to notice.

Lussu never preaches. He lets the facts speak, often with a very bitter irony. The generals are the most memorable characters: General Leone, the division commander, is an almost grotesque figure, obsessed with other people's courage and utterly indifferent to the lives of his men. It is he, among other things, who sends soldiers into the attack protected by the famous Farina armour, with tragic results. I wrote about it in an article on Farina armour.

Cognac and chocolate

One of the details that stuck with me most is almost a secret code. The soldiers knew an attack was coming from what was handed out the evening before: cognac and chocolate. It was the signal. Everyone knew what it meant.

And there is the other side of the coin, which Lussu tells with great humanity: when the attack was called off, the hours that followed became wonderful. A kind of sudden grace, of life given back, that only those who had prepared themselves to die could truly appreciate.

Propaganda and reality

Another aspect that struck me is the gap between the war as told and the war as lived. On one side there was the rhetoric of those who celebrated the war from afar: speeches, newspapers, images of heroic actions and enemies defeated everywhere. On the other there was the reality of the trench, made of mud, wrong orders and deaths that were largely pointless. Lussu has no need to comment: it is enough to place the two side by side.

The revolt and the decimation

The pages that struck me most are those devoted to the soldiers' revolt and to the decimation.

In the final part of the book the soldiers, worn out by months of attacks, reach their limit and rebel. Lussu tells these episodes from the inside, from the difficult position of an officer who understands his men's reasons but has a duty to maintain discipline.

Shortly afterwards comes perhaps the most terrible episode: during an enemy attack, a major, beside himself, orders the decimation of the soldiers of a unit, and ends up being killed in turn. It is a scene that captures better than any essay how far the chain of command could go.

I confess that, before this book, I did not know that decimation had also been practised during the Great War: I had always associated it with the Roman legions. Yet it is documented. In the Italian army, besides about 750 executions after trial, historians Irene Guerrini and Marco Pluviano have counted at least 300 summary executions, decimations included, and consider the figure an underestimate. I discussed this in the first chapter of my history of the Great War and in the article on Italy's war fools.

The Austrian officer

There is also a famous page that alone justifies the book: Lussu, lying in wait with a corporal, has a young Austrian officer in his sights, defenceless, unaware he is being watched. He could kill him. He doesn't. At that moment the enemy stops being a target and becomes a man again. It is perhaps the most human scene in the whole book, and one of the most famous in Great War literature.

Novel or testimony?

An important point, for those who read with a historian's eye: One Year on the High Plateau is not an exact chronicle. Lussu changes several names: the Sassari Brigade's two regiments, the 151st and 152nd, become the 399th and 400th, and many officers have fictional names. Historians have also pointed out some differences between the story and the archival documents.

The book should be read for what it is: a novel of testimony, written by someone who was there, which conveys the truth of an experience rather than the exactness of every detail. That is precisely its strength.

In 1970 the director Francesco Rosi made the film Uomini contro (Many Wars Ago), starring Gian Maria Volonté, loosely based on the book.

In short

One Year on the High Plateau is one of those books that dismantle the rhetoric of war without ever raising its voice. Lussu doesn't shout, accuse or preach: he tells. And for that very reason, almost ninety years after it was first published, it remains one of the most honest and powerful books on the First World War.

Edition read: E. Lussu, Un anno sull'altipiano*, Oscar Mondadori, 1971. First edition: Paris, 1938; first Italian edition: Einaudi, after the war. Historical context: I. Guerrini and M. Pluviano,* Le fucilazioni sommarie nella Prima guerra mondiale (2004).