The White War

Named a Book of the Year by Economist • Sunday Times • Sunday Telegraph • Observer • New Statesman • Evening Standard • Scotsman • Irish Times • Guardian • Times Literary Supplement

“Carefully researched and a pleasure to read…. Thompson’s book is a reminder that the first world war was about a lot more than Ypres, Verdun, the Somme or indeed the German and Austro-Hungarian campaigns against Russia.”

“A startling indictment of the Italian state’s conduct during the first world war, which shows how Italy’s nationalist dream of expansion would turn into the Fascist nightmare.”

“Mark Thompson, a young British writer, can claim a notable achievement with his narrative history of Italy’s World War I experience. With authority, sympathy, and unusual literary skill, he illuminates an aspect of the conflict about which some of us feel embarrassed to have known so little. The battlefield saga is sufficiently fascinating, but eclipsed by the portrait of Italy’s social and cultural experience within which the author sets it.... Thompson’s book gives a fascinating, indeed brilliant, portrait of a society immolated by its own delusions.”

“Mark Thompson’s wonderfully rich and poignant study, beautifully written and based on a detailed first-hand knowledge of the terrain in question as well as an impressive array of published Italian sources shows graphically why the events of 1915-18 had such a searing effect on the country’s national psyche.”

“Brilliant.... In presenting this conflict with such uncompromising focus and detail, Thompson has successfully accomplished a necessarily uncomfortable act of remembrance.... It should be hailed as the best account yet of what Hemingway described as `the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery’ of the Great War and of the experiences of the vast majority of Italian soldiers who, in Giovanni Comisso’s words, had little or no knowledge of `what they had done, or why.’”

“Magnificent… original, masterly, and definitive.”

“Alone among the major Allies, Italy claimed no defensive reasons for fighting. It was an open aggressor, intervening for territory to ‘complete and enlarge the fatherland,’ and a place at the high table of European powers. Mark Thompson begins his brilliant account by painstakingly unpicking the politicking and duplicity by which Italy was pulled into this insane venture…. Mark Thompson has written a compelling, penetrating book, not just about the ‘forgotten front’ of the First World War, but about the psychological, political and cultural condition of a nation tussling—even now—with the price of sacred egoism.”

“Mark Thompson’s The White War is a brilliant account of the ‘lost front’ of the First World War, which opened with the unprovoked Italian assault on Austria in May 1915. He describes in harrowing detail a war measured out in vertical inches (‘Flanders, tilted at 30 to 40 degrees’), and reveals the deceit and incompetence of the military and political class that committed Italy to this insane adventure.”

“The author comes to his subject from a useful and unusual angle—he has previously written about the Balkans—and he displays an impressive acquaintance with the background and the terrain.”

“Mark Thompson’s book is the first comprehensive account in English of a war which most Anglophone readers will know only from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms…. Thompson’s account of this conflict is unfailingly lucid and judicious. He makes sense of the complex genesis of the war…. In describing the conflict itself Thompson zooms adroitly. Working closeup, he makes copious and illuminating use of eye-witness accounts, whether those of distinguished writers—Ungaretti, Gadda, Musil, dos Passos—or of ordinary soldiers. Taking a wider view, he makes sense of the politics which shaped the war and traces its consequences, both for Italy, to whose democracy it proved fatal, and for Europe.”

“As Mark Thompson makes clear in this fascinating book, the Italian front was rather more important than it seemed at the time to outsiders or has since appeared…. It is a commonplace that the experience of war is socially and politically cathartic… but Thompson makes that process extraordinarily vivid, using an impressive range of sources—official reports, newspaper articles, veterans’ memoirs, intellectual manifestos—to put into context and humanize the story of military actions and casualty statistics…. Meticulously researched and a gripping read… exemplary and erudite work of popular history.”

“Mark Thompson has addressed a gap in our understanding…. It is in tracing political developments that the great strength of the book lies, but Thompson also casts a fascinating light on the Italian spirit with a detailed examination of war poetry.”

“Thompson writes well and his narrative flows smoothly and easily. He has the novelist’s ability to capture a character in a phrase, and produces some telling snapshots: Lloyd George’s ‘silver tongue’ and Clemenceau’s ‘salty charisma’ stand out.”

“This narrative of that frostbitten war draws from the work of generations of historians and writers (among them Ernest Hemingway) but gleans vignettes that display the passions of the time and the difficulty of changing a strategy mired in repeated failure.”

“Thompson has made excellent use of the specialist literature… anyone interested in the history of one of Europe’s most beautiful border regions will find much to reflect on in this disturbing account of one nation’s road to military disaster.”

“Thompson’s book is a comprehensive work following the causes, culture, and combat of Italy’s war against Austria-Hungary and Germany…. It’s worthwhile reading and remembering, particularly when trying to comprehend what price victory.”

“[Thompson’s] writing is so vivid, so detailed, so sobering that a reader must take an occasional break from the horrors he describes.”

“A lively and sobering history…. Thompson’s history, winner of numerous honors in his native Great Britain last year, blends the personal recollections of soldiers (a few still alive in his 2005 research), politicians, and journalists with the official documents and publications of the times.”

“A gripping, superbly written account of the mostly forgotten episode that led to Italy’s ignominious defeat and descent into chaos and a fascism led by Benito Mussolini, who somehow perpetrated the myth that the Italian army had been victorious.”

“Illuminating…. Both historians and general audiences with interest in the First World War will benefit from Thompson’s study as a contribution toward a more comprehensive, diverse picture of the war than the one to which most western readers are accustomed.”

“A memorable work…. A riveting description of World War I’s forgotten front.”

“This is no ordinary work of military history…. Thompson’s narrative strategies make for an engaging, powerful book…. A richly textured account of a people and its army at war.”

“A stunning account of a forgotten aspect of WWI…. Meticulously researched and brilliantly written, this book… does full justice to one of the most tragic and previously untold stories.”

“A stunning account of repeated failure and despair, incompetence and opportunism; a human tragedy all too easily entered upon and pursued. In addition to sustained accounts of military engagements, there are vivid portraits of key figures, notably D’Annunzio and Mussolini.”

“Perhaps it has been a combination of native shame and foreign contempt for the disastrous performance of the Italian armies that accounts for the remarkable absence of any serious study in English of the Italian front in the historiography of the First World War; but now the gap has been filled by Mark Thjompson with this brilliant and definitive book. It is a work not simply of military but of political and, even more importantly, cultural history as well.”

“The White War traces the bizarre series of events that led Italy into the war, then into a horribly ill-conceived campaign that as much as anything led to Italy succumbing to Benito Mussolini’s fascism.”

“[A] study as pioneering as it is brilliant.... Drawing on an impressive array of British, Italian, and Austrian sources, including fascinating interviews with survivors, Thompson re-creates the Italo-Austrian conflict in all its facets.... The White War is the work of a bright young historian proving his mettle.”

“Brilliant.... It is the first general history of the serial incompetence and brutality of the war in north-eastern Italy between 1915 and 1918, which makes it exceptional enough. In its elegant sweep of cultural and political as well as martial themes, it stands alone: it is one of the outstanding history books of the year.”

“The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, discovers what for most Europeans is a lost but bloody corner of the Great Warm with almost one and a half million soldiers killed. Thompson’s meticulous research is matched by the fluency and tautness of his writing.”

“Mr. Thompson is not just concerned with the fighting but with its consequences for Italy and he tells his story well.”

“This magnificent book by Mark Thompson is a sobering tale of jingoism and incompetence.”

“It is impossible not to read Thompson and be moved both in emotion and in thought. This is exemplary history…. It brings an area and a time forgotten by much of Europe back into a searching light.”

“Thompson’s coverage here of World War I away from the Western Front is deep and detailed, showing the horrors of the Italian campaign against Austria, as well as its influence on not only Mussolini (and thus Italian fascism) but on writers such as Hemingway and Musil. Valuable for all students of the Great War, both general and advanced.”

“A stunning and emotionally wrenching account….[Thompson] crafts a narrative rich in detail and which does not shrink from describing the horrors of a war that began, on the Italian side, in a spasm of wild nationalistic fervor but quickly degenerated into resigned cynicism. This is a masterful and moving chronicle.”

“Thompson constructs and conveys, better than any English-language account, the essence of three years of desperate struggle for the Isonzo River sector in northeastern Italy. He distinguishes elegantly among the 12 battles for this nearly impassable ground, although the book is best understood as an extended essay on the causes, nature and purpose of Italy’s involvement.”

“A penetrating study of one of the forgotten fronts of the Great War… A much-needed addition to the literature of World War I, which is undergoing substantial revision nearly a century after it was fought.”