Soldiers’ Writings as Sources for Studying the Great War
The Case of Sicily and Sicilian American Combatants
p. 161-197
Texte intégral
Sicily and the Great War: a recent historiographical debate
1In May 1918, a few months before the end of the war, the book Sicilia in Armi was published1. For Ettore Lombardo Pellegrino, publicist and professor of Constitutional Law, author of its preface, “the heroism, sacrifice, and composure of the Sicilian soul2”, which had manifested themselves during the conflict, placed at the center of the national attention the region of Sicily and its social and economic problems which were still not completely resolved3. A few years earlier, the Sicilian political class had tried in vain to remedy delays in development, pushing the government towards the invasion of Libya (1911-1912)4. However, the hope of re-launching the Sicilian island’s economy and redirecting a part of the emigration to Africa had proved to be illusory5. Therefore, at that time, the hope was that the European war could finally bring “new men and new skills, breathable air, without selfishness, tricks of insidious coalitions, valorization of nullity and a boycott of values6”. This aura of political and social palingenesis, which surrounded many European intellectuals of the time, was also shared by the editor and author of Sicilia in Armi, the writer Giuseppe Bortone. In the introduction to his volume, he argued that although
“in this huge tragedy, we feel invaded by the horror of the millions of deaths […] who knows how to look at things from another point of view, […] beyond the small episode and beyond the hour fleeting, in order to embrace the whole and to lengthen the gaze in the past and in the future, finds that the advantages that this war has produced are also great, and will still be greater7”.
2The meaning of Bortone’s work, divided into twenty chapters and over three hundred pages long, is well exemplified by the book’s cover: a Trinacria, the quintessential symbol of the island of Sicily, with the three-legged female face, in this instance with a cruel, proud and combative gaze, from which red flames, similar to vortexes, bring to the apotheosis a winged Victory that holds flowers, against a backdrop of mountains (a probable reference to Mount Etna). On the sides of the medallion, inside which the Trinacria is contained, a sword with a skull and a spade are depicted. The underlying message was probably that Sicilians are not only peasants but, when necessary, they can also be warriors who know how to respond to the call of suffering of their own country.
3In Bortone’s opinion, the adhesion of the Sicilians to the Great War was, in fact, solid and enthusiastic. Moreover, it was said openly that the European War, in which many Sicilians were then engaged, was nothing but a continuation of the Risorgimento’s struggles in which, starting from 1848, the island of Sicily had also been widely involved. Although Sicily was the farthest area from the front where Italians where fighting, Sicilian people were immediately moved “as if they had to free a corner of Sicily and as if, through the mountains and the sea, the lament, the swearing, the warm and pitiful invocation of the unredeemed brothers had arrived over there8”. Bortone also pointed out that the value and impetus of the Sicilians were meant to provoke a sort of “redemption of honor” for their fellow countrymen. When the war was about to end and the results, though uncertain, seemed to play in favor of the Entente countries, Bortone’s book, even only from the title (and, as we have seen, also from the cover), intended to present to the rest of Italy what Sicily and the Sicilians had done during the years of the conflict, above all in the so-called “home front”, and try to dispel every negative prejudice and stereotype (like the number of draft evaders and deserters or the poor moral adhesion). Bortone also suggested that a remarkable transformation had taken place in the months and years since the winter of 1915-16 regarding the main economic sectors (chemical industries, arms and ammunition factories, sulfur mines, citrus and wood production) and that the economy of war had thus helped to promote the industrialization and modernization of Sicily9.
Figure 1: Cover of Giuseppe Bortone’s Sicilia in Armi (1918)

4Sicilia in Armi, despite the epic character of the narration and the clearly didactic and propagandistic purpose, maintains, after a century, a certain interest and fascination. In the following years, no other works were available to revise, critically or not, the facts that occurred in the island between 1915 and 1918. Other than Bortone’s book, Sicily practically left no trace in the historiography about Italy and the First World War. In fact, if we look at the main works on regional history, the First World War is seldom considered10. For nearly a century, an unjustified silence fell on the events of Sicily during the Great War. Only in recent years, and especially close to or during the Centenary, the role of Sicily began to be questioned with greater attention and above all with higher scientific rigor11. The awareness that the First World War did not spare any region of Italy indeed contradicts the common image that associates the Great War with the battlefields along the borders and the regions surrounding them12. For millions of citizens of the South, the Great War represented an opportunity to experience the presence of the State for the first time, and in a consistent way. Although war operations involved a relatively small part of the entire national territory (and geographically distant from Sicily by more than a thousand kilometers), the echoes of the battles, victories or retreats, as well as the news of sons, brothers, husbands or friends killed or wounded, arrived constantly in the South. This territory, although peripheral, saw the same structures of rescue and organization typical of the rest of the “home front” set in motion (to name but a few: Civil Preparation Committees, extensive hospital network for the care of the wounded, places to detain prisoners or host refugees). The theme of the involvement of the island of Sicily in the Great War is justified by several elements.
The number of people mobilized: almost half a million. The Sicilian contingent was the highest among the Southern regions, that is 8,72 % of the total13;
The number of deaths: 44,544 Sicilian combatants (10,13 % of the total) died at the front or in the hospitals after injuries or illnesses (presumably 52,829 deaths)14;
The centrality of Sicilian agricultural production for army supplies15;
The presence of tens of thousands of refugees (especially after the defeat of Caporetto in October 1917) and prisoners. For example, the PoW camp of Vittoria (Ragusa) – the largest ever built in Sicily – was able to host up to 15,000 soldiers (mostly Hungarian)16;
The declaration that the Strait of Messina was in a “state of war” from 1917, because of the presence of German U-boats, which penetrated the Mediterranean Sea and were stationed in the Strait with the aim of sinking passenger and merchant ships in order to block supplies to the population17.
5These elements challenge the widespread stereotype of a predominantly “Northern” war and represent a stimulus to deepen the consequences of the conflict on the society, economy and politics of the island.
Soldiers’ writings and the Sicilian case
6Along with the study of the island’s role in the war as a “home front” and the implications on social, political and economic matters, an interest in the war writings of the Sicilian combatants also emerged. Diaries, letters and memoirs, in fact, encourage us to reconstruct the personal stories, allowing us to plunge deeply into the intimate lives of the soldiers and officers.
7The interest in the so-called “ordinary writings18” in Italy is relatively recent. Italian historiography focused on writing practices of ordinary people (gente comune or semicolti) as key to understanding the war events only from the 1980s onwards. A dense and intense reflection was developed on the topic especially after the publication of the first and fundamental work by Antonio Gibelli in 199119. Subsequently, this debate reached its peak as the centenary was approaching20. This new historiographical movement has investigated traumatic events such as war with a new focus on the experience of individuals. A growing number of scholars have felt the duty to collect and preserve the memories of the protagonists, the “only holders of the existential truth21”, questioning the official memory and the historical reconstructions that do not always give value to individual destinies. Thanks to collections and documentation centers, such as those that arose in the 1980s in Genoa – the Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare (ALSP) –, in Trento – the Archivio della Scrittura Popolare in the Museo Storico (ASPT) – and in Pieve Santo Stefano (Arezzo) – the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN) –, reference points were established for the study of the war experience of officers and soldiers. All three archives have similar collections that include diaries, memoirs and correspondence from combatants during both world wars, letters from emigrants, and a range of other documentation including love letters and personal writing. They all represent – as Martyn Lyons pointed out – the “new history from below in action22”.
8For many of those who were at the front, writing was a compulsive necessity: a way to exorcise the anguish of the trenches. What pushed the combatants to write? Often, in the uncertainty about their fate, writing meant leaving a trace that they imagined could be the last of their existence. However, writing also represented the attempt to introduce a principle of order in the horror of the experience, to face, even after the war, through written words, the overwhelming succession of events23. Reading the writings of the combatants gives us back the thoughts of “people in arms” who can be officers or soldiers; among them, we can find some imbued with patriotism as well as others who feel torn away from their homes24. Mixing the words of the trench officers with the many hobbling writings of peasants – as Fabio Caffarena writes – is therefore “appropriate to create a mixture of voices and heterogeneous stories that can better represent the multi-faceted community of the front”25.
9The Sicilian case shows an interesting peculiarity, which manifests itself in two interconnected aspects: the apparent lack of sources and the lack of archives or documentary centers in the island that could preserve the emerged testimonies. Undoubtedly, an aspect to consider is the high illiteracy rate of the soldiers of the South26. In 1911 in Sicily the illiteracy rate was that of 53 % of men and 63 % of women27. One might think that the responsibility for the lack of sources is above all attributable to it. In this view, Sean Brady, studying Sicily at war and particularly the province of Catania, argues that “high rates of illiteracy among the [Sicilian] men mean that a comprehensive survey of their attitudes to the war is impossible because of a lack of written sources28”. Even Caffarena highlights the scarcity of documentary sources directly referable to the period of the Great War for the South but he does not attribute it only to the high rate of illiteracy in the period examined. According to him, this lack of memory could be derived from a certain initial reluctance (which later became indifference) of the southern population to share letters, diaries and memoirs of their relatives, and therefore “be related to the different involvement of ordinary people in a story that is as mournful and painful as it is separated from the places of daily existence29”. In fact, personal writings are part of a widespread, partly intangible, archive, represented by the complexes of social relations and the territory in which they were produced and/or preserved, which only later take the form of real archives30. If in the places close to the war front the memory of 1915-1918 years has long been and it is still alive, the same cannot be said for the territories of Southern Italy. In fact, it would seem that the gap of popular memory widens as one moves away from the theater of war. Besides, the lack of testimonies can also derive from the lack of archives or documentary centers that reflects a different historiographical attitude concerning the use of these sources that only in recent years seems to have changed31. In other words, sources exist but, on the one hand, the lack of a solid network of institutions – which, as happened in Central-Northern Italy, could offer itself as a valid document collector, avoiding the loss and destruction of these documents, – and, on the other hand, the very long-lasting indifference of population and of most of the academics and local historians have meant that the sources at our disposal now appear to be few. Therefore, the thesis which states that Sicilian combatants did not write anything because of their illiteracy should be nuanced. After all, as Lyons emphasized, “it no longer seems legitimate to assume that the poor and uneducated were inarticulate or they have left few written traces of their existence with which historians can work32”. For instance, Matteo Russo (1889-1917), an illiterate soldier from Catania, sent over eighty letters to his wife during the First World War thanks to the help of a scribe33 and Vincenzo Rabito (1899-1981), a semiliterate soldier from Chiaramonte Gulfi (Ragusa), wrote hundreds of pages in his memoir that were then partially collected into a book, Terra matta, which constituted an unexpected literary case34. Of course, most of the writings available are known because someone, like the relatives of the given soldier, decided first to collect and then to publish them. What about, instead, of the hundreds, if not thousands, of testimonies that have not found a far-sighted heir or a historian who took care of their rediscovery and publication? Many of the letters or diaries and memoirs, perhaps written in makeshift notebooks, have disappeared or are still waiting to be discovered, maybe in an attic or at a market stall. The three main Italian archives that preserve most the writings of combatants (Genoa, Trento and Pieve Santo Stefano) retain some Sicilian testimonies, especially Pieve Santo Stefano, which holds so far approximately twenty documents among letters, diaries and memoirs written by Sicilians during or about the Great War. As already said, Sicily, on the contrary, unfortunately, has no archive that can keep track of them35.
10How can we find testimonies if we do not have physical places that collect them? One way is certainly to go out of Sicily and study the documents collected in the Italian archives mentioned above. As Arlette Farge argues, speaking about the case of French judicial archives, “just because the popular classes were less adept at wielding the written word does not mean that they lived without constructing representations of themselves. The archive[s] [have] many resources in this vein, and you need only to take the trouble to look for them36”. The present essay, however, attempts to propose an even broader change of perspective, considering as “Sicilian” also the sources written in a foreign language by those who had emigrated from the island of Sicily at the end of the 19th century and returned to Europe to fight during the First World War. It might look like a stretch, but the history of Sicily cannot ignore the history of its emigration since the island was among the Italian regions that most of all contributed to fill the Little Italies of the world. From 1876 to 1914, 1,336,793 people left the island. Of these, 36,529 emigrated to Europe, while the majority, 1,232,052 moved to the American continent37. The cases examined here more closely concern two sources, in English, related to two Sicilians who moved to the United States during the great migration to the New World that involved almost four million of Italians38. The first case is that of an Italian American who returned to Italy in 1915, responding to the call of his homeland, the second one is that of another Italian American who enlisted, instead, in the American army in 1917. Two exemplary stories; two case studies useful to expand the range of sources available to us for the study of the Great War.
Italian Americans and the First World War
11“Today, the Mayor called me, and you cannot imagine how I felt when he told me that a warning had arrived, where he was informed that you had been taken prisoner by your will39” writes Antonia Lamberti to her son Giuseppe Maggio on July 9, 1916. Maggio was imprisoned in the Mauthausen PoW camp and soon accused of being a deserter from the Italian military command. The letter – sent from Montevago, near Agrigento, Sicily – shows how the accusation of desertion was perceived by the family of the soldier involved: disappointment, bewilderment and fear are just some of the feelings experienced. Maggio was one of the Italian emigrants who had responded positively to the call to arms of his country. The overwhelming majority of the draft evaders were emigrants (370,000 out of 470,000)40 and this is one of the reasons for which the mother does not believe that her son would turn himself into the enemy: “You came voluntarily from America without anyone obliging you to do so, with so much faith and courage to come to serve our dear country, overwhelmed in this war41”. Having a son or a husband accused of desertion meant seeing the state subsidy removed but also suffering acts of social looting. A phenomenon of ostracism well highlighted by the writer: “The Mayor told me that I no longer have the right to have the pay they gave me, that the subsidy is removed! Then the people fill my head with chatter and tell me that you cannot come back to Italy42”. There is nothing left for the mother but to recommend her son “to show the superiors of your Regiment […] your innocence and your love for our country43”. A postcard sent on August 9, 1916, from Furnari (Messina, Sicily) to Francesco Barca, a prisoner of war in Theresienstadt, from his father Antonio, contains similar suggestions. Antonio similarly invites his son to defend himself against his superiors, communicating “the fact as it is44”. “The indictment that they put on our door declares that at dawn on June 6 you abandoned your lookout post and voluntarily surrendered yourself to the enemy. You will be judged in absentia. See therefore that the case is very serious. We cannot do anything. You must defend yourself45”. The postcard ends with an invitation to get in touch with a relative or perhaps a friend who lives in New York, whose address is given by the father if the son needs something. If Maggio, protagonist of the first letter, had returned from America to fight at the front, in Barca’s postcard a reference to the United States still emerges, this time external to the subjects involved in the text, as an evidence of the link still alive between Sicilian people and the emigrants on the other side of the ocean. However, neither Maggio nor Barca ever read those writings because they were intercepted by the censorship and now preserved in a folder of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome46.
12When, in May 1915, Italy entered the war, Italians in America had already followed with immoderate interest and pathos all the events that had led the Italian government to declare neutrality first and then, little by little, to approach interventionist positions welcomed by the street unrest and the claims of the most irredentist spirits of many young people and intellectuals in the country47. Italy’s entry into the war meant, at least for Italian Americans, the end of the “neutrality” phase. Although only a small number of “reservists” would return to fight48, the war winds still led to the onset of ethnic nationalism among immigrants49. If, “unschooled, scattered, mobile, sundered by regional rivalries”, the Italians had in the past given few indications of the presence of a national spirit, “at the outbreak of the Italo-Austrian war, demonstrations of loyalty were many: substantial subscriptions were made in New York to the prestito della vittoria, thousands of reservists responded to the call to return to Italy, and a characteristically warm reception was given to the members of the Italian mission to the United States50”. The enthusiasm of the inhabitants of Little Italies, promoted and influenced by the bourgeois ethnic press, Italian American leaders and organizations, did not end with the recruitment of some men but manifested itself in broader forms of membership, such as campaigns for the purchase of Italian obligations, rallies, banquets and collections of money or woolen garments to be allocated to the combatants, according to a national-patriotic scheme already experienced in the past, on the occasion of previous national tragedies such as the Messina earthquake of 190851.
13The entry into the war of Italy greatly dampened the individualistic sense of many members of the Italian communities in America and contributed to foster a unique national conscience in many Southern emigrants. The Italian American journalist and lawyer Gino Charles Speranza (1872-1927), in one of his articles as correspondent for The Outlook from Italy, underlined how much stress was laid by some Italian observers “on the part played by immigration in preparing the Sicilian people to accept the brave hardships of war”. If Northern Italy “entered joyously into the conflict, with its soul still smarting under the humiliations and the cruelties of the Austrian oppressor of half a century ago”, Sicily
“from the very beginning rose to the more ideal reasons of the war, and, overlooking its past sufferings, intuitively grasped the fact that the arch-enemy was not the Austrian oppressor of Italy, but the German overlord of a Europe fighting to be free. “Emigration has proved a school of life, an apprenticeship in sacrifice, an experience with pain, privation, suffering, and abnegation; it has been a factor of moral uplift and has habituated the Sicilian people...to the trials of great partings, of far distances, often with no home-coming.” In other words, emigration prepared, in a measure, the spirit of these people for the demands of war52.”
Vincenzo D’Aquila (1892-1975): a pacifist at the front
14The sentiment that many of the reservist soldiers shared was the enthusiasm at the start. The already mentioned Gino Speranza remembers his trip from New York with nineteen hundred of these “Americani”:
“They were the gayest lot I have ever seen, playing and singing all the way from the North River to the Immacolatella at Naples. They came from every point of our country; miners from the West, some wearing caps with the inscription of some flour company or the name of an express company; others decked out in American overalls, suspenders, and sweaters; there was even one Italian from Kansas in a baseball suit! Many of them had the Italian tricolor and a button of the Madonna del Carmine on one lapel and an American flag pinned to the other53”.
15According to the anarchists and the Italian American radical press, which remained the focal point of war resistance among the emigrants, the real reasons for the return of the reservists were instead summarized by an article appeared on the newspaper L’Era Nuova:
“With a smile on their lips, drunken with patriotic spirit and with the hope of returning as victors, covered with glory and honors – they depart. They are leaving because the home government has decreed it; because this is what the war mongers here wish; and the employers of the Consul, with their hypocritical and lying press, have inebriated them with the news of victory after victory, and with the propaganda that this is a sacred war […]. They are leaving – say a good number of them to justify their action – so that they will not incur the punishment of deserters, a threat which the newspapers repeat daily54.”
16However, once they got to the front, for many of them the patriotic inspiration soon turned into disillusionment in the face of the horrors and carnage that were perpetrated day by day on the battlefields. This is the case of Vincenzo D’Aquila (1892-1975), author of a little-known book titled Bodyguard Unseen: A True Autobiography. Published in New York in 1931 by Richard R. Smith, this autobiographical memoir tells his tragic and, at the same time, revealing war experience. Writings like this can help historians to integrate the narration of the facts and they prove to be very useful to reconstruct the intimate dynamics of the combatants. In fact, they represent, like diaries, “a time of more introspective writing, in which it is possible, in a certain sense, to look around, to catch nuances, to elaborate considerations55”.
17Rediscovered in 2008 by the Swedish historian Peter Englund in his The Beauty and the Sorrow. An Intimate History of the First World War56, transposed by the director Jan Peter in two episodes of the 2014 docufiction 14 – Diaries of the Great War and translated into Italian for the first time only in 201957, this autobiographical memoir represents a unicum, both for the personal and spiritual journey that is narrated and the particular point of view of the author. D’Aquila was part of that group of Italian emigrants who, inspired by the newspapers’ propaganda of the prominent people of the “colonies”, chose “to relinquish comparative freedom, the ease and enjoyment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the land of the free and the brave”, ready “to go through the deadly mill for the greatness of the Italian fatherland58”. D’Aquila’s motivations, which pushed him to escape from his father and embark to Italy, were probably spirit of adventure and youthful desire of having a part and to play a role in that historical juncture, maybe that of “a soldier of the king, perhaps of a captain courageous59”. As the author stresses, to influence his choices was the education received. He had grown up spending many hours
“in classroom recitations extolling the merits of what was called patriotism, when what was really meant, but subtly concealed, was nationalism. My ears still rang with the din due to the repetition of phrases like ‘my country, right or wrong’ and other expressions born of ignorance, bigotry and intolerance. Our mentality, my own and theirs, was molded on these models and the idea was fixed that no other people were as great, no other land so productive of genius, as that of one’s birth. They seemed to want us to believe that genius and greatness sprout forth from the ground unlike potatoes60.”
Figure 2: Vincenzo D’Aquila, portrait from Bodyguard Unseen (Richard R. Smith, New York, 1931)

18D’Aquila was born in Palermo on September 19, 1892 and moved to the United States on September 1, 1896, at the age of three, with his family (his father, Cosimo Pietro, his mother, Oliva and his one-year-old sister, Anna). In July 1915 – though he had obtained one year before the American citizenship through naturalization and even if obliged from the solemn act of pledge to “renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty61” – taken by the desire to serve Italy, he embarked on the steamship San Guglielmo going to Naples: his ultimate goal was to enlist as a volunteer in the Italian Army. After the initial enthusiasm, however, D’Aquila is taken over by disillusionment with a war that manifests itself in all its atrocity and cruelty and where his comrades are sent to die like “rats in a room crowded with hungry cats62” and, company after company and battalion upon battalion, are “mowed down like so much crisp hay laid low by automatic reaping machines63”. During one of his first nights in the trench, he experiences a mystical vision, and holds his rifle but decides not to shoot at his enemy.
“The first real crisis in my thinking occurred when I finally woke to a realization that I was about to use that rifle of mine to shoot and perhaps to kill. Immediately my mind became wrapped in clouds of doubt as to whether I would consent to do my part in contributing to the general slaughter. Strange as it may appear, up to that moment it never had entered my head that a musket was placed in my hands to kill with, the same as the tens of thousands of other muskets at their fatal work on all sides. It was at this same moment that I commenced thinking straight and not on the oblique, as I had been doing till then. “To kill with!” – I spoke to myself, “that’s a soldier’s business. Shut your mouth. Shut your brain. Go ahead. Theirs not to reason why – theirs but to do and die!” Lost to the world in my thoughts, quite unexpectedly a power took possession of my being which seemed to liberate my occult senses. I was looking straight ahead into the starlit sky. Up to the surface of my mind came the Scriptural admonition: “All that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” […] I turned instinctively in the direction of the enemy lines. I fancied every man there was, whether Jew, Christian or Mohammedan, my own brother. Quite true, we did not know one another, even by sight. But what harm, on a man-to-man basis had any of those individual men ever done me, that I should strive to destroy them, in order, of all strange reasons, to obtain fame and fortune? […] No, kill I would not! That decision there and then I took irrevocably. From that moment, I was sensibly in possession of a power indomitable in character – I felt like a superman. The God-Power, as I came to name it in the days ahead, was in me!64”
19He, therefore, promises to God, his bodyguard unseen, to save enemies’ lives and to not kill anyone. “From a volunteer – D’Aquila strongly asserts – I changed to a conscientious objector65”. This “chimerical vow66”, after a series of circumstances and after having contracted typhus, would take him to a mental hospital where he experiences the difficulties of being interned among mentally ill people. In one such occasion, he decides to become a prophet of peace and consecrate himself to the humanitarian battle67. The narration of his internment in the asylum, in Udine and then in Siena, is impressive and gives us a surprising and a from-the-inside story of the psychiatric hospitals in time of war and a unique description of the shell-shocked soldiers, the “very pitiable derelicts of the war”. As D’Aquila highlights,
“two of these youths were in a continuous state of mental tension, victims of a chronic nightmare of perpetual filth. They lived under the hallucination that their bodies were cesspools of filth! […] Imagine under what an endless nervous and physical strain that poor mental victim of mankind’s civilization carried on! […] In a third case, the obsession was downright dramatic. This shell-shocked youth was subject at periodic intervals to an epileptic fit in which he repeated in pantomime a charge under cover, against the enemy, crawling along the hospital floor as his trench, culminating in the war cry “Avanti Savoia!” after which he would drop senseless into a trance68.”
20The Archive of the former Psychiatric Hospital “San Niccolò” of Siena, where he was interned from March to September 1916, holds the medical records of Vincenzo D’Aquila. These documents constitute an interesting counterpoint to his memoir. On the one hand, the opinion of the doctors about his internment period in Udine and later in Siena emerges; an opinion that, clearly, D’Aquila would not have been privy to at the time of the facts, nor at the time of writing his autobiography. In fact, according to the doctors of the asylum “Sant’Osvaldo” of Udine, where he was admitted with the diagnosis of dementia praecox on January 26, 1916, D’Aquila showed “sentimental fatuousness, delirious activity of absurd content with prevalent ideas of greatness69”. On March 10, 1916, D’Aquila, eventually, was moved to the asylum “San Niccolò” of Siena where he was admitted with the diagnosis of cyclothymia. Here in the doctors’ opinion, D’Aquila revealed a “strange delirium of greatness and persecution related to the events of the war in which he had taken part70”. On the other hand, in three letters that he wrote (in Italian) in April 1916, it is possible to read a personal report of D’Aquila’s recent experience at the front. This report, written in a few pages, denotes a certain coherence with what he will write, in a more articulated manner, in 1931. However, while in his autobiography he will associate, explicitly, his desire to escape from the front to the objection of conscience and the following positive result to a divine intervention, here he stated that, anxious to make “spontaneous revelations” acquired at the front about the conduct of war and the ignorance of the commanders, he had purposely simulated the “cerebral delirium” (delirio cerebrale) to justify a hospitalization71.
21After being considered in January 1916 “dangerous to himself and others”, he was declared “completely healed” nine months later. Nevertheless, he was never put on trial for desertion, perhaps because of his double citizenship (the United States were still neutral) and neither he was sent to the front again probably for the pacifist ideas expressed to the other patients and to the doctors and to not turn him into a “martyr” as one officer, acting “as a sort of spokesman” would have confessed to him72. Even if he had been “declared to be in full possession of [his] mental faculties73”, D’Aquila, fifteen years later, admits, with some humour, to still being afflicted and perturbed from that “mental affliction of long duration74” his doctors talked about and “not yet cured of those delirious, grandiose and absurd ideas, which incidentally have won the support of a large element of the thinking minds of to-day, great and small, without subjecting them to the penalty of taking residence in an insane asylum75”. His “delirious, grandiose and absurd ideas” – that in D’Aquila’s view correspond in all respects to his objection of conscience – were indeed shared by many people after the First World War. Since the signing of the Paris Peace Treaties, many books wondered when a second World War would break out and what to do to avoid it. A profound reflection was made also in the Christian communities76.
22D’Aquila’s memoir was published at a moment when Wilsonian idealism still held sway77. The League of Nations (though the United States had failed to join it) continued to embody the widespread expectation of a “new world order” characterized by the spread of democracy and uninhibited economic exchanges across borders under the tutelage of international law78. However, the first warnings of war winds – the so-called “Mukden Incident” on September 18, 1931, provided Japan with a pretext for invading Manchuria – were in the air when D’Aquila had probably already finished to write his book (published in early October of 1931). The debate on peace, which D’Aquila’s book wanted to encourage, was also favoured by the climate that anticipated the conference on disarmament that would have opened in Geneva in February of the following year. On paper, that assembly should have applied what was stated in the statute of the League of Nations, but it would end in nothing. Right after the publication of the book, between October 25 and 30, 1931, “Peace Mass Meetings” were also held in about one hundred and fifty American cities, promoted by Pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), by pacifist feminist Jane Addams (1860-1935) and by the philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey (1859-1952), on the subject “How may another World War be averted?79”. We must also take into account that just two years earlier three anti-militarist literary masterpieces on the Great War such as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That and, above all, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (and the following 1930 homonymous popular movie directed by Lewis Milestone) had appeared and perhaps D’Aquila wanted to follow the path traced by them80.
23We can understand better the motivations that prompted the author to deal with his own past and tell his “incidents of war and folly” – as he describes in the “preface” his experience in Italy – by a letter that D’Aquila wrote on October 3, 1931 to James Wilford Garner (1871-1938), professor of political science at University of Illinois. Here he pointed out that his book represented “the writer’s contribution to the cause of World Peace and International Understanding and Good Will” and sought to “illustrate through the form of a dynamic personal experience the latent powers within us all awaiting to assert themselves in behalf of the commonweal”.
“Whatever may be your personal sentiments regarding War and Peace, – he underlined – it is conceded by militarist and non-militarist alike, that the present state of universal unrest cannot continue indefinitely. Reverberation of a political, economical and spiritual nature throughout the world emphasize more than ever, the interdependence of all peoples. The nations of the earth are destined to sink or swim together. These are times when every man’s spirit is being tested. Each of us can contribute in his own way constructively or destructively in moulding the future of the human race81.”
24Whoever writes – especially after many years – about their experiences cannot be free from the temptation to review and rearrange them, making them more consistent both for readers and for their own memory. In fact, in every autobiographical writing there is a certain expectation for the dissemination and acceptance of the story itself. As a matter of fact, in D’Aquila’s pages, it is possible to trace reflections, influences and references borrowed from numerous readings, not only the above-mentioned masterpieces on the Great War, but also from the Holy Texts82 and other classics of world literature like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Shakespeare’s dramas83. Nevertheless, as clearly expressed by the subtitle of his book, D’Aquila’s aim was to write a true autobiography. This further adjective’s clarification may appear tautological (which autobiography in the intent of his/her writer is not true?) but is not secondary and probably expresses the author’s desire to break away from the type of fictionalized writing and get as close as possible to the pure truth of the facts. D’Aquila, after all, encases his story into a well-defined scheme in which the evolution of the plot corresponds to the very evolution of its spiritual conversion and inner consciousness. The titles of the three parts in which this 279-pages book is divided are proof of this: Beginning to think straight; Coming to a straight conclusion; Putting that straight conclusion in force.
Figure 3: A letter from Vincenzo D’Aquila to James Wilford Garner, October 3, 1931.

25D’Aquila’s story is an important source for our research. Not just because of his Sicilian roots but because these roots are essential to the development (and are a part of) of its narration. First of all, the author often emphasizes his Sicilian origins and the Jewish origins of his ancestors, who had arrived centuries earlier in Sicily, the “land of a hundred races, the melting pot of the old world84”. In the book, the tales of Italy in his time, especially of the region where he was born, are remarkable. D’Aquila passes through Palermo several times. In his hometown, he spends part of the long license after his discharge from the hospital: it is where he passed most of his time “either sitting under the shades of the numerous trees of La Favorita, the favorite villa of the Bourbon kings or else watching the blue Mediterranean waters washing against the beach and breakwater at the foot of the Cassaro, the old Kasr of the Arabian and Saracen days85.” D’Aquila also provides us a faithful account of the propaganda speeches held in the churches of the island and addressed to the combatants:
“It disgusted me to watch the entire local garrison march its way into the majestic basilica of San Domenico. I knew that they were obliged to listen to propaganda sermons by military chaplains who spoke eloquently regarding the holy war and the obligation of every good Italian and Christian to follow the king’s order to kill other good Christians in the interest of the sacred cause. In passing it may be worth mentioning that some of these same ministers of the Lord are engaged in glorifying the fruits of victory and God’s favor to the Italian arms to this very day, and calling for funds to take care of the orphans of the very soldiers whom they incited to murder and be murdered in turn86!”
26Furthermore, the description of the Sicilian countryside is noteworthy: in the eyes of someone like him, “brought up in the complicated atmosphere of a busy American metropolis”, the island appears in all its pleasant contrast. The theme of Sicily accompanies, moreover, the whole story: the island is a safe haven to return to, the land of gold to behold, in which time seems not to pass and whose inhabitants, though “rustic and old-fashioned in their ways”, “primitive in their dress and moral ideas”, challenged the results obtained “from our modern and highly materialistic civilization which was now resorting as its means of self-expression to a most devastating war of ruthless destruction and unholy hatred87”. In the rail journey from his hometown, Palermo, to the front, D’Aquila expresses all the discomfort, uncertainty and anguish towards the future experienced by lots of Sicilian combatants, particularly when he compares “rural Sicily” which, “at early dawn, is enchanting to contemplate” to him and the other “handful of youths drawn together from the new world, in a third-class compartment, bound to scenes diametrically opposite to those we were now surveying88”:
“Here was a countryside which had seen civilization ebb and flow for many centuries. One race had succeeded another in its domination of this rich land. For all that, it still remained a placid, peaceful, verdant series of graceful plateaus, hills and mountains, garlanded with pastures, vineyards and rich orchards laden with luscious fruits, olive trees, palms and oleanders, many in full bloom. The glamor of this panorama was greatly accentuated and enhanced for us by the antiquated mode of existence, the medieval transportation methods still employed by the natives, and the consequent atmosphere of peace, happiness and contentment. Taking it all together made it very difficult to imagine ourselves bound to war, madness and destruction. Occasionally, as the train slowly wound its way, zig-zagging through tunnels and mountain passes, a group of mule drivers could be seen leading their charges, heavily laden with the products of the soil and of their labors over the identical highways trod by the warriors of Hannibal and Caesar. The quaint folk-songs which they were singing echoed back to us and mingled with the screeching of the locomotive siren – songs, perhaps centuries old, judged by their slow pathetic style and their note of peace with God and man89.”
27A further precious part of the book is its narration of the arrival to Messina – the city that in 1908 had been almost totally destroyed by a severe earthquake – from which he would have had to embark through the ferryboat for the Italian mainland. Here the author notices, not without bitterness and a touch of irony, that in 1915, the city was still filled with rubble and that the reconstruction proceeded very slowly. And to the reader the physical destruction of Messina seems to foreshadow the future moral destruction of an entire young generation:
“At noon we reached the temporary wooden sheds representing the Messina railway station. We alighted for a few hours in order to permit the switching of our train onto the which was to convey it across the Messina straits to. In the meantime we took in the ruins of the city, while seeking a tavern, for it was being rebuilt leisurely, or I might say with extreme deliberation. Now that the war was right on us, everything grew quiet. There was no sense building at one point of the Italian boot, when there was no known way of preventing the deliberate destruction going on at another point. However, I remember Messina more for a fine repast of fish than for its ruined beauty90”.
28One last episode that makes clearer the strong link that the author has with his homeland is when, in December 1915, a few months after his arrival at the front, he suddenly decides that he will do everything to be away from the trenches by Christmas in order not to break his “chimerical vow” of not killing anyone. Therefore, he is visited by a medical officer. The lucky element of the situation is the fact that D’Aquila finds out that the doctor is Sicilian and, thanks to a certain complacency on the part of that, he manages to obtain a sick certificate in order to be transferred to the field hospital.
“Those few spoken words dropped in my lap the opening of which I had stood sore in need from the start, for they told me, by his accent, that he also was a Sicilian. Whereupon to give the line of conversation a new direction, I inquired what part of Sicily he hailed from. Perceiving now in turn that I was a Sicilian also, he replied that he was a native of the town of Grotte in the province of Girgenti. That was all I needed to know. I immediately recalled the fact that a cousin on my mother’s side had married a man from Grotte, named Vella, a tailor by trade. At this statement, he grew very interested, for, as he explained, he had known Vella as a youth and would very much like to hear what had happened to him since he lost track of him as a young man on his departure to America many years ago. I could tell him of his present whereabouts and thus we became cordial and indeed somewhat intimate with one another91”.
29It is therefore quite evident how much being Sicilian marked him and, in some cases, even helped him. Arriving at the field hospital, the doctors inexplicably decide for an urgent hospitalization. During the journey to one of the hospitals of Udine, however, D’Aquila really falls ill, having contracted typhus. The disease will lead him to a life-threatening experience that takes him “out of an old and into a new and less wobbly existence92”. After a series of vicissitudes and with a new anti-militarist conscience, Vincenzo will later be able to return definitively to the United States93.
Alex Pisciotta (1897-1985) and the American Expeditionary Forces
30Italians who had emigrated abroad did not always come back to their homeland to join the Italian army. Many of them had already been enlisted in other countries before 191594 and many Italian Americans, in 1917, when the United States joined the war, were enrolled in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in the number of 300,000, even if of these only 100,000 were actually incorporated among the fighting troops95. As Fiorello Ventresco argues, “for ‘loyal’ Italians, America’s involvement provided a great opportunity to show their devotion to the new homeland while not diminishing their sentimental ties to Italy96”. Although among the immigrants who left to Europe those already in possession of dual citizenship were also present, the choice to join the army “with stars and stripes” was mainly dictated by the fact that the participation in the conflict would allow a quicker process for obtaining American citizenship on the basis of what was decided by the Congress for all foreigners who had been honorably discharged at the end of the conflict97. To this, the decision of the American Government to ensure a better treatment in food and clothing, a wage of one dollar a day, with the possibility to allocate part of it to the payment of an insurance policy and, not least, the regular granting of permissions with the right of repatriation in the United States must be added98. In the case of Italy, instead, returned emigrants were not permitted to go home for fear they would fail to rejoin their units99.
31For the already quoted Gino Speranza, the war worked “upon the spirit of the immigrant world, upon those hundreds of thousands of European peasant laborers who have known America” sublimating “into an enduring heart’s allegiance the political allegiance of those countless immigrants among us for whom America will have become truly their Patria”.
“To most of the returned immigrants whom I have spoken – he wrote in one of his articles in The Outlook – the distinction between Italian and American citizenship has seemed, and is, vague and unreal; it exists in their minds, if at all, as a legalistic distinction […] What counts with them is what they feel far more than what they do, even if what they do is to stand ready to die like men. […] Fighting on the Italian front or fighting “Over There”, wearing the Italian gray-green or the American khaki, made little difference in the heart’s allegiance of these men100.”
32For Speranza, the participation of the emigrants to the war was the “America’s reward for having offered to every humble yet adventurous soul the longed-for opportunity, for having tendered a home and a refugee to the disinherited of every land”. That is why many men, though subject to military duty in Italy, became volunteers in the Army of the United States101.
33Like Vincenzo D’Aquila, Alessio (Alex) Pisciotta (1897-1985) had also moved to the United States as a child. Pisciotta, born in Menfi, in the province of Agrigento, on October 5, 1897, arrived in New York with his family (his parents, Antonio and Vita, and two sisters, Antonina, nine years old, and Rosalia, two years old), on July 27, 1899. When Italy entered the war, he had not reached the age of majority and therefore he was not required to leave for the front, neither did he enlist as a volunteer. When the United States decided to take part in the conflict in April 1917, Pisciotta went to register102. One year later, he served his country in France with the American Expeditionary Forces between summer 1918 and winter 1919.
34Both D’Aquila and Pisciotta had been naturalized before 1915. They were born in the same region; they also shared the same age in which they had arrived to the United States for the first time, the American city in which they had grown up and probably the education. Pisciotta had left Italy when he was only three years old, but he was raised to love his native country. Proof of this are the drawings kept at the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) in New York made by Alex during his childhood: the Carabiniere in uniform for ceremonies, the soldier led by a personification of Italy shouting “Avanti Savoia”, His Majesty the King, and, during the Italian-Turkish war of 1911-1912, Italian soldiers fighting against the Turkish enemies and numerous flags of the kingdom103. Pisciotta had also studied as a child the same reading books as his peers in Italy; volumes quite evocative as “Il Giovanetto Italiano” (The Italian Yong Man) or “Casa mia! Patria mia!” (My Home! My Fatherland!)104. Nevertheless, when Pisciotta joined the American Army and during his war experience, Italy, and Sicily, in particular, are just a backdrop far away. This aspect, first of all, emerges in the language used by Pisciotta in the letters he wrote during the war to his family and his fiancée Mae and preserved by the Center for Migration Studies. As understandable for someone who had moved to the “New World” as a child, the language used by Pisciotta is always English. His case was certainly not the only one. At that time, the American government carried out an intense propaganda campaign with immigrants to exploit their support for the war105. What prevailed was an atmosphere of “one hundred percent Americanism” in which ethnic expressions, such as the use of the native language, were discouraged. Italy, however, was an ally and this allowed immigrants to be American and Italian patriots at the same time106. Only in one case, in a letter written a few days after the end of the war, on November 25, 1918, Pisciotta, without a specific reason, chooses Italian to communicate with his father. In this letter, composed in a language probably based on the Sicilian spoken at home, Pisciotta remembers that he had left his “beloved country and home” (amata terra e casa) almost five months before, he says that he had the opportunity “to see the old Europe” (Abbio vutto la bella opportunita di vedere la viechia Europa), he expresses all the uncertainty about his fate (Ancora noi non sappemo si noi resttiamo qui o retorneremo all’America) and he hopes to be at home very soon, ideally by Christmas (speramo di essere assiemi per le feste)107.
Figure 4: A Brownie Kodak photograph of Corporal Pisciotta in field uniform standing before a French farmhouse (1918)

CMS, New York, Alex Pisciotta Papers
35After training at Fort Jay on Governor’s Island and at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, in the summer of 1918 Corporal Pisciotta and the 70th Artillery Regiment travelled on the USS Manchuria for France. Although Pisciotta and his regiment never saw the front, they, like many of their compatriots, got the sense of adventure in the military that the nation’s first overseas war offered108. In one of his first letters to his mother he writes:
“I’m now billeted in a little village somewhere in France. It certainly is a pretty little place, the people are very hospitable and certainly do like the soldiers. We live in barns, farmhouses and large rooms which the people used to use as storehouse. […] The house I live in is owned by pretty well-to-do people, an old man and women with a married daughter whose husband is at the front. […] There is a little ancient Catholic church in this village. The priest is about 90 years old, but a very kind hearted old man. I had the opportunity to speak to him […] and after he heard I was a catholic, he asked to me to come to his church next Sunday109.”
36Pisciotta immediately records the good reception from the local population. For many people, the presence of American soldiers is reassuring and he too feels soon fully aware of the role to which he is called, although he is not in the trenches.
“Now and then French soldiers come home on leave from the front. They all praise the American soldier saying he is a merry and good fighter. The French people in this village hate and are afraid of the Boches. When the soldiers left this town, they all were asking and were anxiously waiting for more troops to come, and when we finally arrived the entire town turned out to meet us with flowers. They say they feel better and can sleep happier when the soldiers are here to protect them110.”
37Pisciotta and his buddies replace local men working in the field and in the farms. “In all ways we are helping Frenchy to win this war111” he writes. He never seems anxious to go to the forefront because he is
“certainly fine to work in a farm. Here we get 4 meals a day. Chicken, duck, rabbits and fresh meat to eat every day, fresh milk and eggs every day. I will be getting fat if I stay here a little longer. I certainly like to watch these farmers; they are very interesting and do things old fashioned. They must be about 100 years behind the times in this place. I like to watch them milk the cows, make butter the old fashion way, make cheese and cook. […] These French people certainly do know how to cook112.”
38Alex manages to dedicate a few moments to visit the surrounding places, and he also has the opportunity “to speak to some Italian soldiers who have their barracks there” and to visit a big base hospital that host wounded soldiers of all nations, “Americans, French, English, Belgian, Italians, also German prisoners wounded, Algerians and other negros113.” Above all, Pisciotta is very impressed by the comparison between the places where he is now and his country, the United States:
“Things in this town are pretty well up-to-date with a few things that are peculiar to us but are part of their custom. Part of the city is very clean and pretty, with broad boulevards, where a large number of the allied soldiers from the nearby barracks and wounded fellows go for a little walk. Like our city a section of the town is inhabited by the poorer class. Narrow streets with a sidewalk about 2 feet wide […] and dirt all along the roads. […] It isn’t a strange thing to see women and men of all ages riding bicycles that being the only way by which the village people can come to town114.”
39This surprise was probably stronger because he did not know other realities than New York; since he was a child, he had lived in the United States and he had never been to Sicily, where the way of life had to be the same if not humbler. His parents to whom he writes certainly had in mind, however, the kind of material poverty that they had left behind. In Pisciotta’s account of the reality of this small French village, we seem to find a parallelism with Vincenzo D’Aquila’s previously quoted passage in which he describes the Sicilian countryside and the old-fashioned way of life of its inhabitants.
“People in New York don’t appreciate how fortunate they are with their gas stoves and coal stoves. Here the folks have to do all their cooking by burning small twigs and branches under a big pot in an old time fire-place. Visited on a little bike some of the nearby farms and villages. These people certainly have to go some to catch up to our modern ideas, they are very far behind. Everything in this country works regardless of how young or old they are. The women do most of the work since a large number of the men are at the front. I’m still in this village billeted, drill every day and getting ready for the front, which we expect and hope to get a chance to go soon. […] I’m feeling fine and am enjoying my little stay in this strange country115.”
40In Pisciotta’s letters there is also space for the tale of moments of leisure that remind him of home. Once, for instance, he goes to play ball with another Artillery regiment and sees some of his old friends116. For his birthday, he organizes a little celebration that ends up “with a real mass meeting and music by our jazz band, composed of a tin water pail, mess hits with spoons to make more noise, a few boxes as bass drums and a banjo and cow bells, which we borrowed from the farmer’s cows117.” While, another night, they have “a show given by some fellows of an engineer regiment near”, with “their own orchestra, real good music, also a little piano” that reminds a fellow of the shows in Brooklyn118.
41While Vincenzo D’Aquila spent some time in the trench (even if just a few months before going to the hospital and then to the asylum), Alex Pisciotta spent all the months in France just preparing for that. The first time he “sees” the war is only through the eyes of others and the wounds of a French soldier he meets on the street and gives him a ride in the car. Nevertheless, he keeps getting ready, even if it seems, “according to the opinion of the American and French soldiers who return from the front, that the war will be over very soon, perhaps by next Christmas119.” In October, for about one hour every morning, Pisciotta begins to go “to the guns to learn something about them”, then he sets unit to make maps120. “I guess I’ll be able to find my way home written on a map, once I hit New York121” he writes in one letter to his mother. The description of what happens to him and his fellow soldiers becomes more captivating when, for the first time, they are made to wear a gas mask and resist the powerful and violent instrument of death that so many soldiers had hitherto mowed down on both sides throughout the duration of the war. A short drill which seems, however, endless to the soldiers. An exercise that, while putting everyone’s resistance to the test, takes place amidst the laughter of those who are outside watching:
“Yesterday we got our first dose of gas. We were taken into a gas chamber by a French Lieut. who is supposed to be an expert on that stuff and is putting us wise to it. We put our gas masks on and entered the chamber about 25 fellows at the time, staying in there for about ten (10) minutes, or maybe more, for it seemed like 10 hours to us. While in the room the French told us all about the stuff we were in and the effect it would have on us if we hadn’t had out masks on. […] Then he took one man at the time, and opening the door, made the man stand in the center of the room and take his gas mask off, telling the fellow that as soon as he got a good sniff of the stuff to go out. Well he didn’t have to tell the fellows that, for as soon as the fellows got a little dose, they jumped out of the room “tout suite” […] meanwhile the rest of the bunch were outside laughing at us flying out of that chamber. It was a joke to them seeing the fellows with tears running down their eyes as if they had peeled onions. […] for us fellows the mask is our best friend122.”
Figure 5: A letter from Corporal Alex Pisciotta to his mother from his military base in France in World War I

CMS, New York, Alex Pisciotta Papers
42Many of Pisciotta’s letters talk about mail delay (Alex writes about two letters every week and sometimes concludes with the request “write often”), the treatment in terms of board and lodging, small weekly reports or notices regarding subsidies and they often contain photos or postcards attached, some small souvenirs such as embroidered handkerchiefs, and always end with greetings to home and also to his fiancée. As already stated, unlike D’Aquila’s, Pisciotta’s writings contain very few references to Italy. However, we know that Alex was corresponding also with his relatives in Italy, such as his father’s brother, Antonio Pisciotta and his mother’s brother, Calogero Palminteri. “I answered him in Italian as best I could123” he writes to his parents, adding days later that he was “beginning to write pretty good in Italian124”. Perhaps these two sentences addressed to his parents in October 1918 explain why Pisciotta, one month later, felt ready and able to write in Italian to his father as well that letter which we have already mentioned. It was maybe a sign of respect and affection for his father and for a language that Pisciotta, despite knowing, did not feel his own and in which he was not at ease.
43One day, he learns from his maternal uncle about the fate of many of his young relatives, engaged like him in the same war, although on another front:
“Peppino of aunt Teresa is a Lieutenant of Infantry at the front. His other three brothers are all at the Front: Casparino is officer in the Engineers, Leonard is Sub-Lieutenant Infantry, Peppino of aunt Mimi is Sub-Lieutenant in Pharmacy Service at Palermo. Peppino of aunt Pidda is a sergeant in Medical Corps at the Front […] All the folks are in good health and they have invited me to visit Italy if I can ever get a chance. […] Perhaps as soon as the war is over125.”
44At the end of October, the war seems to be coming to an end: “The way the Boches are retreating now it seems as if all us boys will soon be home126.” “According to the papers peace is soon here and then we will be back home127.” On November 11, the day of the armistice, Pisciotta can finally express his joy telling to his mother how that day had been lived in France:
“Well, mother, the War is over and we are certainly celebrating. The bells of all the churches in France were ringing for about an hour, the people are running around the town wild, kissing each other and giving the soldiers flowers. They are singing and drinking wine to beat the band and Lord knows how many fellows will stay sober tonight. Well as soon as it was announced that the armistice had been signed by Germany the fun began. French automobiles with American and French flags came speeding down the streets blowing their horns and sirens and shouting “La guerre est fini” the war is finished. The farmers quit work and came to town, the old blacksmiths took off their aprons and the entire town went wild. All the frogs celebrated, going into cafés and drinking, shouting “Vive l’Amerique et la France”. Every house put out American and French flags. […] I can just imagine the excitement in New York over the good news. Well mother it seems as if we will soon be coming home and then we will have our own celebrating126.”
45Pisciotta never complained about the fact that he did not see combat. This was a circumstance that touched on the majority of American troops who went to France and that instead disappointed some soldiers who felt ashamed or guilty since they never had faced the enemy127. Paradoxically the war seems to break out in his life only when it is over, when, at a hospital, he meets several of his friends who have been wounded.
“From them I got a little news about my other pals in the 59th who used to be in my company. Do you remember that fat good looking fellow that used to have his bundle near the door of the tent. One Sunday […] his sister came to see him. Well that poor fellow was killed at the front128.”
46Alex will not go to Sicily as his relatives would have desired, both because he is not able to obtain permission, and because he hates the idea “to lose the chance of going back to God’s country129.” His biggest desire is to be home for Christmas. “Now that the war is over, we have no idea what’s going to happen, we’re just waiting for orders and have no idea where are going. Hope I could be home for Christmas130” Pisciotta writes on November 27. On December 2, he confirms: “The war is all over now but it doesn’t seem to make any difference to us131”. Days later, he meets another soldier native of Santa Margherita, a small village near Agrigento, not very far from Menfi, his birthplace. That soldier is expecting to go back to Italy as soon as possible, but Pisciotta is still unconvinced as he writes on December 16: “Sometimes I think that I may be able to go to Italy while at other times it seems impossible. You see, we are expecting to go back to the States, but aren’t very sure when we leave. It may be tomorrow and then again about six (6) months from now132”.
Conclusion
47Vincenzo D’Aquila and Alex Pisciotta, even if they did not know each other, shared many things during their childhood and until 1915. It was the First World War that made their existences so different. The different answer they showed towards the event of war reveals a different relationship with their homeland. The choice to join the Italian Army in 1915 made D’Aquila closer to Italy, while the choice taken by Pisciotta to enlist to the AEF led him to a new self-awareness as Italian-born American133. On the one hand, Sicilian American people who were enlisted, by will or not, in the Italian Army, felt all the burden to return to a country from whom they and their family had to leave and that, even if it had obliged them to emigrate not to live in misery and in poverty, had then called them to the “sacred duty”. On the other hand, who chose to fight in the American Army, even if “foreigner”, experienced the same military life side by side with American-born people. For many emigrants, the possibility to serve their country “of adoption” represented a further step to the full and complete social inclusion in the American society. In both cases, the experience of the First World War – that, in the final analysis, represents in the history of the United States “only” a small war – constituted the watershed event in their own lives as Sicilian Americans.
48The present essay aimed to show that if it is true that Southern Italy and Sicily registered a high rate of illiteracy during the first half of the 20th century, it appears exaggerated to state that WWI Sicilian writings are lacking and it is not possible to verify the perception of war by the island’s soldiers. In addition to research in the archives of Northern Italy (where several testimonies are anyway present) and also in other fundamental collections like the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (mentioned in the case of the correspondence retained by the censorship), one way to achieve a good result and to shed light onto the Sicilian case, forgotten until recently, is to change perspective and evaluate other kinds of testimonies, like letters, diaries and memoirs written by the emigrants, like Sicilian Americans. This is a work in progress which needs further research but that nevertheless seems to promise other interesting results.
49At the same time, it would be beneficial for Sicily to equip itself with an archive for these kinds of sources. In this sense, the intention expressed by the Center for Sicilian Philological and Linguistic Studies (Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani) of Palermo to set up a “Sicilian Archive of Popular Writings” (Archivio siciliano delle scritture popolari) seems very appropriate134. Having a large and comprehensive collection of examples of ego-documents (preserving “family” documents, removing them from the dust and the drawers and framing them in their proper linguistic and historical original context) could be useful in the study not only of the Great War (as it has been shown), but also for other areas of study such as the Second World War, emigration, and all other main events of our recent history in which the island and the whole of South Italy have been particularly involved.
Archival Sources
Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Rome | Tribunale Supremo Militare, Atti Diversi 1911-1928 |
Archivio storico ex Ospedale psichiatrico “San Niccolò” (AOPS), Siena | s. cartelle cliniche, fasc.6558 s. Documenti dei malati, fasc.10206 |
Center for Migration Studies (CMS), New York | Alex Pisciotta Papers |
Published Sources
50D’Aquila Vincenzo, Bodyguard Unseen. A True Autobiography, New York, Richard Smith Inc., 1931.
Notes de bas de page
1 Bortone Giuseppe, Sicilia in Armi, Livorno, Belforte, 1918.
2 “l’eroismo, il sacrificio, la compostezza dell’anima siciliana”, Lombardo Pellegrino Ettore, “Prefazione”, in Bortone Giuseppe, Sicilia in Armi, op. cit., p. 11 (my translation).
3 Even a foreign observer like the Anglo-German writer Helen Zimmern (1846-1934) in the book New Italy, published in London the same year of Sicilia in Armi and written with the Italian writer Antonio Agresti (1866-1927), pointed out that in Southern Italy and Sicily everything was “almost entirely given up to somewhat primitive agriculture, the people, though hard-working, were extremely poor and ignorant, at the mercy of the great landed proprietors, and still suffering from the effects of long centuries of misrule at the hands of the Church and the Bourbons, and their condition made the solution of economic questions one of urgent necessity.” See Zimmern Helen, Agresti Antonio, New Italy, London, Constable and Co., 1918, p. 17.
4 For the Libyan war as an important prelude to Italian Great War, see Gooch John, The Italian Army and the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 38-50.
5 Astuto Giuseppe, “Saggio Introduttivo”, in Astuto Giuseppe, Nicosia Aldo (eds.), La Sicilia e il Mezzogiorno. Dall’impresa libica alla Grande Guerra, Napoli, Editoriale Scientifica, 2017, p. 26.
6 “nuovi uomini e nuove competenze, aria respirabile, al di sopra di egoismi, di trucchi di coalizioni insidiose, di valorizzazioni di nullità e di boicottaggio di valori”, Lombardo Pellegrino Ettore, “Prefazione”, op. cit., p. 11 (my translation).
7 “in questa immane tragedia, ci sentiamo invasi dal raccapriccio di fronte ai milioni di morti [...] chi sa guardare le cose da un altro punto di vista, [...] oltre il piccolo episodio ed oltre l’ora fugace, per abbracciare l’insieme ed allungare lo sguardo nel passato e nel futuro, trova che son pur grandi, e maggiori ancora saranno, i vantaggi che questa guerra ha prodotto”, Bortone Giuseppe, Sicilia in Armi, op. cit., pp. 15-16 (my translation).
8 “come se si fosse trattato di liberare un lembo di Sicilia, come se, attraverso i monti ed il mare, fossero arrivati fin laggiù il lamento, l’imprecazione, l’invocazione calda e pietosa dei fratelli irredenti”, Ibidem, p. 47 (my translation).
9 The war had not actually resolved these issues but, on the contrary, it had aggravated the Southern Question (questione meridionale). The military expenditures and the huge resources allocated to industrial sectors had radically altered the relations between agriculture and industry, between town and country, between North and South. See Barone Giuseppe, “Introduzione”, in Barone Giuseppe (ed.), Catania e la Grande Guerra. Storia, protagonisti, rappresentazioni, Acireale, Bonanno Editore, 2014, p 11.
10 Only three pages in Ganci Massimo, “La Sicilia contemporanea”, in Storia della Sicilia, vol. viii, Napoli, Società Editrice Storia di Napoli e del Mezzogiorno continentale e della Sicilia, 1977, pp. 221-223; Aymard Maurice, Giarrizzo Giuseppe (eds.), Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’unità a oggi. La Sicilia, Torino, Einaudi, 1987 does not contain any parts concerning the First World War; more space in a seminal and forerunner analysis Renda Francesco (ed.), Storia della Sicilia dal 1860 al 1970, vol. II. Dalla caduta della Destra al fascismo, Palermo, Sellerio, 1985, pp. 305-330; few mentions in Di Matteo Salvo, Storia della Sicilia. Dalla preistoria ai nostri giorni, Palermo, Edizioni Arbor, 2007, pp. 526-530, that focuses only on the post-war period and on the worsening of social tensions; three pages in Mangiameli Rosario, La Sicilia dalla prima guerra mondiale alla caduta del fascismo, in Benigno Francesco, Giarrizzo Giuseppe (eds.), Storia della Sicilia vol. 2. Dal Seicento a oggi, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2003, pp. 151-153; a very short essay about refugees and prisoners in Sicily in 1916 has appeared in the recent miscellaneous volume titled Storia mondiale della Sicilia (Mondial History of Sicily). See Poidomani Giancarlo, Terra di profughi e prigionieri, in Barone Giuseppe (ed.), Storia mondiale della Sicilia, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2018, pp. 427-430.
11 At the center of the investigations were mainly the provinces of Catania, Messina and Ragusa. Unfortunately, there are no in-depth historical reflections on the western area of Sicily, especially on the capital, Palermo. On Sicily and the Great War see: Brady Sean, “From Peacetime to Wartime: The Sicilian Province of Catania and Italian Intervention in the Great War”, in Miller Alisa, Rowe Laura, Kitchen James (eds.), Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 3-28; Id., Sicily at War. The Province of Catania and the Experience of the Great War, 1914-1922, PhD Thesis, Dublin, Trinity College, 2014; Barone Giuseppe (ed.), Catania e la Grande Guerra…, op. cit.; Id., Gli Iblei nella Grande Guerra, Turin, Cliomedia Officina Editore, 2015; Baglio Antonio, Battaglia Rosario, Caminiti Luciana et al., “Da queste sponde sicule che stan di fronte a Scilla”. Messina e la Grande Guerra, Messina, Istituto di Studi Storici Gaetano Salvemini, 2015; Poidomani Giancarlo, Lutti e memorie dei Siciliani nella Grande Guerra, Catania, Prova d’autore, 2015; Id., “La Sicilia contro la guerra. Le manifestazioni per la pace e il ‘disfattismo’ (19151918)”, Giornale di storia contemporanea, I, 2015, pp. 107-133; Id., “La Grande Guerra dei Siciliani: il lutto e la memoria”, Nuova Rivista Storica, vol. 101, n. 3, 2017, pp. 1017-1041; Baris Tommaso, “Sicilia”, in Cammarano Fulvio (ed.), Abbasso la guerra! Neutralisti in piazza alla vigilia della Prima guerra mondiale in Italia, Firenze, Le Monnier, 2015; pp. 589-599. Astuto Giuseppe, Nicosia Aldo (eds.), La Sicilia e il Mezzogiorno..., op. cit.; Bonomo Margherita, Poidomani Giancarlo, “L’Italia chiamò”. La Sicilia e la grande guerra, Rome, Carocci, 2017; Riccio Elena, Verri Carlo, Siciliani al fronte. Lettere dalla Grande Guerra, Palermo, Istituto Poligrafico Europeo, 2017.
12 For an accurate general view about the Italian War Front see Labanca Nicola, “The Italian Front”, in Winter Jay (ed.), The Cambridge History of The First World War, vol. 1: Global War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 266-296.
13 Mondini Marco, La guerra italiana. Partire, raccontare, tornare. 1914-18, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2014, p. 73.
14 Bonomo Margherita, Poidomani Giancarlo, “L’Italia chiamò”, op. cit., p. 173.
15 Barone Giuseppe, “Ristrutturazione e crisi del blocco agrario. Dai fasci siciliani al primo dopoguerra”, in Barone Giuseppe, Lupo Salvatore, Palidda Rita et al., Potere e società in Sicilia nella crisi dello Stato liberale, Catania, Pellicanolibri, 1977, pp. 3-146.
16 Soltész József, “Hungarian prisoners of war on the island of Sicily in World War I”, Szülőföldünk, n°21-22, 1994; La Ferla Fabio, La Ferla Vincenzo, “L’ex-campo di concentramento di Vittoria”, Studi Storico-Militari, Rome, Ufficio Storico Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, 1999, pp. 424-557; Francione Giancarlo, Juhász Dezső, Cappella ungherese: storia, memoria e mito di un monumento che parla di pace, Comune di Vittoria, 2004; Iid., Hungarian Chapel in Sicily, Budapest, Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum, 2017; Keglovich Rita, “Prigionieri di guerra Ungheresi in Sicilia dopo la Prima Guerra Mondiale”, Verbum, VII/I, 2005, pp. 293-301.
17 Only in the last two years of the war, more than 12 torpedoings happened in the Strait. See Caruso Vincenzo, Messina nella Prima Guerra Mondiale, Messina, Edas, 2008, pp. 25-51.
18 Fabre Daniel (ed.), Écritures ordinaires, Paris, Bpi-Centre Pompidou, 1993; Id., Par écrit. Ethnologie des écritures quotidiennes, Paris, Ministère de la Culture-MSH, 1997; Lyons Martyn (ed.), Ordinary Writings, Personal Narratives. Writing Practices in 19th and early 20th century Europe, Bern, Peter Lang, 2007; Id., The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860-1920, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013; Caffarena Fabio, Scritture non comuni. Una fonte per la storia contemporanea, Milano, Unicopli, 2016.
19 Gibelli Antonio, L’officina della guerra. La Grande Guerra e le trasformazioni del mondo mentale, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2007 [1st ed. 1991]. See also the seminal work by Procacci Giovanna, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella Grande guerra: con una raccolta di lettere inedite, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2016 [1st ed. 1993].
20 For instance: Caffarena Fabio, Lettere dalla grande guerra. Scritture del quotidiano, monumenti della memoria, fonti per la storia. Il caso italiano, Milano, Unicopli, 2005; Id., “Armed with pen and paper. Soldiers writings beween story, memory and the history of the Great War”, in Piredda Patrizia (ed.), The Great War in Italy. Representation and interpretation, Leicester, Trombador, 2013, pp. 167-177; Gibelli Antonio, La guerra grande. Storie di gente comune, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2014; Id., La grande guerra degli italiani. 1915-1918, Milano, Bur, 2014; Antonelli Quinto, Storia intima della Grande Guerra. Lettere, diari e memorie dei soldati al fronte, Rome, Donzelli, 2019 [1st ed. 2014]; Stiaccini Carlo, “Scrivere dal fronte”, in Labanca Nicola (ed.), Dizionario storico della Prima guerra mondiale, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2014, pp. 301-310; Id., “War Letters (Italy)” in Daniel Ute, Gatrell Peter, Janz Oliver et al. (eds.), 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin, 2015 [http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10643, 20/04/2020]; Maranesi Nicola (ed.), Avanti sempre. Emozioni e ricordi della guerra di trincea 1915-1918, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2014; Todero Fabio, “‘L’aria è tutta un fremito’: diari, memorie e lettere dalla Grande guerra”, in Cammarata Enrico (ed.), Nati per morire. La Grande guerra dalle testimonianze personali ai luoghi della memoria, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2015; pp. 101-125. Mondini Marco, La guerra italiana…, op. cit.; Caffarena Fabio, Murzilli Nancy (eds.), In guerra con le parole. Il primo conflitto mondiale dalle testimonianze scritte alla memoria multimediale, Trento, Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino, 2018.
21 “i veri detentori della verità esistenziale”. Bianchi Bruna, “Il trauma della modernità. Le nevrosi di guerra nella storiografia contemporanea”, in Scartabellati Andrea (ed.), Dalle trincee al manicomio. Esperienza bellica di matti e psichiatri nella Grande Guerra, Turin, Marco Valerio, 2008, p. 12 (my translation).
22 Lyons Martyn, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe…, op. cit., p. 24.
23 Gibelli Antonio, La guerra grande…, op. cit., p. 27.
24 Caffarena Fabio, Lettere dalla Grande guerra…, op. cit., p. 24.
25 “Mescolare le parole di questi ufficiali di trincea ai tanti scritti zoppicanti dei fanti-contadini è quindi opportuno per creare una miscela di voci e di storie eterogenee che meglio rappresentino la sfaccettata comunità del fronte”, Ibidem, p. 99 (my translation).
26 Wilcox Vanda, Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 15-16.
27 Ministero di agricoltura, industria e commercio, Direzione generale della statistica e del lavoro, Ufficio del censimento, Censimento della popolazione del Regno d’Italia al 10 giugno 1911, vol. iii, L’alfabetismo della popolazione presente, Rome, Tipografia nazionale di G. Bertero e C., 1914, p 230.
28 Brady Sean, Sicily at War…, op. cit., p. 79.
29 “essere messa in relazione al diverso coinvolgimento della gente comune ad una storia tanto luttuosa e dolorosa quanto disgiunta dai luoghi dell’esistenza quotidiana”, Ibidem, p. 255 (my translation).
30 Caffarena Fabio, Scritture non comuni..., op. cit., p. 31.
31 Caffarena Fabio, Lettere dalla Grande guerra..., op. cit., pp. 249-253.
32 Lyons Martyn, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe…, op. cit., p. 245.
33 Russo Matteo, Lettere dal fronte (1916-1917), Catania, cuecm, 1993.
34 Pieve S. Stefano, ADN, MP/00, Rabito Vincenzo, Fontanazza; Id., Terra matta, ed. by Santangelo Evelina, Ricci Luca, Turin, Einaudi, 2007. For this relevant case see “The Story of Terra matta”, ed. by Moss David, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 19, 3/2014.
35 The only known exception is the Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria of Palermo that holds several letters written by Sicilian combatants that were sent by their families in reply to a public call made by the Institute in 1917 to gather the most patriotic writings of Sicilian people at the front. See Riccio Elena, Verri Carlo, Siciliani al fronte…, op. cit. More recently, in 2015 the website Archivio degli Iblei, a digital and virtual archive, was born with the aim of offering thematic routes on the history of the southeastern part of Sicily, particularly on the province of Ragusa. One of its sections is dedicated to the First World War [http://www.archiviodegliiblei.it/index.php?it/658/oltre, 20/04/2020].
36 Farge Arlette, The Allure of the Archives, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013, p. 102.
37 Annuario Statistico dell’emigrazione italiana dal 1876 al 1925, Rome, edizione del Commissariato Generale dell’Emigrazione, 1926 and Saija Marcello, Cordaro Federica, “L’emigrazione siciliana nelle Americhe e la Grande Guerra”, in Astuto Giuseppe, Nicosia Aldo (eds.), La Sicilia e il Mezzogiorno..., op. cit., p. 137. The phenomenon had its maximum between 1901 and 1913: in these twelve years, 1,063,734 Sicilians left the island. The vast majority (991,176) went to the United States and partly to Argentina and Brazil. It was a colossal exodus, a genuine social collapse for a population that in 1911 counted 3,672,00 inhabitants: over a quarter of the islanders left their land for an unknown fate. See Di Matteo Salvo, Storia della Sicilia..., op. cit., p. 525.
38 Pretelli Matteo, “Italians and Italian Americans, 1870-1940”, in Barkan Elliot Robert (ed.), Immigrants in American History. Arrival, Adaption, and Integration, vol. 1, Santa Barbara, abc-clio, 2013, pp. 437-448.
39 “Oggi stesso mi ha mandato a chiamare il Sindaco, e non puoi immaginare, l’impressione che ho provato quando me disse che cera arrivato un avviso, ove gli comunicava che tu, ti eri dato prigioneri volontario”, ACS, Tribunale Supremo Militare, Atti Diversi 1911-1928, b.4, fasc.1 (my translation).
40 Forcella Enzo, Monticone Alberto, Plotone di esecuzione. I processi della Prima Guerra Mondiale, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2014 [1st ed. 1972], p. XV.
41 “tu sei venuto volontario dall’america senza nessuno che ti obbligava a farlo. con tanta fede e coraggio per venire a servire la nostra cara patria, travolta in questa guerra”, ACS, Tribunale Supremo Militare, Atti Diversi 1911-1928, b.4, fasc.1 (my translation).
42 “Il Sindaco me disse che non mi tocca più la paga che mi davano, che il sussidio mi veni levato! Poi la genti mi a dinchino la testa di chiaccheri, me dicono che tu non puoi più tornare in Italia”, Ibidem (my translation).
43 “fare comprendere ai superiori del tuo Reggimento [...] la tua innoccenza, e il tuo amore verso la nostra patria”, Ibid. (my translation).
44 “il fatto tale e quale com’è”, ACS, Tribunale Supremo Militare, Atti Diversi 1911-1928, b.4, fasc.5 (my translation).
45 “Nella carta d’accusa che hanno messo alla nostra porta dichiara che all’alba del 6 giugno tu abbandonavi il tuo posto di vedetta e volontariamente ti davi. Sarai giudicato in contumacia. Vedi dunque che il caso è molto grave. Noi non possiamo fare niente. Devi difenderti tu stesso”, Ibidem (my translation).
46 Staiti Claudio, “‘Vedi dunque che il caso è molto grave’. Lettere di familiari a sospettati di diserzione nella Grande Guerra: tre esempi ‘siciliani’”, Humanities, V/9, University of Messina, 2016; p. 127-144.
47 Vecoli Rudolph J., “Negli Stati Uniti”, in Bevilacqua Piero, De Clementi Andreina, Franzina Emilio (eds.), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana, vol. II, Rome, Donzelli, 2002, p. 71.
48 Only about 100,000 Italians left the United States to answer Italy’s call. See Luconi Stefano, “Le comunità italoamericane degli Stati Uniti e la prima guerra mondiale”, Dimensioni e Problemi della ricerca storica, 1, Sapienza University of Rome, 2015, pp. 93-94; Franzina Emilio, “Emigranti ed emigrati in America davanti al primo conflitto mondiale (1914-1918)” in Fiorentino Daniele, Sanfilippo Matteo (eds.), Stati Uniti e Italia nel nuovo scenario internazionale 1898-1918, Rome, Gangemi Editore, 2012, pp. 150-151; Id., Al caleidoscopio della Gran Guerra. Vetrini di donne, di canti e di emigranti (1914-1918), Isernia, Cosmo Iannone Editore, 2017, pp. 143-176. On the Italian Americans and First World War see also Ventresco Fiorello B., “Loyalty and dissent. Italian reservist in America during World War I”, Italian Americana, iv, 1978, 1, pp. 93-122 and Staiti Claudio, “Due Patrie, due lealtà: gli italoamericani e la Grande guerra”, in Pompejano Daniele, Panella Lina, Villani Angela (eds.), Cittadinanze trasversali, Padua, Cedam, 2020, pp. 231-249.
49 Choate Mark, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 212.
50 Foerster Robert F., The Italian Emigration of our times, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1919, pp. 398-399.
51 Staiti Claudio, “Il terremoto di Messina del 1908 nei giornali italiani di New York”, Altreitalie, n°58, 2019; p. 5-38.
52 Speranza Gino C., “The ‘Americani’ in Italy at War”, The Outlook, April 12, 1916.
53 Ibidem.
54 L’Era Nuova, August 28, 1915, p. 2, quoted and translated from Italian in Ventresco F. B., “Loyalty and dissent. Italian reservist in America during World War I”, art. cit., pp. 114-115.
55 “un tempo di scrittura più introspettivo, in cui è possibile in un certo senso guardarsi attorno, cogliere sfumature, rielaborare considerazioni”, Caffarena Fabio, Lettere dalla Grande guerra, op. cit., p. 77 (my translation).
56 Englund Peter, Stridens skönhet och sorg. Första världskriget i 212 korta kapitel, Stockholm, Atlantis, 2008; appeared in English in 2011 and in Italian in 2014.
57 D’Aquila Vincenzo, Io, pacifista in trincea. Un italoamericano nella Grande guerra, ed. and trans. by Staiti Claudio, preface by Franzina Emilio, Rome, Donzelli, 2019. Copies of the original 1931 book, which never had a second edition, are held in more than fifty American libraries (mostly linked to Universities) and, in a few examples, also in Europe (for instance, at the Kongelige Bibliotek in Aarhus, Denmark, and at the British Library and at the Imperial War Museum in London). The original book never arrived in Italy: neither during the years of Fascism (maybe for its anti-militarism), nor subsequently, and in fact it is not catalogued by any Italian library.
58 D’Aquila Vincenzo, Bodyguard Unseen. A True Autobiography, New York, Richard Smith Inc., 1931, pp. 16-17, 12.
59 Ibidem, p. 18.
60 Ibid., p. 17.
61 New York County Supreme Court, Naturalization Petition Index, 1907-1924, vol. 158, p. 216, Certificate of Naturalization n. 482818.
62 D’Aquila Vincenzo, Bodyguard Unseen..., op. cit., p. 111.
63 Ibidem, p. 5.
64 Ibid., pp. 75-79.
65 Ibid., pp. 79-80.
66 Ibid., p. 79.
67 Ibid., pp. 192-202.
68 Ibid., pp. 189-190.
69 “fatuità sentimentale, attività delirante a contenuto assurdo con prevalenti idee di grandezza” (my translation). See AOPS, s. cartelle cliniche, fasc.6558.
70 “strano delirio di grandezza e di persecuzione connesso ai fatti della guerra, cui aveva preso parte” (my translation). See AOPS, s. cartelle cliniche, fasc.6558. For a comparison between D’Aquila’s memoir and the official medical records see Staiti Claudio, “L’‘odissea di guerra e pazzia’ di Vincenzo D’Aquila. Un pacifista in trincea”, in De Santis Dario (ed.), Guerra e scienze della mente in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, Rome, Aracne Editrice, 2019, pp. 187-211. On D’Aquila’s case see also Staiti Claudio, “Vicende di un percorso: da volontario di guerra a pacifista”, in Orazi Stefano (ed.), Dopo la Grande Guerra. Dalle distruzioni materiali alle ripercussioni fisiche, morali e sociali. Atti del Convegno di studi (Pesaro, 9 novembre 2019), Urbino, Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano - Comitato di Pesaro e Urbino, Argalia, 2020, pp. 63-87.
71 AOPS, s. cartelle cliniche, fasc.6558.
72 “We’re not going to be such simpletons as to make a martyr of you.” See D’Aquila Vincenzo, Bodyguard Unseen..., op. cit., p. 268.
73 Ibidem, p. 250.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., p. 249.
76 See, for instance, these works published in the years following Paris Treaties: Jefferson Charles E., What the War has taught us, New York, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1919; Ecob James H., “Why did not the Church prevent the war?”, The Advocate of Peace, August 8, 1918, pp. 237-239; Merrill William P., Christian Internationalism, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1919; Irwin Will, The Next War. An Appeal to Common Sense, New York, Dutton & Co., 1921; Id., Christ or Mars?, New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1923; Page Kirby, The Sword or the Cross. Which should be the weapon of the Christian militant?, Chicago, The Christian Century Press, 1921; Vanderlip Frank, What next in Europe, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922; Palmer Frederick, The folly of Nations, New York, Dodd Mead, 1921; Angell Norman, The fruits of Victory. A sequel to the Great Illusion, New York, The Century Co., 1921; Kerr Philip H., Curtis Lionel, The prevention of war, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1923; Eddy Sherwood, Page Kirby, The abolition of war, New York, George H. Doran Company, 1924; Gibson Harry B., War abolition, New York, Robson & Adee, 1925.
77 In the same year of D’Aquila’s memoir see, for instance: Chiozza Money Leo G., Can war be averted?, London, Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1931; What would be the character of a new war? Enquiry organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, London, P. S. King & Son, 1931; Wingfield-Stratford Esmé C., They that take the sword, New York, W. Morrow & Co., 1931.
78 Pischedda Costantino, “Review Essay: War and Peace in a Hidden Gem of Italian-American Literature”, Italian Americana, xxxviii, 1, 2020, p. 81.
79 The Cincinnati Enquirer, October 17, 1931, p. 7.
80 D’Aquila was probably influenced also by American novelist John Dos Passos (1896-1970). Both based on the author’s first-hand experience as an ambulance driver at the French-German front, his first novel, mostly ignored by critics, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, was first published in London in 1920 and then in 1922 in New York; while his second novel, Three Soldiers, was published in 1921 in New York after many rejections from publishers and censorship squabbles. Both of them seek to demonstrate the cruelty and senselessness of war and how it can affect the choices of individuals. Some similarities between D’Aquila’s memoir and Dos Pasoss’s war fiction can be seen especially in the novel Three Soldiers. Here one of the three main characters is an Italian American, the naive and ambitious Dan Fuselli, while the protagonist, John Andrews, a young New York composer, gets to reject the uniform and become a deserter. For the experience of Dos Passos (and Hemingway) of the war life in Italy see Pozzato Paolo, “The Harvard Ambulance Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and the Italian Front”, Over There in Italy. L’Italia e l’intervento americano nella Grande guerra, Quaderno Società Italiana di Storia Militare, 2018, pp. 401-412.
81 Letter from Vincenzo D’Aquila to prof. J.W. Garner, October 3, 1931. I want to thank prof. John Paul Russo (University of Miami) for sending me this precious letter, found by chance attached to a copy of D’Aquila’s Bodyguard Unseen requested through an interlibrary-loan from the Garner Memorial Library at University of Mississippi.
82 As emerges since from the few lines taken from the first letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians – “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong.” (1 Cor 1, 27) – that he puts as an epigraph at the beginning of his book, D’Aquila feels one of the “weak” and “fools” to whom God has reserved the privilege to be able to point the way of truth to the world. To support his path of “prophetic initiation” is his faith, which derives, essentially, from reading and knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. The biblical text (especially the New Testament), not surprisingly, is mentioned several times, more or less explicitly, in the memoir, especially in the third part.
83 D’Aquila Vincenzo, Bodyguard Unseen…, op. cit., pp. 13, 34, 59, 104, 235.
84 Ibidem, p. 258.
85 Ibid., p. 267.
86 Ibid., pp. 267-268.
87 Ibid., pp. 27-28.
88 Ibid., pp. 26-28.
89 Ibid., pp. 26-27.
90 Ibid., p. 29.
91 Ibid., pp. 139-140.
92 Ibid., p. 160.
93 After he returned to the United States, in 1919 D’Aquila got married with Delia, a girl from Abruzzo with whom he had two daughters. He worked first as tobacco exporter and then as publisher. He died in New York on April 26, 1975. See Staiti Claudio, “Introduzione”, in D’Aquila Vincenzo, Io, pacifista in trincea..., op. cit., p. 28.
94 This was, for instance, the case of France, as evidenced by the postcards and letters written by Italians living there to their families preserved at La Contemporaine in Nanterre. See for instance: La Contemporaine, Nanterre, F delta 2125/06: Correspondance de soldats (1914-1919), Lettres en langues étrangères, Lettres de Mario Rossetti, soldat français à sa mère, 14 janvier-2 mai 1915.
95 Pastori Gianluca, “Gli Italiani d’America e l’AEF”, Over There in Italy. L’Italia e l’intervento americano nella Grande guerra, op. cit., pp. 151-164. On the participation of Italians of America in the AEF see also Sterba Christopher M., Good Americans. Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003 and Laskin David, The long way home. An American journey from Ellis Island to the Great War, New York, HarperCollins, 2010.
96 Ventresco Fiorello B., “Loyalty and dissent. Italian reservist in America during World War I”, art. cit., p. 111.
97 Luconi Stefano, “Military Nationalism and the Re-elaboration of Ethnicity. The Italian Americans and the World War One”, in Vellucci Sabrina, Francellini Carla (eds.), Re-mapping Italian America. Places, Cultures, Identities, New York, Bordighera Press, 2018, pp. 318-336.
98 Saija Marcello, Cordaro Federica, “L’emigrazione siciliana nelle Americhe e la Grande Guerra”, op. cit., pp. 141-146.
99 Wilcox Vanda, Morale and the Italian Army…, op. cit., p. 60.
100 Speranza Gino C., “Heart’s Allegiance”, The Outlook, May 15, 1918.
101 To prove the “heart’s allegiance” of the Italian American soldiers, Speranza reported two illustrative examples. The first one was the case of a letter showed to him by an “oldish peasent woman” in which her boy communicated her that he was in the American Aviation Service, glad to give his life “for liberty and to abolish the German slavery and destroy those unnatural enemies who would like to be the padroni of the world”. The second was the case of a soldier patient met at the American Hospital in Florence named Jimmy. A “swarthy immigrant from Basilicata who had worked in Santa Fé Railroad” whose brother was instead an American soldier: “I got a bullet in me leg, for Italy’s sake; now I hope me brother will get hurt too for America. Then it will all be squared up”. See Speranza Gino C., “Heart’s Allegiance”, The Outlook, May 15, 1918.
102 Among the Italians, even the Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, the future mayor of New York City and a hero to the many Italian Americans who resided there, resigned his position in Congress to join the American Expeditionary Forces to show that a man who put his constituents into the war was willing to go as well. It was a show of solidarity with the armed forces and in part a way to show that Italian Americans could be just as patriotic as Americans. See La Guardia Fiorello H., The Making of an Insurgent: An Autobiography: 1882-1919, Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1948, p. 160.
103 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.1, f.4, Drawings referring to the Italo-Turkish War, 1909-1912.
104 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.24. ff.274-275.
105 Jansen Axel, “Cultural Elite or Political Vanguard? American Volunteers Join the European War, 1914-1917”, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 17, 4/2018, p. 646.
106 Vecoli Rudolph J., “Negli Stati Uniti”, op. cit., p. 71. On the influence of the patriotic discourse surrounding World War I on the identity of Italian newcomers see also Luconi Stefano, “The Rhetoric of Patriotism and the Nationalization of Italian Immigrants in the United States during World War I”, in Della Putta Johnston Marina, Mito e realtà della Grande Guerra, Venezia, Marsilio, 2020, pp. 135-149.
107 “Carissimo Papa, Abbio ricevuto due lettere de Rosalia, e sono contendi di sentiri chi sieti tutti di perfeta saluti e cosi vi asecuro de me. Ora fa quasi cinque mesi chi io sono partuto di la mia amata terra e casa, ma speramo che noi pottremo essere assiemi in poco tempo. Ancora noi non sappemo si noi resttiamo qui o retorneremo all’America. Non essere surpriso si io qualchi giorni mi trovasi a casa. Speramo che noi saremo assiemi a tabola per la festa di Natali, ma como voi sapette che li soldati non sono mai sicuro quel sarano l’ordeni, stanno solamenti in speranza. Abbio vutto la bella opportunita di vedere la viechia Europa e vedere qualchi picoli paesi qui in Francia. [...] Allora avevo non altro di scrivervi e speramo di essere assiemi per le feste, con tanti saluti e bacci almiei amici e famiglia con tanti abbraci. to figlio”. See CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.58, Letters to his parents, November 25, 1918.
108 On Pisciotta’s case see also Keefer Scott, Adventure and Proving Patriotism in the American Expeditionary Forces. Corporal Pisciotta’s Story, in WWI Centenary. Continuations and Beginnings [http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/?p=4000, 20/04/2020]. About the centennial of First World War, students at New York St. John’s University used photographs from Alex Pisciotta Papers to create a website providing resources for school teachers. See Pascullo Joseph, Burgess Tanya, Podias Roseann et al., “WWI Resources: Teachers and Students for Success!” Children’s Librarians Assisting History Teachers [http://wwiresources.yolasite.com, 20/04/2020]
109 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.58, Letters to his parents, July 29, 1918.
110 Ibidem, August 6, 1918.
111 Ibid., August 29, 1918.
112 Ibid., August 17, 1918.
113 Ibid., August 12, 1918.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., August 26, 1918.
117 Ibid., October 7, 1918.
118 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.59, Letters to his parents, October 23, 1918.
119 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.58, Letters to his parents, August 29, 1918.
120 Ibidem, October 15, 1918.
121 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.59, Letters to his parents, October 23, 1918.
122 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.58, Letters to his parents, September 27, 1918.
123 Ibidem, October 15, 1918.
124 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.59, Letters to his parents, October 20, 1918.
125 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.58, Letters to his parents, October 10, 1918. 126 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.59, Letters to his parents, October 23, 1918. 127 Ibidem, October 31, 1918.
126 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.58, Letters to his parents, November 11, 1918.
127 See at least: Kennedy David M., Over Here: The First World War and American Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980; Capozzola Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You. World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; Richard, Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
128 CMS, Alex Pisciotta Papers, b.8, f.59, Letters to his parents, November 18, 1918.
129 Ibidem, December 11, 1918.
130 Ibid., November 27, 1918.
131 Ibid., December 2, 1918.
132 Ibid., December 16, 1918.
133 After the First World War, Alex Pisciotta received his law degree from Brooklyn Law School and was admitted to the New York Bar in 1923. He married Mae McIntyre and had three children, two sons and a daughter. During his long career, he served as Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, from 1926 to 1929. In 1935 he was appointed to the position of Secretary of the New York City Department of Licenses by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. In 1942, after being appointed to position of New York City Magistrate, he was called to active duty in World War II and during the Korean War in 1950. He was elected mayor of Lake Grove, Long Island, several times, from 1968 to 1981. He died on January 24, 1985. After he passed away, his family donated his papers to the Center for Migration Studies of New York, a thinktank and advocacy group run by the Scalabrinians. This organization contains a large archive of immigration to the United States, with a particular focus on Italian immigration. See CMS, Guide to the Alex Pisciotta Papers, New York, 2014 [http://www.cmsny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/cms_038.pdf, 20/04/2020] and Brown Mary E., “Reconnecting with the Center for Migration Studies”, Italian American Review, VII, 1, 2017, pp. 72-76.
134 Paternostro Giuseppe, “Per un Archivio siciliano delle scritture popolari”, Dialoghi Mediterranei, n°41, 2020 [http://www.istitutoeuroarabo.it/DM/per-un-archivio-siciliano-delle-scritture-popolari, 20/04/2020].
Auteur
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Claudio Staiti
PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Messina, Italy, since 2019. During his Doctoral Research (on Sicilian WWI popular writings), he has been PhD Visiting Student at Columbia University, New York. He then received a scholarship from the Centro Universitario Cattolico in Rome. His current main research interests concern Sicily, First World War and the Italian American world.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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