A Christmas Carol 1914. A fairy tale in the trenches of the Great War

There are books that bring the possibility, for the reader, of forgetting the time and place to which one belongs and also, in truth, the time and place in which the facts narrated happen, even when these too have marked history. We could perhaps call them fairy tales, these books. If so, then Mattia Signorini has written one. A little peace (Feltrinelli, 192 pp., 17 euros) tells, when events draw to a conclusion, of a respite from the fighting on Christmas night 1914, at Ypres in Flanders, where the British and Germans fight at the front in World War I. It was the idea of ​​an English boy, rifleman, photographer, named William Turner like the painter, that the narrator, a German soldier passing through those places again with his son, met – in the woods, on the run, in reconnaissance, shouldering and lowering the rifle – because sometimes a “rifle is just a circumstance”.