«Proud to have reddened the road to Trieste with my blood»- Corriere.it

We are in the middle of the First World War, around 1 pm on 23 February 1917, eight months before the defeat of Caporetto. At an altitude of 144 near Doberd, south of Gorizia, some Italian soldiers of the 11th Bersaglieri regiment are training in the use of a bomb launcher, an Ansen cannon, by carrying out adjustment shots. Everything seems to be going smoothly when suddenly a bullet bursts inside the weapon, causing a deluge of shrapnel.

The serious accident, five Bersaglieri lose their lives. Among the wounded is a corporal who is a journalist in civilian life and at the front it holds a War diary published in installments in the newspaper of which it is director, Il Popolo d’Italia. Benito Mussolini, hit by numerous shrapnel to the face, the anterior right underarm region and both legs.

Also thanks to his relentless warmongering campaign, Italy intervened in the war against Austria-Hungary: hostilities began on May 24 and the following August 31, the future dictator received the injunction postcard. But he was lucky, because they assigned him to rather calm areas of the front and in a year and a half in the army he has never been engaged in significant combatwhile the Italian troops bled to death in the repeated offensives on the Isonzo river commissioned by the commander in chief, General Luigi Cadorna.

As Mimmo Franzinelli wrote, from the war diary it seems that Mussolini sees military life through rose-colored lenses. He claims to be comfortable with him, describes a troop willingly doing its duty. In private correspondence the less idyllic picture, difficulties and discomfort emerge. Several years later, in his conversations with Yvonne de Begnac, the Duce would recall the experience of the front and admit the farmer-soldier’s extraneousness to the supreme ideals of war. He will speak of useless shootings, of appalling decimations. And yet the country will plunge into other war adventures.

After the incident, Mussolini was hospitalized in a field hospital. On 1 March 1917 he was joined by an editor of the Popolo d’Italia, to whom, despite the pains and high fever, he makes a most combative statement: Say loud and clear that for the triumph of the ideals of justice that guide the armies of the Quadruple, I would have accepted, without regrets, even a harder fate. Tell me I’m proud to have reddened the street of Trieste with my blood, in the fulfillment of my riskiest duty!

In April the wounded man was transferred to Milan, where he was entrusted to the care of Dr. Ambrogio Binda: there is a photo of him with another patient, Mussolini still on crutches. Discharged from the hospital on August 1, 1917, with a five-month convalescence leave, the future Duce will never return to the front probably also thanks to an interest from the authorities who deem him more useful at his desk as director of the People of Italy, from where he supports the war effort with great energy.

1917 was a year of crucial events. In March, Tsar Nicholas II falls. In April, the United States enters the war alongside the Entente powers against Germany and Austria-Hungary. In August, Pope Benedict XV defined the current conflict as a useless massacre. In November, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party take power in Russia. But above all, a few days before, on 24 October 1917, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies break through the Italian front at Caporettoin the upper Isonzo, forcing our troops to retreat as far as the Piave.

For Mussolini, the defeat of those days was a painful blow. He confides in his sister Hedwig that he would rather die than see the nation fall apart. But his reaction, after the first phase of dismay, was a nationalist and extremist stiffening. Il Popolo d’Italia pushes ever more right, labels the Russian revolution as a coup de main inspired by the Germans, indicates the fighters as the only possible ruling class for the future of Italy. Mussolini is then heartened by the strenuous resistance offered by our soldiers on the Piave.

Finally, August 1, 1918 marks a very significant turning point from a symbolic point of view. In the masthead of the Popolo d’Italia the subtitle Socialist Quotidiano disappears. In its place is placed the inscription Newspaper of fighters and producers. Mussolini now light years away from the positions of the past. He no longer believes in class struggle, but in the struggle between peoples for geopolitical dominance. He trusts in the vitality of capitalism. In the most revolutionary period in the history of the world – writes the future Duce – socialism builds nothing, of a passivity, of a frightening sterility. At the end of the war, he will identify the enemy to beat in his former comrades.