TEMPUS

LE FORME DELLA MEMORIA

TEMPUS

LE FORME DELLA MEMORIA

A: “Per quanto tempo è per sempre?”

B: “A volte, solo un secondo”.

Lewis C, Alice in Wonderland

Il racconto della memoria è al tempo stesso riflesso di sé e dell’altroda sé, punto di incontro tra la storia (singolare, particolare, contin-gente) e la Storia (plurale, universale, trascendente). Le storie divita, da ascoltare, scrivere, leggere e custodire rappresentano il puntod’incontro tra epoche, culture e individui. Tempus si propone di rac-cogliere le memorie e raccontare la Memoria, disegnando una lineatra passato e presente.

LA REGIONE ONORA LA MEMORIA E PROMUOVE LA CONOSCENZA

This book has been done, thanks to IoDeposito Ong, as part of the research pro-ject Il Corpo delle Umane Memorie, edited by Tancredi Artico, in partnership withIlaria Zamburlini and Marianna Lana (managing editors). Project supported byRegione Friuli Venezia Giulia, Struttura di Missione della Presidenza del Consigliodei Ministri, Unesco, European Council (Project done under the auspices of theSecretary General of the Council of Europe, Mr. Thorbjørn Jagland). Special thanksto: CEDOS – Centro di documentazione storica sulla Grande Guerra, AustralianWar Memorial, Nagy Háború Kutatásáért Közhasznú Alapítvány, National WorldWar I Museum and Memorial, Ms. Gönül Eti, De Waele family.

From the Front

Zibaldone della Grande Guerra

edited by

Tancredi Artico

Preface byGustavo Corni

ContributorsTancredi Artico, Francesc Montero, Sylvie Crinquand

Rose Spijkerman, Mehmet Besikçi, Robyn Van Dyk, Theresa CronkAndrea Zaffonato, Pierluigi Sanzovo, Dietmar Dragaric

Csaba Katona, Jonathan Casey, Stefania SalvadoriRobert Thomas Thomson

WritersFrederic Pujulà, Stuart Chapman, Jack Martin, Clément de Waele

Ali Rıza, Apcar De Vine, Vivian Noble, Domenico ZaltronGiovanni Casati, Hermann Plessmaier, Laszlo Kokay

Howard Johnson, Bruno Jacob, Jack Stratford

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No part of this book may be reproducedby print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means,

without publisher’s authorization.

Ist edition: May

to Annette, with tender devotion

Table of contents

PrefaceGustavo Corni

Re–thinking War. A History of VoicesTancredi Artico

Part IFrom the Western front

Everyday Life in the Trenches, Bivouac Literature. TheAnti–epic Tone of the Catalan Testimony of Frederic PujulàDuring the Great WarFrancesc Montero

Mud, Shells, and a Few Words. The Great War Told bytwo British Soldiers in their DiariesSylvie Crinquand

« But courage! We have to win and we shall win » War andEmotion. The Diary of Clément de WaeleRose Spijkerman

El tabacFrederic Pujulà

Home In Time For BreakfastStuart Chapman

Sapper Martin. The Secret War Diary Of Jack MartinJack Martin

DiaryClément de Waele

Table of contents

Part IIFrom the Turkish front

Enduring the Caucasus Front in the Great War. CorporalAli Riza’s DiaryMehmet Besikçi

The Diary of Sergeant Apcar De Vine. A Valuable RecordRobyn Van Dyk

The Wartime Experience of Corporal Vivian NobleTheresa Cronk

Harb–i Umûmide Hatırât–ı Askeriyem. Egin’den ItibarenHatırât–I AskeriyemAli Rıza

DiaryApcar De Vine

Excerpts from the First World War Diaries of Vivian NobleVivan Noble

Part IIIFrom the Italian front

Domenico Zaltron’s War MemoriesAndrea Zaffonato

Giovanni Casati Artilleryman’s War DiaryPierluigi Sanzovo

Hermann Plessmaier, an Austrian Artilleryman in the“Strafexpedition”Dietmar Dragaric

« Poor Dago! What have you sinned against us, and whathave we sinned against you? ». The War Diary of LászlóKókayCsaba Katona

Table of contents

MemorandumDomenico Zaltron

Servizio militare del soldato Casati GiovanniGiovanni Casati

DiaryHermann Plessmaier

Kókay László szegedi önkéntes doberdói naplójaLászló Kókay

Part IVLetters

A Family During War. Letters from the Howard JohnsoncollectionJonathan Casey

Shared Memory and dialogical dimension of Witness inBruno Jacob’s LettersStefania Salvadori

The Stratford Family World War I LettersRobert Holmes Thomson

LettersHoward Johnson

In der SchlachtBruno Jacob

LettersJack Stratford

Appendix

From the FrontISBN 978-88-548-9578-2DOI 10.4399/97888548957821pag. 13–17 (may 2017)

Preface

G C∗

The World War One centennial put the enormous growth of theinternational historiography based on this epochal event under theattention of the great public and of the political institutions of Eu-ropean countries. A growth that has many features; I will outlinesome of them, maybe the more representative, with no pretensionto consume them all.

First of all, the usual attention appointed on political, diplomaticand military events, which, years ago, prevailed in the historicalresearch, surely lost its enthusiasm (even if it didn’t disappear atall). This allowed other kind of studies to take its place, especiallyeconomical, sociological and cultural history, in its double meanings:the more ‘noble’ (that is to say investigating the relationship betweenintellectuals and war or arts and war) and the sense of an improvedattention for mind’s phenomenon, for both the unconscious and thethoughts and images the war experience produced in the mind ofthose who were living it.

Then, cultural history considers other subjects so far not tou-ched by historiography: according to the historiographical studies,civilians have assumed the same importance as the soldiers, althou-gh a critic may observe that it is necessary to never forget that itwas a military conflict, which involved large numbers of soldiersmore intensively and dramatically than civilians populations, mo-re than in – and in the following clashes. It considers alsospecific categories: women, children, militarized workers, refugeesmoved around the whole continent by governments and armies, wi-th dramatic griefs — culminated in the forced expulsion of Armenianpopulation by the Ottoman empire, an expulsion defined by many(but not unanimously) as a “genocide”.

∗ Professor of contemporary history, University of Trento.

Preface

Considering this point of view, even the geographical field of inte-rest has been improved. Even nowadays there is a deep consciousnessof the national feature of the war, or rather, of a succession of nationalconflicts concentrated in Europe: Germany versus France, Germanyversus Russia, Italy versus the Austro–Hungarian empire (and con-versely). Nevertheless, an interest for long forgotten fronts — fromthe Balkans to Middle East and Far East — has increased togetherwith a renewed attention for areas faraway from the conflict’s focalcenters, like British and French colonies, or Dominions — wherehundreds of thousands soldiers and officers departed to go fightingin Europe — and for those countries apparently not affected by war,as Latin America or China, where it surely had indirect effects.

This widening of the historiographical studies upon this globalwar concerned the temporal factor too. It seems that historians andresearchers took consciousness that war did not end in that Novem-ber , or — as we often read in historical manuals — with thesignature of the Versailles treaty in . According to this perspective,we may look at the specific case of the Balkans, in which historiansbackdated war’s chronology in order to trace a deep connectionbetween World War I and the previous Balkan wars.

This inclusion of the temporal plane assumes peculiar values inthe Russian matter, firstly a civil conflict between ‘reds’ and ‘whites’followed the World War, and secondly the Russian–Polish war, twi-sted with national conflicts, political and social tensions that oftenresulted in a massive use of weapons. There’s no lack of studies, spe-cially the Germankind, which have stimulated the problematic issueof a possible relation between the politics realized by the imperialgovernment and both German’s military authorities — in the East,for example — and what German Nazism realized twenty yearslater, in the same European regions. They nearly have stressed thecontinuity — or the affinity — about the politics of forced manpo-wer recruitment and even considering the concepts of mentality andprejudices, as anti–Slavism and anti–Semitism.

Finally, the sources represent another important subject. It hasn’tbeen a while since the international historiography began wideningits attention toward those sources that have been scarcely considered,previously, and they also have been defined as inadequate in studyingpolitical and military events. It means a widening of interest — thatwent together with the preceding observation — that contributedto create a renewed sensitivity towards the complexity of the mi-

Preface

litary phenomenon. It is enough to consider — according to bothE.J. Leed’s and P. Fussel’s pioneering studies — the importance ofthe role of literary sources, as direct expressions of participants andwitnesses of the conflict. The Italian historiography has been ableto highlight particularly the popular writing sources, as they defi-ned them nowadays: diaries, memories, letters written by peopleof middle or lower class, mainly soldiers or even civilians. Trentinohas always been an ideal container of these pioneering researches:firstly this is due to the presence (so far unobserved) of an importantamount of this kind of sources — probably because of the uniquescholastic situation, of one of the region where there was a low le-vel of illiteracy in comparison with others Italian territories, part ofthe Austro–Hungarian empire —; secondly, thanks to an ensamblescholars and institutions (above all the historical museums of Trentoand Rovereto) that have been careful in studying the new aspects ofhistorical research.

As Antonio Gibelli and QuintoAntonelli have underlined, thesubjective sources of popular writing are not simple to analyze. Itis not possible to study this kind of sources thinking of readingspontaneous and direct forms of popular manifestations, where fee-lings are expressed with no cultural mediation. Quite another thing:these popular compositions are based on patterns and expressivestrategies not less than ‘higher’ forms of cultural expressions; so, itis necessary to read those writings with the useful methods of thesociolinguistic doctrine, the linguistic history and dialectology, andtheir intersection with the common historical system.

Although the chief editor has decided to focus his attention onprivates’ testimonies — those who belong to the wider group of theworld war soldiers — the previous approaches considerably condi-tion the book I’m here presenting. Zibaldone is the name the editorhas chosen to indicate this collection of private evidences — a termthat immediately remembers the Italian writer Leopardi, who gaveliterary dignity to that kind of anthology, which usually were confu-sed. However, this is a kind of project that doesn’t pretend to coverall the aspects of such a long and extended conflict, that is a toodifficult purpose to join in a unite book. The fourteen texts that itincludes represent a small part of a universe of testimonies that noone can records and analyzes, neither an individual study nor a teamresearch’s work (the examples of research units assembled in Trento,Rovereto, Genova and Pieve Santo Stefano, borned to study and edit

Preface

the thousands of Italian war diaries, clearly represent the amountof work). So the writings admitted in this book form an exiguouscorpus if compared with the whole body of documents produced du-ring the war, but it is a remarkable ensemble by itself (it’s in any caserespectable for a single volume) for two reasons: because it producesa selection of drawings that come from important foreign archives,like the Kansas City’s National World War I Museum and Memorialand the Australian War Memorial (that have both huge collections ofdiaries and memoirs), and finally because of the recent evaluation ofthese crucial documentary sources by the historiographic research.

Considering those extrinsic difficulties, Zibaldone represents animportant contribution due to some interesting qualities it has. Fir-stly, the sources are preceded by critical essays: each of them hasa specific dimension and focuses itself on particular features (a ‘zi-baldone’, once more), reflecting personal perspectives and bringingspecific historical traditions. Although formal differences, every essayproduces an essential biography of the writers as soldiers, adds someinformation about their writing style and the way their texts havebeen conserved and transmitted. The use of critical preambles is auseful method to avoid simplistic lectures of these writings, thosethat do not seem to own their proper meaning without a sugge-sted reading and an adequate placement (inside a wider group ofproductions).

Secondly, the study here presented has an ambitious purpose(which is impossible to reach at worldwide level, such as the chiefeditor diffusely explains): that is sowing a cross–sections consideringunusual backdrops and various fronts. The reader will find textswritten by Italian, Austrian, Belgian, British, Australian, Hungarian,Canadian and American soldiers. They are private soldiers mainly,coming from lower classes, but also intellectual individual like Pujulà.These works can be both well written, from a grammatical pointof view, and more simple and rough. Moreover, they follow severalgenres: most of the sources are excerpts from daily logs, but thereare diaries with a deeper elaboration too, letters, and the war’s shortstories that Pujulà, the Catalan writer enlisted with the French Army(as known, Spain didn’t take part of the conflict), sent to his country’s

. See Q. A, I dimenticati della Grande Guerra. La memoria dei combattenti trentini(–), Trento, Il Margine, , e N. M, Avanti sempre. Emozioni e ricordi dellaguerra di trincea –, Bologna, Il Mulino, .

Preface

newspapers. The letters are mostly one–way collections, in whichonly the messages sent by the soldiers are preserved (collectionswith both correspondents is rarer), nevertheless, the case of Johnsonfamily shows an all–round kind of documentation.

Thirdly, this anthology reproduces its writing sources in theiroriginal language, except for the less known idioms; Catalan, Magyarand Turkish present an English or a German translation because ofthe easier comprehension of these last one.

On the whole, the term “zibaldone” is the proper one again.Some sources describe war events with crudeness, such as relen-tless photographs; others are softer, just like they slip a too realisticnarration. However, there are correspondences focusing on the indi-viduals’ feelings and almost ignoring that current war, as the BrunoJacob’s letters indicate. As Jonathan Casey correctly states in his essay,« every story is unique », that one together with the rest of the contri-butions, give interesting cues to the reader, in order to stimulate adeeper view of the complex war phenomenon.

From the FrontISBN 978-88-548-9578-2DOI 10.4399/97888548957822pag. 19–27 (may 2017)

Re–thinking War

A History of Voices

T A∗

It was total warfare: more than countries involved, roughly million died or killed; the invention of new weapons always moreeffective in their lethality. It was also the beginning of a sequence oforiginal conflicts, between unsatisfied nations (including Germanyand Italy) and ethnicities, vexed by the Treaty of Versailles and forcedto be included in incompatible nationalities against their nationalself-interest and ambitions. This created tensions that later instigatedanother global disaster. But World War I can be understood as morethan just a global conflict.

A history focused on numbers and political phenomenona, directto the investigation of the general issues, often reduces to just one-dimensional event, diminishing its pulsating aspects and its vitality.An event that was lived by people, first of all, young men — at least inthe firing-line even though all populations, genders and classes wereconcerned — sent unprepared to their fate, obliged to face death. So,this typology of history is an incomplete narration (I conceive historysuch as an act of telling, that is possible to study with structuralistictools and that is always changeable), that forgets the human pointof view, which is the most important. A considerable communityof modern scholars is now engaged in giving a new, fresh vision,

∗ PhD, Departement of Linguistic and Literary Studies, University of Padova.. There’s a debate around the numbers, in which are given a lot of hypothesis: we can

say that casualties were between -, and million (see H.P. W, World War I, NewYork, DK Publishing, and the catastrophic evaluation of J. T, The Smoke and theFire. Myths and Anti-Myths of War, -, London, Sidwixk & Jackson, ). A full outline ofthe technologies invented during the conflict is the excellent one by S. A–R, A.B, -, retrouver la Guerre, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, .

. Starting from the masterpiece by P. F, The Great War and modern memory, Lon-don, Oxford University Press, , a lot of researchers offer new outlooks: I can’t mentioneverything, but I need to mention at least J. W, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The

Tancredi Artico

but with the war’s centenary also the official versions, adorned withpatriotic and nationalistic rhetorics, have been revitalized, as we cansee through ceremonies, monuments, memorials, museums, andbooks.

It’s the history told by authorities, that is often a vehicle forideologies of intolerance and consequently isn’t truthful. In thecase of historic manuals, it’s just a question of data and statistics. Animportant Italian literary critic, Francesco Orlando, says that therespect we give to a text is ethically similar to the respect we shouldgive to another person, different from us. If we read a collectionof data, it is difficult to feel empathy with the drama of the war,and numbers seem impersonal. There’s nothing worse than beingindifferent when faced with a moral decision «for whom the belltolls», a phrase from a poem by the English poet John Donne, whichHemingway uses as the title of his famous novel about the SpanishCivil War. It’s necessary — all the more reason during the centenary— to consider a better way to study the war experience and create amore subtle narration, which will emphasize emotions and thoughts.

A good way to start is working with written testimonies. Distinctfrom the rigorous versions offered by the history of facts (calledhistoire événementielle by the French École des Annales), all kinds ofnarrative forms are useful, from literature to less fictional writing,because of the effort that the act of writing imposes on whom everis recording his knowledge of the event. The First World War is likecinema today for us, where millions of people play a role, and the

Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press,, and S. A-R, A. B, La violenza, la crociata, il lutto. La Grande Guerra e lastoria del Novecento, Einaudi, Torino .

. F. O, Teoria della letteratura, letteratura occidentale, alterità e particolarismi, in Uncanone per il terzo millennio. Testi e problemi per lo studio del Novecento tra teoria della letteratura,antropologia e storia, edited and introduced by U.M. Olivieri, Milano, Mondadori, pp. -,p. . This is the entire passage: «Del resto, se è vero che sempre l’altro è il testo, non saràvero, o almeno suggestivo e benefico da pensare, anche il rovescio: che il testo è l’altro? Nelsenso letterale che il rispetto con cui ci avviciniamo a un testo può modellarsi, eticamente,sul rispetto dovuto all’altro; che ogni violentamento indifferente di un testo dovrebbe ispirarequalcosa della ripugnanza che è “politicamente corretto” provare per la violenza inflitta a unaltro».

. Nowadays, there is still a deep discrepancy in the critical point of view betweenthese two expressive forms: see at least F. C, Lettere dalla Grande Guerra. Scritture delquotidiano, monumenti della memoria, fonti per la storia, Il caso italiano, Milano, Unicopli, ,that investigates the problem and gives a useful framework and methodological indications.