Guerra in camicia nera, Giuseppe Berto

Giuseppe Berto is a volunteer assigned to the 6th Blackshirts Battalion in North Africa. The historical backdrop is already familiar: a Fascist Italy coated in desert dust, able to dominate only in boastful propaganda, a colonial power only on paper, victorious only in the architecture of the regime, because the only true power lies in war.

A war without morality, in which, for Berto, what matters becomes the morale of the soldiers, which he, as a supply officer, tries in every possible way to lift through food. The reconstruction of events, presented through the pages of a fictional diary, is certainly novelized, yet the effort to avoid the usual cliché of the Italian soldier as cowardly, lazy, and incapable is undeniably authentic. Even with inadequate weapons and incompetent generals, he resists being reduced to the brutality of war.

Guerra in camicia nera is not merely the account of a soldier describing what it means to be soldiers, nor just a horrifying sketch of shabby conduct, sweaty dullness, and sordid deceit. It is the story of what lay beneath so many black shirts: men.

Not immediately appreciated by critics, with the exception of Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino, I strongly recommend this novel not only for its clear-eyed portrayal of the destructive Fascist mentality in war, but also because, amid defeat, filth, and inhumanity, Berto manages to preserve his own humanity.

edited: Emilia S.