Body Politics: National Identity, Performance, and Modernity in Maciste Alpino (1916)

Abstract

A famous adage says that generals always fight the last war. This was certainly true of World War I (WWI). When the conflict broke out, the high command of both sides expected a quick confrontation, with armies strate-gically maneuvering and fighting a few decisive battles, like in a Napoleonic campaign or in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Instead, what materialized was an extremely bloody four-year war of attrition, where the simple idea of maneuvering was almost always out of reach, at least on the Western Front (where the war was won), as well as on secondary fronts like the Italian front, the Balkans, and the Gallipoli peninsula. The Eastern front, and especially the Middle-East, saw traditional nineteenth century–style maneuvering but, again, the war was won in the West, along an endless line of trenches that ran for 600 kilometers, from the Channel to the Swiss border, a line that basically remained still for almost the entire conflict. There, British, French, and German generals—like the Italian ones on the Isonzo River—tried in vain to achieve “movement” through a series of horribly costly “pushes.” It was a nineteenth century tactics, based on frontal assaults by dense infantry formations, oblivious to the implications of twentieth century industrial and military technology, especially the machine gun, which, combined with barbed wire, made those frontal assaults suicidal.1