ABSTRACT
The war in fact saw the destruction of Italian parliamentary democracy: Mussolini would simply administer the coup de grace. In the same way as the typical experience of the war for the British was the Western Front, the campaign in which the Italians died in their scores of thousands was that fought on the stony plateau of the Carso that barred the way to Trieste. For the mass of Italians the comparable holocaust on the Carso was a meaningless disaster better forgotten, but the Fascists claimed that it proved Italy to be truly a warrior nation, one that would in future fara da se. The trouble was that such ‘good’ were rather thicker on the ground abroad than they were in Italy itself. In fact the Italian people had never been very enthusiastic about unification. Nationalism was largely a middle-class phenomenon and in Italy the middle class was slow to develop.
