Photograph of four First World War Italian soldiers. The one on the far right wears a monocle.
"The officers held their breath. They had not been able to hear the adjutant's words, but from my replies they had understood only too well. They looked at me silently, in anxious suspense. Then the cavalry lieutenant filled up his glass and said:'Here's to the Bainsizza!'His fellow-officers did the same.'To the offensive on the Bainsizza!'It was beginning all over again."
The end of Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade, an account of a year fighting on the Asiago plateau, on Italy's northern border. In mid-July 1917, Lussu's battalion was withdrawn from the front build defenses. The men recovered, and some of the wounded returned to the battalion. As Lussu wrote, 'One very soon began to forget. Life regained its ascendancy.' He was dining and joking with fellow officers when word came that they were being sent to the Bainsizza Plateau where the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo was underway.
Sardinian Brigade by Emilio Lussu, page 274, copyright © 1939 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publisher: Knopf, publication date: 1939
1917-08-25, 1917, August, Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo, Eleventh Isonzo, Italian soldiers
