Veterans Day

I believe most of us adults prejudiced by our culture. There is a natural we/they mentality that "the elders" pass on to us. In Toledo, where I grew up, it was about the Polish (stingy, funny accents, not so bright) and, above all "the colored." This was the polite term, and it was usually used in a sentence that began with "Once the colored move in. . ."

Toledo didn't have much of an Italian population, so while we knew the racial terms we didn't really know the stereotypes too well. But when it came to war, we, the children of the World War II generation, did know that the Italians were some combination of cowardly and inept. Many films and books after the fact reinforced this notion.

Today is Veterans Day. It commemorates the armistice that ended World War I in 1918. Italy fought in that war on the side of the good guys: Britain, France, the U.S., Russia, at least until their Revolution. Italy had its own version of the Western Front, with millions of soldiers wallowing around in freezing mud in the Alps, engaging in no fewer than eleven murderous battles (each one lasting weeks or months) against the Austrians and Germans. 60,000 soldiers on both sides died in avalanches. A similar number froze to death.

World War I is a fascination of mine. How is it that these few people: Kings and Kaisers and Tsars and Archdukes who were related to their adversaries could touch off four years of slaughter, including all the major democracies of the world, in the 20th Century? Why is it that the rest of us never got it? Check out All Quiet on the Western Front or Goodbye to All That or For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Soldier of the Great War, or, for non-fiction, The Great War and Modern Memory or The Pity of War or A Storm in Flanders or Death's Men.

World War I created Hitler - a decorated war hero with a legitimate complaint about corrupt leadership killing his comerades. Mussolini was in power five years after the war ended. America retreated into isolationism again, and watched while the Fascists used nationalism and racial pride to take over Europe and Japan. World War II will, I think, be considered in the future the conclusion of the first great war.

Italy, a younger country than the U.S. with one fifth our population, lost 650,000 dead in that war, about the same number of Americans who have died in all of our wars. That works out to 400 dead soldiers every day that the war lasted. Russia, France, the United Kingdom and Germany all lost as many or more.

There is a memorial in this small city of Varese with the names of about 600 men. Of these, fourteen were named Macchi. Macchi is a prominent name here: a foundation, an aircraft manufacturer. Maybe it's just a common name.

We say "men" were lost, but they were, it's safe to bet, mostly scared teenagers wondering with their last thoughts, what they were doing there.

Now, only a handful remain. I read an estimate that there are about 30 British veterans alive of the millions who served (about a million died). There is probably a similar number of Italian veterans of that war still alive.

I don't think lack of bravery was their problem.