Page 133 - La Grande Guerra dei Carabinieri - Flavio CARBONE

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the last Waltz at the edge of the Apocalypse:

Carabinieri Corps, art and poetry
Carabinieri Corps, art poetry

in the Great War

he art, poetry and literature of the coun-
tries involved dramatize and echo, and
T very often foretold, that immense trage-
dy, and many of the young European intellec-
tuals and artists – mostly ideologists, who expe-
rienced battle – discovered first hand and then
denounced the demented falshoods of the ideol-
ogies that supported the Empires. The aesthete
prince of the Vienna Secession art movement,
Gustav Klimt, master of fascinating portraiture
of a Byzantine and decadent flavour, increasingly transformed his aristocratic heroines into lifelike dolls, im-
prisoned by suffocating ornate motifs, envisaging the fatal reification of high society that had presumed to chal-
lenge eternity. The infantryman Joseph Ungaretti, a convinced ideologist, discovered first hand the nameless
horror – the unjustifiable conflict – in the mud of the trenches, where his words gradually lost every D’Annun-
zian weight, stood purged and bare amid the torment of suicidal attacks, with an animalistic will to live. No his-
torical documents nor vaunted speeches have ever or will ever be able to tell the peremptory truth, bare and
torn, as the words of Lussu, in whose books, not as negligible appearances, the Carabinieri, presented as safe-
guarders of order and military discipline, carrying out orders from superiors in blind obedience: that borders on
fanaticism, but also and above all to protect the the people, threatened by deserters and degenerates of all sorts,
to carry out intelligence and counterespionage, provide relief for the displaced and for the victims of bombings,
and to play their part in the war effort at the front. However, perhaps the words of the most painful example
are those of one of the most famous survivors of the Great War: Erich Maria Remarque, who in his memorable
book, All Quiet on the Western Front, was able to denounce – at the same time – the horrors of the past and
the dangers to the present.