This chapter traces the emigrant soldiers’ experiences after their arrival in Italy. For some, it was their first encounter with a country they had heard so much about and many had the opportunity to engage in sightseeing before enlistment. Others were devastated to be swept off to the front without having the chance to see their parents and families. Returning from abroad to comply with a mobilisation order did not confer any special status on the emigrant soldiers. Once at the front lines, the mobilised emigrants suffered the same privations, injuries and hardship as all other Italian soldiers and officers. One of the major issues for those from South America and North Africa was the unfamiliar cold and snowy conditions they experienced. Others were disappointed to be stationed away from the front and that their service was not as exciting as they had expected. However, depending on their place of residence abroad and, in some cases, their pre-war occupations and language skills, the fact of their emigration did impact on their physical experience of combat and warfare. The chapter details the emigrant soldiers’ combat experiences, including gas attacks, the rout at Caporetto in 1917 and internment as prisoners of war.

As soon as Italy entered the war, mobilisation orders were issued, from which emigrants were not exempted. From May–December 1915, two-thirds of the 300,000 emigrant soldiers would depart from their adopted homelands. Their passage was paid by the Italian government, but transporting thousands of reservists across the Atlantic was a formidable logistical challenge. This chapter examines the initial mobilisation of the reservists, their motivations for enlisting and their journeys to Italy in 1915. Their decisions to depart rested on many factors, including country of emigration, family situation, economic considerations, the length of time a man had spent abroad, degree of adherence to a sense of Italian national identity and political beliefs. Youthful naivety and a desire for adventure were also common motivators and the dangers of submarine attack when crossing the Atlantic a significant deterrent. Despite the mobilisation orders to emigrants, the Italian government had limited power to compel them to return from abroad to serve. The main incentive was a negative one: if reservists did not respond to the draft, they would be subject to severe penalties at a later date if they were to return to Italy.

The epilogue reflects on the memory of the 300,000 Italian emigrant soldiers today, in Italy and elsewhere. In the interwar period, emigrant communities erected monuments and commemorative plaques to the emigrant soldiers who had died on the battlefields between 1915 and 1918. The decision about whether and how to commemorate the ‘fallen soldiers’ from emigrant communities was one taken at a local level and usually a result of the interests and priorities of specific figures or groups, both state and civilian. There is no evidence of any coordinated programme of commemoration or coherent timeline. Today, there is little public awareness of the emigrant soldiers and neither did the centenary of the war, between 2014 and 2018, bring about any widespread recognition of their role and experiences in the war.

This chapter explores the experiences of Italian emigrant veterans during the Fascist regime (1922–1943) and the Second World War. There were many contradictions in the Fascist treatment of emigrant veterans. On some occasions, they were fêted and lauded for their service. Unlike the Liberal state, Mussolini’s government highlighted the contribution of the emigrant soldiers during the Great War as exceptional and worthy of recognition, most notably at the landmark Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, held in Rome in 1932. However, on the whole, emigrant veterans did not become politically active once they returned abroad and were not the dominant standard-bearers for Fascism, and were often badly treated or ignored by the regime. Most of the Fascist government’s attention to the emigrants and the war surrounded the issue of wartime draft evaders, and new laws were passed in the 1920s to permit them to travel to Italy for short periods without being inducted into the Italian Army or otherwise punished. The outbreak of the Second World War upended the emigrant veterans’ lives once more, resulting in experiences of occupation, internment as enemy aliens or mobilization in the Italian or other armies.

Chapter 2 considers how Italian emigrants navigated the arrival of war during the period of Italian neutrality from August 1914 to May 1915. The immediate effects of the war in 1914 were felt most amongst those in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium and France, many of whom suddenly lost their jobs. Not content to remain unemployed and risk living in a war zone, a mass exodus to Italy began. By October 1914, half a million Italian emigrants had returned to Italy from across Europe. They faced grave difficulties upon arrival, primarily in finding employment, leading to instances of serious public unrest. The chapter also considers the experiences of the 3,000 garibaldini, Italian volunteers in the French Army, half of whom were Italian emigrants already living in France and half of whom were volunteers from Italy and elsewhere, including six of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s grandsons. Finally, the chapter analyses the immediate response of Italian emigrant communities to Italy’s declaration of war against Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915 and entry into the war alongside Britain, France and Russia.

Chapter 5 reveals the numerous specific challenges experienced by emigrant soldiers and explores the coping mechanisms they employed. Compared to other soldiers, they experienced additional difficulties related to sending and receiving letters from abroad, in finding their preferred brands of foreign cigarettes and, for those without close family in Italy, in using their infrequent periods of leave. In addition to such practicalities, integration into the Italian Army was often challenging. A significant obstacle was their weak grasp of the Italian language and the fact that they were often treated as foreigners by others. There was no widespread recognition of the need to consider the emigrant soldiers as a distinct cohort within the Army and the men often felt forgotten and disregarded. Within a few months of Italy’s entry into the war, intense feelings of regret surfaced for most of the emigrants, even those who had previously been patriotic. While feelings of being Italian may have increased for many non-emigrant soldiers, the opposite was true of large numbers of those who had returned to Italy from abroad and many of them found their feelings of national belonging severely weakened as a result of their military service.

The vast majority of emigrant veterans returned to their pre-war places of residence. Between bureaucratic hurdles, economic difficulties and the fact that many were leaving their loved ones behind in Italy, this was not an easy choice. This chapter covers the period of 1919 to 1921 and examines the early years of the emigrants’ reintegration into their lives abroad. The men faced different difficulties depending on their country of residence and personal circumstances. As veterans of a foreign – albeit Allied – army, Italians found themselves ineligible for national support schemes designed for British, French or American ex-servicemen and at the same time were cut off from supports on offer back in Italy. The issue of pensions was a major and ongoing problem. Even when the veterans received them, they did not stretch very far in expensive cities outside Italy and it was up to private charitable organisations to fill the gap. While in some countries the men found their status as veterans used against them, in the US, it was taken as proof of their good character. Thus, the arrival of Italian veterans was generally regarded in highly positive terms as it bucked the perceived trend of ‘low-quality’ Italian immigrants.

This chapter considers the demobilisation of the emigrant soldiers in the immediate post-war period, which was a significant and high-profile political issue. Over two-thirds of them chose to depart from Italy as soon as they were able, revealing just how weak the veterans’ ties were to the nation for which they had just spent three years fighting. Significant bureaucratic and logistical hurdles existed, including a lack of steamships to transport the transatlantic returnees. Thousands of emigrant veterans descended on Genoa and Naples, causing severe overcrowding and public disorder. As protests mounted in spring 1919, politicians began calling on the government to recognise the exceptional nature of the emigrants’ service. Some special measures were thus put in place to afford them superior treatment upon discharge. A certificate was awarded to those who had travelled from the Americas, distinguishing between the emigrant returnees by country of departure for the first time. However, as this chapter demonstrates, any post-war recognition was too little, too late. The emigrants’ experience of and treatment during and after the war definitively weakened whatever earlier feelings of attachment they may have had to the nation.

In 1911, Italians living abroad constituted one-sixth of Italy’s population, numbering roughly five million people. However, the experiences of emigrant communities have not been incorporated into the narrative of Italy’s war. This chapter discusses the place of migration within the historiography of the First World War and of the war within migration history. It introduces the cohort of 300,000 emigrant soldiers who returned to Italy to complete their conscripted military service during the war, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. Scholars are divided as to whether this should be regarded as a success or a failure: I argue it is remarkable that so many made the journey considering that, in most locations, there were no coercive measures obliging them to do so. The chapter lays out the global micro-history approach adopted in the book and the decision to focus on four emigrant soldiers, each typical and atypical in different respects: Americo Orlando in São Paulo, Esterino Alessandro Tarasca in New York, Cesare Bianchi in London and Lazzaro Ponticelli in Paris.

Dominion generals truly believed that they might need a corps-sized army formation, or something close to it, in the not-too-distant future. They had just assembled big armies to fight a big war, so the possibility of having to do it again sometime soon was not so remote to them as it appears to us 100 years later. Their first instincts were to preserve as much army as possible. Senior officers in Canada proposed a permanent force of 20 000–30 000 and a compulsory service militia of 300 000 soldiers. Australia’s generals wanted a permanent force of 3500 professionals to train a militia of 130 000 troops, which could expand to 182 000 in wartime. And they suggested that the Commonwealth Government implement ‘measures for the utilization for a definite period of the trained personnel of the A.I.F’ to put things on the right path.