Heroes and Barbarians: propaganda postcards from the Great War

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Heroes and Barbarians
Propaganda postcards from the Great War

The bottoms of drawers at my parents’ home sometimes offer interesting finds going back to earlier generations. One such find was a small but jarring batch of unused postcards from the First World War.

    These were probably brought back from that war by Zio (uncle) Ettore, my maternal grandfather’s brother, who had served in the Italian army. I remember him from my childhood as a poised old man that people would address as “Signor Colonnello”; but in the photo shown here he is still a young Lieutenant.
    The postcards I found are all standard issue of the Royal Italian Army -- the kind that were presumably handed to soldiers to write home on. Some are innocuous enough, blank on the content side and with a nice coat of arms on the address side, like this:

Click a photo to enlarge

    But then there is a batch of postcards designed as propaganda. Given the horrors of that conflict (including over 16 Million deaths), and the senseless reasons for it, someone saw a need to convince the soldiers that dying in it was a necessary and glorious idea; and whoever designed these cards did not resort to understatement. I imagine the other parties to that war had similar efforts in place...
    These cards are drawn in a rather crude manner, and the depressing black and beige technique adds to their sinister impact. The artist signed his name as G. Mazzoni, and thanks to Google we can assume he’s Giuseppe Mazzoni (1881-1957), an Italian soldier and painter.

    I tried to arrange them in a logical sequence, and they get increasingly disturbing as it proceeds.
Here they are, with my translation of the texts:

Fight you must, O soldier of Italy, for Justice, for Right, for Liberty!

So far, so good: Lofty universal goals indeed. The significance of his own planned role vis a vis the smoking altar in front of the monument to these goals may or may not have escaped the soldier's attention.

WW1 Italian military propaganda postcard

Click photo to enlarge

Fight you must, O soldier of Italy, to save the grain of your fields, the wine of your vines, the oil of your olives, the herds in your cowsheds.

Well, now we’re getting more personal. Note the lack of any mention of “the dividends of your stocks” or “the bookshelves of your libraries”... these soldiers were clearly recruited from the agrarian lower classes, and the propaganda experts knew what buttons to push.

Click photo to enlarge

Perplexed and horrified, the nation of Italy waited; then it broke the chains that bound it to the Barbarian and shouted: I do not tarnish myself, O German, with your faults!

This left me at first as perplexed as those horrified Italians... My guess is that it refers to the fact that Italy started the war in alliance with Germany, then switched to the other side; this bit of expediency had to be rationalized as a heroic act of noble liberation from evil.

Click photo to enlarge

The Barbarian gnashed his teeth and screamed his threat: For you too, traitorous Italy, will arrive the terrible hour of revenge!

Not surprisingly, Germany took a dim view of Italy’s opportunism.

Click photo to enlarge

But one sad day the hordes of two empires, ravenous and ferocious, came over the Alps and flooded into our lands to bring grief, weeping and misery.

Hordes across the Alps? What a carefully chosen hot button for the Italians, invoking national traumas going back to Attila and Hannibal. In fact, it was Italy who declared war on the Germans and the Austrians, but why bother with the facts?

Click photo to enlarge

For Justice, for Right, for Liberty, he fought heroically amid the eternal ice, on the desolate Karst, and he covered himself with glory.

Actually Italy secured very little glory in WW1, and the Karst plateau took a devastating toll in life from its army.

Click photo to enlarge

Do you hear on the other riverbank the screams and weeping of women? It is the Barbarian molesting the women of Italy. SOLDIER OF ITALY DEFEND THEM; if you surrender, your woman too will suffer this outrage.

Click photo to enlarge

Of course... the story would not be complete without reference to the rape of our virtuous women by their brutal men. Not that this didn’t happen, and no doubt on both sides. When they weren’t busy covering themselves with glory, that is.

Fight you must, O soldier of Italy, to avoid enduring the disgrace of your violated woman, to avoid seeing growing in your house the bastard, son of your woman and the German.

This surprised me... You’d think the previous vignette would be enough, but evidently the suffering of the women was considered insufficiently motivating on its own. Now, the bastard of the German, in your own house... that’s good cause for hate. By this point, who even remembers Justice, Right and Liberty?

Click photo to enlarge

So now you know why the heroic soldiers of Italy ought to fight the Barbarians. Or vice versa; the hate narrative in these cards could serve the same purpose just as well on the other side -- indeed, on any side in most of the wars in modern history. There's just one thing I can’t figure out: were they really expecting the soldiers to use these gruesome postcards to send to their wives and girlfriends back home??!?

Heroes and Barbarians

Propaganda postcards from the Great War