About this ebook
The volume follows the diary as a machine for converting attrition into meaning. Repetition is disciplined by narrative; fear is translated into duty; boredom is attached to a horizon; rumor is managed by bulletins, documents, letters, songs, and fragments of trench language. The front becomes a laboratory in which endurance is made speakable, sacrifice is secularly sacralized, and the soldier is constructed as an exemplary type: one who waits, suffers, obeys, and continues.
This edition is documentary and analytic at once. It offers a controlled English translation with a bounded apparatus: textual and editorial notes, historical anchors, structural cross-links, and terminological discipline. The aim is not to monumentalize the author, nor to reduce the diary to propaganda. It is to make visible how wartime writing manufactures belief under pressure.
Read in this way, My War’s Diary becomes a crucial chapter in the Philosophy of Command: the passage from ideological polemic to morale technology, from political language to lived discipline, from the “I was there” of the witness to the public production of consent. The trench is not only described. It is organized, narrated, and turned into a grammar of obedience.
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About the author
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was an Italian political journalist, socialist militant, interventionist agitator, and later founder of Fascism.
Vincenzo Pinto (b. 1974) is an Italian historian, educator, publicist, and translator. He is editor-in-chief of the cultural association “Free Ebrei” and edits Free Ebrei's series published by Brill (Studies in Jewish History and Culture).
