Caporetto. Its legacy would be a term to indicate terrible defeat. 

Italian losses at the hands of the Central Forces numbered in the tens of thousands. The Austro-Hungarian advance demolished our front line. I was a spirited kid from the south with a burning desire to serve my country, but I wasn't stupid. When the call came to surrender the men were relieved. They gave up arms willingly, the losses we had suffered had broken down all moral. The war was over for us.

Those of us which could walk did so, while others were carried. It was the many who remained prone, scattered across the front line which I swore to remember. The horrors of war were real, there was no glory. Blunt and mechanical instruments of war wrought the human form in ways never imagined by those boarding ship with wild ambitions of grandeur in combat. How was there such fragility in man, while also being capable of causing such unimaginable butchery? As we turned our backs to it all the line of brothers whispered a prayer.

In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti

Had we known what fate awaited us, most would have rather died on that wretched battlefield. Myself included, and I survived.

Once we arrived in Austria we were divided between concentration camps. Myself, I was taken to Mauthausen. The conditions rapidly deteriorated as the number of us taken captive swelled. The healthy became emaciated and sick. The wounded and weak decayed in their cots. By some miracle I was spared that macabre fate, the cost of which was to witness an untold number of friends and brothers needlessly perish in agony.

When the war ended, life for myself in Italia was over. I could not expose mio famiglia to the harrowed man that returned.