Toes Up. (Duckworth, 10s. 6d.), with the subsidiary title of
"a chronicle of gay and doleful adventures of Alpini and mules and wine," by Signor Paolo Monelli, translated by Mr. Orb o Williams, with twenty-one excellent photographic illustrations, is as good a war book as we have yet found. It deals with a theatre of which we have not grown tired ; of ski platoons and glacier vedettes and snowstorms, as well as of bombs and blood ; and even if we have vowed never to read another tale of frightfulness we should make an exception in this instance, for Signor Monelli is a writer of real distinction, and the people he interprets are too little known in England. Napoleon used -toy that his best troops came from the Alps. The descendants of those famous veterans are the Alpini of to-day ; a stern and strong-kneed race, as different as possible from the flexible and excitable Latin of popular fancy. Yet these Alpinis are Latins in their eloquence, in their courage, in their gaiety. Signor Monelli's book {like Signor Mussolini's Diary) was written chiefly in the front-line trenches, and has a sense of actuality that no later artifice could give. To-day, in a preface to the fourth Italian edition, Signor Monelli says that those times are "as distant and strange from my spirit as the chronicles of a remote childhood."
Previous page
