Legend

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Return I will and talk to the dead… notes, short stories, poems, thoughts and pictures by a combatant.

Pietro Annese, poet and combatant, was born in Castellana Grotte (Bari, Italy) in 1907, artillery captain, participated in the Africa Campaign from ’40 to ’43 and lived with deep emotion the drama of a generation sent to the front in harm’s way, only equipped with its own enthusiasm and with the love of country and then condemned to oblivion for reasons of opportunism or narrow political fundamentalism.

He left numerous photographs and paper sheets where he fragmentarily wrote facts, poems and stories down. Much of the material has been lost.

In full fervour of construction works and progress, we took up the musket abandoning the building sites and the fields where the silence of inactivity fell. The military units have been reconstituted, units that are poor in years but exuberant with enthusiasm and faith for the destiny of war. After polishing the old muskets, the seasoned cannons, the few rusty planes and the scarce armaments, the borders were reached with impetus.

The enthusiasm replaced the weapons, a hurricane had come and swept the useless sandy enemy resistances away, on Masale, Gallabat, Metemna, Somalia, Berbera, Cassala, the tricolor rose everywhere. But we remained there, closed in a circle, the country could not help us, supply us, assist us and one had to defend our families from the insults of the natives and the hunger, and to provide with one own means of supply to the defence of the territory and the good name of the Italy and our flags from the increasingly substantial attacks of the enemy.

The circle was too broad, that it could not be measured or embraced with the look or the chain of our arms. It was necessary to shrink, to make a mass, to cling to impervious lands and to easier defences and to draw back, Berbera, Cassala, Masale, Gallabat were abandoned.