This book—as its preface tells us—is "an act of faith hurled into the madness of war, a gesture of hope offered to those who had ceased to speak that word."
Written in spare prose that often turns to poetry, Don Carlo draws us near, with restraint and tenderness, to the immense and unspeakable suffering of our soldiers—the alpini—in Albania, Greece, and above all in Russia.
The frost. The blizzards. The endless steppe. Endless columns of men stripped of every shred of human dignity, trudging forward exhausted yet strong and unbroken in spirit. The gnawing, obsessive hunger for a crust of bread, a moment's rest, the warmth of a fire.
In the midst of such desolation and senseless pain, Don Carlo scatters moments of humanity and profound Christian witness. As a chaplain among his alpini, he becomes for them an unforgettable father and brother—so much so that a fellow soldier who shared that Russian campaign would later say of him: "How Italy needs someone like Don Gnocchi now."
A wooden chapel built in the snow. A portable field altar carried on mule-back wherever the regiment moved. An icon painted in black and white oils by an artillery gunner—the canvas a towel, the paint scraped from a tin, the brush "borrowed from the quartermaster." Blessings and absolutions given to his alpini before an assault. Letters from home—that tender taste of family—the ones that arrived and the ones that never did.
To urge you to read this precious book, to make it known, to recommend it in schools so that we do not forget the sacrifice of so many of our soldiers, and so that we recover something of that love for our homeland that sustained them, I offer one passage I will never forget:
"...all of them performed work that was truly beyond human strength. God was with them, but men proved worthy of God. Is it not divine majesty—that of Captain Grandi, mortally wounded, who saw his alpini gathered silently around his stretcher and cried out: 'What are these hard faces? Come on, men, sing with me: "The captain, yes he is wounded, wounded he lies, soon he will die"?'
And so across the desolate reaches of the winter steppe rose a swift and sorrowful chorus of alpini, carried on the frozen evening wind and guided by the ever-weaker voice of a dying man: 'The first verse...the third verse for my mother...the fifth verse for the mountain that will cover him with roses and flowers.'