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He, touched, replied, “In my heart, that was what I wanted!”

This novel is, therefore, based on a true story. Nevertheless, some characters, organizations, and circumstances may be the fruit of the author's imagination or, if they exist, used for narrative purposes.

Almost.

THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN OF RUSSIA

OF 1941-1943

AND ITS MEMORY

I’ve still in my nose the smell of grease on a red-hot machine-gun. I’ve still in my ears and even in my brain the crunching of snow under my boots, the coughs and sneezes from Russian lookouts, the sound of dry grass swept by the wind on the banks of the Don. I’ve still in my eyes the stars of Cassiopeia which hung above my head every night, and the bunker props above my head every day. And when I think about it all I feel the terror of that January morning when their gun Katiuscia first let off its seventy-two rocket-shells.¹

This is the incipit of a famous autobiographical novel, The Sergeant in the snow, written by the Alpine Mario Rigoni Stern, soon destined to become the best-known literary testimony of the disastrous Italian campaign in Russia during the Second World War.