

Weight of Words
Almost 4 billion letters and cards were sent to and from Italian soldiers during the First World War – this compares to around 10 and 30 billion items sent by the larger armies of France and Germany respectively. But another factor to consider is that alongside having less total soldiers mobilized, Italy also had a rather low literacy rate: at the outbreak of war there were perhaps 40% of the population who couldn’t read or write. With no other way to communicate with their loved ones, or sometimes just to express themselves and find an escape from the experience of the war, illiterate men would either learn or get help writing from their comrades or military chaplains. The Italian military issued a large number of postcards, many in a format designed to be easy for less literate soldiers to fill out, with some preprinted text, clear spaces for addresses. However, these cards may have had a dual purpose: in giving such a limited space for actual writing, it would prevent soldiers writing too much about their experiences, controlling the amount of information getting out to the civilian population and making the job of the mail censors easier. Mail censorship was common during the First World War, and means that a lot of letters and cards are more vague and less expressive than they might otherwise have been.
