the Boys of '99: A Novel Italian Front, 1917 - 1918

They called them boys. The war turned them into men in a matter of weeks. Autumn 1917. Italy has been shattered at Caporetto. The army is falling back, the roads are choked with refugees, and the country has one line left to hold: the river Piave. In desperation, the High Command calls up the class of 1899 - boys who have just turned eighteen. Antonio Ferrari is one of them. A farmer's son from a small village in Piedmont, he leaves at dawn with a blanket, a change of clothes, and his mother's rosary. He travels to the front with Carlo, a baker's son who jokes to keep the fear down, and Francesco, quiet and frail, who prays without moving his lips. What waits for them is not the war they were promised. It is mud and freezing rain, field hospitals that smell of blood and disinfectant, and a firing squad against a brick wall at dawn. It is the tunnels of Monte Grappa, hauling shells through the heart of a mountain while the artillery shakes the rock. And it is one impossible moment on the Piave, when an enemy soldier lowers his rifle and kneels in the mud beside him. A story of friendship, fear, and the price of coming home. The Boys of '99 is a work of fiction rooted in real events. Roberto Cavasin has spent years walking the battlefields of northeastern Italy - the trenches above the Piave, the galleries of Monte Grappa, the small country cemeteries with their wooden crosses - and photographing what remains of them. That ground is on every page. For readers of literary war fiction and coming-of-age novels; for anyone drawn to All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, or the forgotten front where a generation of Italian teenagers stopped an army. Translated from the Italian. Includes the Supreme Command's Order of the Day of November 1917 honoring the Class of 1899.