Another type of testimony about those days was that given by Italians who were imprisoned during the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo. According to official reports by the military commanders, from 24 October to 4 November slightly less than 300,000 persons were captured, half of the total number of Italian prisoners who were captured during the First World War. Arrested in streets and villages where they tried to organize resistance operations, these men were taken to prison camps in the heart of the Austro-Hungarian and German empire. In their memoirs they recall their dismay, their sorrow and their fears at what was happeningand describe the places that up to two weeks earlier had served as battlefields.
On 31st October 1917 Bartolomeo Pernigotti wrote these words in his diary: "Che differenza da quando l'avevo veduta un mese e mezzo prima [Udine]. Una casa bruciava, i tedeschi facevano la films [sic]. Noi si sostò in un albergo dove un ottimo Chianti rinvenuto in un fiasco ci allietò un poco unitamente a qualche mela. […] Era un davvero triste spettacolo quello del Carso. Completamente ingombro da cannoni, carriagi d'ogni genere e tutto saccheggiato." (What a difference from when I had seen [Udine] a month and a half earlier. A house was burning; the Germans were making films [sic]. We took a break in a hotel where a very good Chianti that we discovered in a flask cheered us up together with a few apples. [… ] The Karst presented a very sad spectacle. Fully cluttered with cannons, all kinds of carriages and the whole place plundered." quoted in Antonio Gibelli La Grande Guerra degli Italiani, Bur, Milan, 2009, page 282). Andrea Pintus, a young soldier from Sardinia aged twenty two years, recalls instead that the soldiers "bestemmiavano, maledicevano la guerra, il nemico, che li obbligava a lasciare quei luoghi dove tanto avevano lavorato per costruirsi i ricoveri, per altri forse peggiori sprovvisti di tutto" (were swearing, cursing the war and the enemy who was making them leave those places where they had worked so hard to build their shelter, to go to other places that were possibly worse and lacking everything" Andrea Pintus, Anni di guerra e prigionia 1915-1918, Edes, Sassari, 1994, page 58).
