Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian insisted Tuesday

Another clash with global consequences looms, apart from the

awful conflagration in war-ravaged Syria. On Oct. 12,

following weeks of French pressure, the U.N. Security Council

set a 45-day deadline for intervention into Mali, the

northwest African nation that has seen roughly half of its

territory overrun by rebels and militias with links to al-

Qaeda’s North African wing (AQIM). France’s Defence

Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian insisted Tuesday it was a

“matter of weeks, not months” before decisive action would

be taken to reclaim a vast stretch of desert and semiarid

scrubland that has become a “terrorist sanctuary.” The

instability of the past half-year in Mali has sparked fears

on both sides of the Mediterranean of a broader regional

crisis. Six French nationals are currently being held hostage

in the Sahel. Only “the integrity of Mali,” said Le Drian,

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“assures Europe’s security.”

Metaphors of doom now swirl in what was once one of Africa’s

democratic success stories. Some say that Mali is the next

Somalia, where a patchwork of warlords and insurgents ranges

itself against a dysfunctional, crisis-hit state. Others say

it is the next Afghanistan, where extremist militias, some

with jihadist connections, make hay in a security vacuum,

arming and funding themselves through illicit drug smuggling

networks. (Islamist groups in control of historic Saharan

entrepots such as the cities of Timbuktu and Gao have

instituted Shari’a law and, like the Afghan Taliban a decade

ago, destroyed ancient tombs and relics considered idolatrous

within their own puritanical creed.) And now it may be the

next Libya—where only foreign military intervention, framed

as humanitarian action, can stabilize a steadily

deteriorating state of affairs.

(MORE: Why Islamists are wrecking Timbuktu.)

when the screenplay moves into computerized arrangements

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The third writer was the director Daniele Luchetti. (The writers adapted a novel by Antonio Pennacchi called Il Fasciocomunista, a title that really does fit.) This is Luchetti's eleventh film, and from moment one we know that we are in the hands of a director whose experience has made him impatient. He has no time for trifling or beautifying. He implies all along that film is important and screen time must be used. Nonetheless, or perhaps thus, the most rewarding elements in the picture are personal habits, interplay, small stuff--broken gestures, averted glances, unfinished sentences. Luchetti and his actors give their picture a strong sense of cultural verity, of Italian-ness, even when the screenplay moves into computerized arrangements.
Accio is the adolescent younger brother of Manrico. When the film begins, in 1962, he is in a seminary, but he leaves because of dissatisfactions and is drawn to the still-alive Fascist Party. Cut off from religious life, he is attracted by the idea of an omnipotent figure (Mussolini is still on headquarters walls), the discipline and patent purpose. He fights, often in truly rough roughhousing, with Manrico, who is a communist. Their differences lead to adventures and misadventures as they grow older, including relations with Francesca, who first appears as Manrico's girlfriend.

dog tags

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"practical realities" meant either that burials had to be organized more hastily and impersonally or that "retreating armies ... had to depend on the humanity of their opponents, who predictably gave precedence to their own casualties." While officers generally received more privileged treatment, ordinary foot soldiers would likely be interred individually in shallow, often unmarked graves--that is, if their own side buried them. If left to the handling of the enemy, they would probably be dumped with other fallen soldiers into large pits. As a consequence, nearly half of the Union dead and far more of the Confederate could be identified only, as Walt Whitman would note, "by the significant word UNKNOWN." Not until World War I would American soldiers wear "dog tags."
How, then, would families at home determine the fates and the whereabouts of loved ones in the field? How would they struggle not only to learn whether loved ones were alive or dead, but also to comprehend--to "realize," as they put it in their letters and diaries--the fact of death without its physical embodiment, its visibility? Improvisation, together with enormous energy, was required here as well. Sources of "official" information--reports of field commanders, casualty lists in newspapers--were few, and they were often unreliable or inadequate. "You may have heard before you read this that I was killed or wounded," one New York soldier, anticipating Mark Twain's famous quip, could write his sister after the Battle of the Wilderness, "but allow me to contradict the report."