In the ranks of this unit, Lussu became one of the most valiant and well-known officers, so much so that he earned the appreciation of his superiors and deserved during the conflict four decorations for valor in recognition of the innumerable daring actions carried out and of the influence exercised over the men under his command.

Having failed an attempt at negotiation and convergence between the shareholders and the Fascists, of which he himself was a protagonist, Lussu sided with increasingly antagonistic positions, participating in the Aventine Secession after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti.

[1] Hidden under unit numbers and fictitious names, the novel recounts events that can be traced back to the period spent by the Sassari Brigade on the Altipiano dei Sette Comuni between June 1916 and July 1917.

The criticism towards the superior officers and the generals who were responsible for the conduct of the fighting is undoubtedly fierce, and reflects the accents of bitter antimilitarism that characterized the author at the time of writing the novel.

Although it has long been neglected by both academic and militant critics, there are recent readings that highlight the literary quality of this and other Lussu works (such as Marcia su Roma and its whereabouts), and argue that the pages of this memoir-romance anticipate techniques and ideas of later twentieth-century literature.

[12] The first to formulate this criticism were the historians Paolo Pozzato and Giovanni Nicolli, who consulted all the existing documentation on the Sassari Brigade during the period in which Lussu was a member, highlighting a series of inconsistencies.

Their theses have been independently taken up and integrated by Ferdinando Scala[6] and Lorenzo Cadeddu,[1] which have respectively narrated in a complete way the events of the Sassari Brigade in the period of interest and studied the episode of the shooting of Major Marchese.