Dying in the factory, in Ilaria Rossetti's novel the tragedy of Bollate's Sutter & Thévenot

Work, a bit like war, has always claimed its victims. This axiom is even more valid when a country is involved in a conflict and the war effort must be supported at all costs, without any regard to the tiredness of those who work and safety standards. Ilaria Rossetti reminds us of this, with highly evocative and poetic language, in her novel " The girls' factory " (Bompiani, 2024, pp. 312, also e-book) in which she recalls the serious accident that occurred in 1918 in the Sutter & Thévenot factory of Bollate , near Milan.

In the explosion of the plant, intended for the production of munitions, 59 workers and especially female workers died , because in the midst of the Great War men used to die in the trenches and women had the bitter task of supporting and sacrificing themselves on the home front.

Rivers of ink have rightly been spilled on the human tragedy experienced by soldiers engaged in the First World War.

However, the conflict was also dramatic for those who were not on the front lines, in particular for women . Let's just think of the tragedy of seeing fathers, husbands, sons leave for the front and live for years in anguished wait for a letter of reassurance or a meager official communication announcing that their family member had fallen for their country. Let's try to put ourselves in the shoes of women of all ages who suddenly found themselves alone in providing for their family, in an era when it was almost only men who worked and earned a salary. Often malnourished, exhausted by fatigue and terrorized by their enemies, women died in large numbers even if not from artillery fire: of the over six million civilians wiped out by the Great War, most were women. In this tragic picture which it would be senseless to embellish, the women showed great courage and above all a great heart. It was they who kept the home front, that is, the entire structure of civil society, standing, and they did so in many ways. You found them in the rear of the front as cooks, sutlers, seamstresses. Or in field hospitals as Red Cross nurses - ten thousand Italians worked in the Red Cross in 1918 - or nurses. With almost all the men absent, it was up to the women to go to the factories, to make the cities work. Young and old found themselves driving trams, working as postmen, sweepers and teachers, operating lathes and welding machines in factories, working in barber shops and offices previously the preserve of men only. And things worked great and the industrial machine never stopped , managing to satisfy the army's growing demand for armaments and supplies. Indeed, the women endured exhausting shifts, in unhealthy environments. For example, the workers who worked in armaments factories were called "canaries" because at the end of the job they were all yellow like canaries. Too bad that color was due to contact with gunpowder and harmful chemicals used in the factory!

Ilaria Rossetti dedicates a novel to these women which is a sort of emotional elegy . Girls from 1918 with the windswept hair of those who cycle through the countryside, with hollow cheeks because food is scarce but the burning eyes of those who have their whole life ahead of them, with thin fingers that are perfect for making ammunition. In fact, during the First World War, the Sutter & Thévenot factory chose the Lombard countryside to install, in Castellazzo di Bollate, one of the factories where hundreds of very young women took turns supplying the soldiers at the front. Thousands and thousands of boys, separated from their families and from work to go and become cannon fodder in the trenches, with hearts full of nostalgia and ready to light up when a postcard arrives written in a female handwriting, as happens to Corrado who arrives out of love to desertion...

But it is 1918 and history makes no concessions: this is how Emilia, the little girl of the house, says goodbye to her parents on the morning of June 7th without knowing if she will see them again, because a serious explosion hits the factory causing dozens of victims, almost all women and little girls. However, production resumes immediately, in wartime human lives matter even less than usual. This is how Corrado and Emilia's father, Martino, with his wife Teresa will have to accept that reality is harder than dreams and time passes indifferently. And that wars, even when they end, never end for everyone.