The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (17 page)

8
the first prominent Italian to call publicly
: Cornwall [2000], 113.

9
‘
because it is not for me as an irredentist
’: Battisti,.

10
Joseph Roth gibed that
‘
national self-determination
’: Roth.

11
Mario Alberti, a high-
profile irredentist
: Gross. 84.

12
‘
Growing up in these parts meant growing up
’: Stuparich [1950].

13
‘
Trieste is waking rawly
’: Joyce.

14
‘
slept the sleep of their prehistory
’: Federzoni.

15
‘Italianism is uncontaminated, full, generous, ardent
’: Barzini [1913].

1 
From 1909, Trieste’s Italian and Slavic Socialist Parties presented a single slate in local elections. This was consistent with Austrian Socialist anti-nationalism; the party leaders in Vienna wanted to reform the empire into a federation of ethnically-based units. Nationalism, in their view, was an outgrowth of bourgeois capitalism, a weapon in the class war that should and could be ‘put beyond use’, if it could not be destroyed.

NINE

From Position to Attrition

Among mountains there are everywhere numerous
positions extremely strong by nature, which you
should abstain from attacking.

N
APOLEON

The Second Battle of the Isonzo

On 7 July 1915, the last day of Italy’s first full-scale offensive, Cadorna was at a conference of Allied commanders in France, to co-ordinate operations. The main purpose was to support the Russians, who had lost ground steadily since the defeats at Gorlice in May. It was hoped that a fresh Anglo-French offensive in August would relieve pressure on the Eastern Front. On the ‘Italo-Serbian front’, as General Joffre irritatingly called it, the Italians should keep attacking with all their might. The French commander added that, if Germany came to Austria’s aid on the Isonzo, the Italians might think of stopping at Laibach and Klagenfurt. A period of consolidation on the plains, with the Alps at their back, would leave them well placed to resume the offensive towards Vienna and Budapest in due course.

Within a few months, this advice would mock the Italians’ inability to crack the Isonzo front. At the time, Cadorna took heart from the Allied support for his strategy and tactics. A week and a half later, the mobilisation was complete and Cadorna launched the second offensive. The bombardment began at 04:00 on 18 July along a 36-kilometre front. The Supreme Command took responsibility for co-ordinating the medium-calibre batteries and, instead of showering shells around the Austrian lines, the gunners concentrated on hitting the front line. This improved the results; the Austrians were stunned by the artillery fire, which continued into the afternoon. Yet the Italians still lacked detailed information about enemy positions, and did not realise that in many places the Austrians ducked into well-made underground shelters. The rear positions, on the other hand, were totally exposed, and the reserves took heavy casualties.

The main objective was Mount San Michele, at the northern tip of the Carso. Attacking at 13:00 hours on the 18th, the infantry made good progress, quickly reaching the enemy lines on outlying summits and pressing upwards. The hilltop was stormed on 20 July, but the triumphant Italians were hammered by accurate Austrian fire. The Duke of Aosta asked for reinforcements and, while his request was under consideration, Boroević mustered forces for a counter-attack before dawn on the 21st. After an opening bombardment and two hours’ hand-to-hand fighting against a Bosnian regiment brandishing studded maces, the outnumbered Italians fell back to avoid being outflanked. They retook the hill on the 26th, twice, without being able to hold it. Losses on both sides were huge. The Sassari Brigade alone took 2,400 casualties, about 40 per cent of its strength. (It would lose a further 1,200 men during August.)

A dozen kilometres to the south, Giani Stuparich crouches behind a stone parapet, peering through binoculars at the soldiers crawling ‘like lines of ants’ over the grey flanks of Mount Cosich. He is glad to be distracted from the nauseating heat and stink of faeces, unburied corpses and sulphur. The stones in the trench are scalding. All the men can do is rig sunscreens from lengths of canvas. Another kind of heat is welcome: he notes the relief of ducking into a trench at night that is still warm from other bodies, like a communal bed. His rucksack, too, inspires affection:
canterano
or ‘chest of drawers’ by day, pillow by night. The men move in shadowy groups around the hillside, outlined by the pale rock.

The order comes to advance. Reddish shrapnel bursts overhead, yellow explosions flare on the ground. Deafened, stumbling into potholes in the limestone, sometimes so deeply that other soldiers have to drag them out, the men look as if they are walking on flames. The ground trembles under their boots. Terrible losses halt the operation on 23 July. The following day, the Third Army suspends all attacks. Stuparich’s unit moves to the wetlands south of Monfalcone. Their new trench offers an easy target, and they cannot attack because the ground ahead is too marshy. The captain’s hands shake, his eyes are dull. After two straight months at the front, the men’s nerves are shot; life seems unendurable.

The Italians made no more headway further north. Successive charges up Mount Sabotino and Podgora hill, around Gorizia, gained little ground against machine-gun enfilades. Marginal progress in the first days was wiped out by counter-attacks. Repeated thrusts at Hill 383, above Plava, were repulsed.

For the soldiers, the Carso quickly became an evil force rather than an inert landscape: an enemy that probed their human frailty, flaying their senses. An Austrian officer remembered the vertical sun,

… baking the leaves on the trees to a dark crisp, until they crackle on the branch. It blanches the grass until it shatters at a touch, like the thinnest blown glass. In the glare, trees look black. Beyond, the sea steams, or gleams like steel. Rocks split. Sounds carry far louder and faster. It is as if the sun’s rays were multiplied by millions of mirrors, tormenting the soldiers’ eyes. There is no escaping the heat. Tongues swell, coated with thick saliva. Fingers swell and dangle clumsily from sticky hands. Eyes inflamed, skin like parchment. The blinding light beats everywhere, penetrating our eyelids. Our flasks are empty, sucked dry by early morning.

 The writer, Captain Abel, also left a vivid account of an Italian bombardment:

The incoming shells are visible to the naked eye; they look like black sausages. If their effect were not so terrible, the sight of Carso veterans leaping this way and that to avoid the shells would be ridiculous. Not realising that they must dodge the shells, many of the newcomers are blown up. As soon as the bombardment ends, the Italians rush out of their advance positions – usually very close to our front line – and jump into our trenches.

 Bringing their machine guns and sandbags with them, they swiftly convert a conquered trench into a defensive position. ‘Their engineering skills are matchless.’ The Austrian commanders must prepare a counterattack at once, or it will be too late. Survivors lie where they fall in the burning sun, not daring to brush away the flies; the slightest movement draws enemy fire.

The battlefield is a vision of hell. The men trample on detritus at every step. The thin soil in the natural craters is pocked with shell holes. Fragments of shell casing have sunk deep into the tree trunks. Unexploded projectiles of every calibre end up in the most unlikely places, half buried, wedged between rocks. Telephone wires are tangled like clumps of exotic grass. Coagulated blood glints on the rock. And everywhere the sickly stink of corpses. Night brings little rest. Patrols search for the wounded, the dead and the buried-alive. Mules bring munitions and victuals up to the line. The daily allowance of a litre of water is delivered, and often finished by daybreak. Sappers and engineers repair the trenches, hating the moonlight that silhouettes them. Throbbing away, unseen, are the rock-drills that are now arriving, ‘more important than water, than air, even than the Military Order of Maria Theresa. A rock-drill can eat up a metre and a half of rock in one hour.’

On the upper Isonzo, the climate and conditions were atrocious in different ways that also added to the Italians’ difficulties. A junior officer called Virgilio Bonamore (3rd Company, 21st Battalion of Bersaglieri) kept a diary in the first months of the war. His company was stationed above Caporetto. He described nights at 2,000 metres, shivering uncontrollably on paths like goat-tracks where a wrong step meant certain death. On 29 July, he spent 24 hours in a trench between Mounts Krn and Mrzli,

… squatting among our own and enemy corpses. The stench was unbearable and on top of that we had to withstand a furious enemy assault and we repelled it. Many of our men fell, hit in the head while they poked out of the trench to fire. The constant stream of bombs also caused some casualties. These are steel cylinders about 30 cm long that the Austrians throw at us with special equipment from up to 300 m away.
1
Their effect is horrific. A poor Alpino lost his legs and had his stomach ripped out. In daytime you can see the bombs coming and dodge them but at night it’s serious stuff.

 When Austrian artillery caused a cliff to collapse above the Italian line, 20 men were swept into the abyss.

As well as enemy fire and deadly rock-falls, the Bersaglieri had to contend with violent electric storms, freezing winds, and hailstones ‘as big as walnuts’. On 2 August, Bonamore wrote: ‘It hasn’t stopped raining for a single day. The cold was so intense that the whole battalion apart from 50 had to go down with frostbitten feet.’ Judging by his diary, the company was not aware that the second offensive was under way, nor were their movements timed to relieve pressure elsewhere. In late July and early August, the company was needed for defensive operations, repelling ferocious Austrian sallies down from the Krn–Mrzli ridge.

Only in mid-August, when the Carso had been quiet for a week, did the Italians mount a major assault on the upper Isonzo. (Cadorna was trying to break through towards Tarvis.) Bonamore recorded the horror of compact infantry assaults on the cliffs and ravines in a landscape where only well-equipped mountaineers would now venture. At 03:00 on 14 August, the artillery opens up. Under cover of the darkness and thundering guns, the Bersaglieri crawl up the trackless hillside. More than once, Bonamore slithers back 20 or 30 metres. They stop some 200 metres below the enemy line and huddle for warmth. Bonamore sleeps ‘for an hour or so leaning on the knees of Sergeant Meda who in turn was leaning against a tree trunk so as not to fall’. The climbing sun reveals them to the Austrians, who rake the mountainside with shrapnel. The Italians press against the rocks, and wait. The wire- cutting detail is highest up the slope.

Around 12:15 the artillery falls silent. Bonamore keeps checking his watch. The order to attack comes at 12:35 precisely. Roaring encouragement, Captain Rossi of 3rd Company races up the hill, with Bonamore and a few others in his wake. They reach the wire through a hail of bullets, overtaking the wire-cutters who go down like ninepins. In desperation, the captain’s party tries to tear out the pegs that pin the strands of wire to the ground. It cannot be done. They try to hack through the wire with little hatchets, but the wire is too thick. Others have caught up by now, and men are dying all around. The sappers still lag behind and seem to be hesitating. Looking back down the hillside, they see artillery and machine-gun crossfire sweeping the hillside, ‘mowing down everything’. It is carnage. ‘The dead are in piles on top of each other. Nearly all the senior officers have fallen.’

The captain’s party is quickly reduced to a dozen, ‘right beneath the barbed wire. We throw ourselves to the ground.’ At least they are safe from the deadly crossfire: the Austrian gunners do not dare to aim so close to their own first line. As they cannot retreat without making themselves easy targets, they wait, firing as rapidly as possible to make the Austrians think there are more of them. When the ammunition runs low, the captain decides to move. One by one, four men crawl away from their enclave by the wire; all are killed. The survivors wait for nightfall. ‘It’s raining and we’re literally sodden in freezing water.’ Darkness finally comes and they get back down the hillside, treading on ‘innumerable corpses’ as they go. ‘What a massacre! How many young lives wasted. It’s raining non-stop and we lie in the bottom of a ravine to spend the night amid the water and cold.’ The scale of the disaster becomes clear next day: ‘Except for 50 or so survivors, the 21st Battalion no longer exists.’

Repeated assaults on the Krn–Mrzli sector brought no gains that could be held. At 02:00 on 19 August, the Italians captured the enemy’s front line on Mrzli, an unusually well-built trench that snaked below the summit ridge. This was the notorious ‘
trincerone
’ or Big Trench. Under it, the ground fell to the Italian positions. The Austrians only had to push rocks down the mountain at the right moment for an attack to fail. Above the Big Trench, massive boulders interrupted the sight-lines to the summit. Mrzli could not be taken unless the Big Trench was in Italian hands. Yet it was fearsomely difficult to secure; reinforcements had to cross 60 metres of mainly open hillside. Boroević’s men, masters of the counter-attack, quickly regained the Big Trench. The Italians almost seized it again at the end of the month, only to be beaten back the following day – as so often by a Bosnian battalion.

On the same day, 29 August, the Second Army tried to capture Mount Rombon, at the northern limit of the Isonzo front. After belatedly occupying Flitsch, the Italians were pinned down by fire from Rombon, towering overhead. Boroević had wisely garrisoned Rombon with the 2nd Mountain Rifles, a regiment that was almost 90 per cent Slovene. The soldiers were fighting to save their nation from Italian domination as well as defending their emperor against traitors. Rombon was a bulwark, guarding over a million Slovenes, and the troops were packed onto the narrow summit, still snowbound in late August. The northern face, looking away from the Isonzo, is almost sheer, so the Italians had no choice but to press upwards directly from the valley. Bent on emulating the glorious capture of Krn in June, two battalions of Alpini managed to capture the little cone of Čukla, a bump on Rombon’s flank. When they tried to charge up the steep ridge to the summit, they stood no chance. In the first days of September, the survivors retreated to the valley bottom.