The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (22 page)

1
the Ponton brothers, Massimiliano and Giuseppe
: Milocco & Milocco, 119–20.

2
demonised in the nationalist press as a
‘
renegade
’: Pavan, 263.

3
‘
always supported the Austrian government
’: Milocco & Milocco, 95.

4
the tranquillity that they have lost
’: Cecotti, 141.

5
D’Adamo spelled out the implications
: Milocco & Milocco, 75.

6
‘
Pro-Austrian elements’ were to be removed
: Cecotti, 25, 82.

7
‘
The population is still hostile
’: Bonamore.

8
forcing the local authorities to put on a show
: Milocco & Milocco, 34.

9
‘
very hostile’ to the men
: From a report by the colonel of the regiment that occupied Colle Santa Lucia, south of Cortina, in May 1915. Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxxv.

10
‘
Wonderful! They have come to liberate us
’: Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxxiii.

11
‘
the lands that will soon be ours
’: Albertazzi, 35.

12
Mussolini’s journal shows this outlook
: Svolšak [2003], 125.

13
‘
They submit with resignation
’: Svolšak [2003], 307.

14
like ‘
objects of administration
’: Cecotti, 113, 111.

15
the verses of Simon Gregorčič
: Pavan, 225.

16
‘
They do not stir that sense
’: Giovanni Del Bianco, quoted by Cecotti, 15.

17
‘
What I think
’: Pavan, 374.

18
‘
the glow of a more radiant future
’: Svolšak [2006], 158.

1 
The irredentists were mostly well educated, town-dwellers. These men in suits had probably fled to Italy before the war and returned with the army.

2 
This historian, Giovanni Del Bianco, also argued that the executions at Villesse had been offset by ‘the glow of a more radiant future, and new hopes arose, as if to affirm the fluctuations of life and death by which the becoming of peoples is destined to unfold’. Boilerplate dialectics were a convenience for historians under fascism, as for those under communism.

THIRTEEN

A Necessary Holocaust?

A certain plodding earnestness and strict discipline
may keep up military virtue for a long time, but can
never create it.

C
ARL VON
C
LAUSEWITZ

At the end of 1915, the volunteer officer Guido Favetti sits in a trench behind Monfalcone, facing Mount Cosich. Nothing stirs. Amid the ‘glacial silence’, metaphors for the situation arise in his highly educated mind. The two warring nations seem to be separated by a silent strip of death, a tongue of fire. Life is suspended; death hovers in the air, ready to pounce. The anticipation of atrocity is a terrible burden, yet the prospect of death is not demoralising; instead, it induces a mild melancholy, like going to the dentist.

This fine disdain for danger was shared by many middle-class irredentists, whose faith in what Favetti called ‘the religion of the Fatherland’ could not be shaken. It was much harder for ordinary conscripts to distance themselves from their experience in this way; intellectual consolation was not available. Remarkably, Favetti – who deplored the men’s lack of idealism – recognised this, and imagined the state of mind of

… the infantryman keeping watch with his rifle at the loophole while a shell smashes the trench a few metres away; legs, arms, bits of brain fly through the air, hitting your face like shrapnel … someone is screaming because he has lost his legs, or his stomach is split open, he’s raving, he gabbles a prayer, one of those prayers that make you weep.

Favetti’s ‘feeble words’ can never describe the ‘mortal anxiety’ of an infantryman under attack or ordered to attack, when ‘enthusiasm, patriotism, no longer exist, or rather, they didn’t exist before for these masses of peasants and workers’. Stepping beyond stock responses, Favetti exclaims to his diary: ‘Is he not a true hero? They are all like this – all of them!’

*

For several months after the Fourth Battle, the army was close to collapse. Cadorna’s losses in 1915 ran to 400,000, including 66,000 killed (compared with 28,000 Austrians). To grasp the intensity of destruction, consider the fate of a single brigade, the Casale, known as the Polenta Brigade due to its yellow colours. In May 1915, its strength was 130 officers and 6,000 soldiers. After 440 casualties during June and 800 more in July, it spent three months on Podgora, the steep hill west of Gorizia, where it lost another 2,822 men, including 86 officers – two-thirds of its total strength. During seven months at the front, the Casale lost 154 officers and 4,276 men, dead, wounded and missing.
1
Tens of other brigades suffered equivalent losses.

The survivors’ morale was shaky; even for enthusiasts, the jubilation of their ‘radiant May’ was a mocking memory. The troops were unprepared, in every sense, for the conditions they faced. Lacking weapons, ordered to attack intact barbed wire, struck down by typhoid and cholera, poorly clothed and fed, sleeping on wet hay or mud, the men began to realise that they were ‘going to be massacred, not to fight’. Hardly Garibaldian warriors, rather cannon fodder in a new kind of war.

The positions and communications were improvised. Most of the front line was impossibly exposed and highly vulnerable to counter-attack. The trenches were still shallow scrapes, filthy with rubbish. Even on San Michele, the epicentre of the front, there was no real line; hummocks made of sandbags and rubble alternated with stretches of completely open, unprotected ground.

Sweat, dust, mud, rain and sun turned the men’s woollen uniforms into something like parchment. Their boots often had cardboard uppers and wooden soles. Lacking better remedies, the men rubbed tallow into their cracked feet. Helmets were in very short supply. The wooden waterbottles were unhygienic. The tents – when they had them – leaked. The wire-cutters were almost useless, and unusable under fire: ‘mere garden secateurs’, as a Sardinian officer wrote disgustedly in his diary. Ration parties were often delayed by enemy fire. The only hot meal was in the morning, and so poor that soldiers often rejected most of it. The pervasive stench could, anyway, make eating impossible. The effects of such poor nutrition were evident after three or four days in the trenches, and some units sent out raiding parties for food and clothing in trenches that the enemy had abandoned. The soldiers slept on straw pallets, but there were not enough to go around. Even in the rear, before proper hutments were built, the men lived in tents that quickly became waterlogged and filthy. Abysmal medical care led to ‘a good number of avoidable deaths due to inhuman treatment’. Wounded men were routinely ‘shipped on 20 or 30 km ambulance runs on vile roads and then kept waiting for hours outside hospital’.

On the higher positions, the infantry tried not to freeze to death in their dug-outs, heating rations on Primus stoves that made everything taste of petrol. They slept in holes or pits, wrapped in their coats, packed together for warmth, under canvas stretched between boulders. During their brief spells out of the line, they were often drafted into labour platoons. As for recreation, nothing was organised in the rear areas. To the puritanical Cadorna, free time was a regrettable necessity. Men were forbidden to enter cafés or bars during the day, or to be seen in public ‘in easy company’. (A soldier might be arrested for strolling arm in arm with his fiancée.) There were no libraries, cinemas, or theatres. The only distractions were alcohol (the soldiers called it their petrol), authorised brothels (separate for officers and men), and saucy literature. The first modern Italian novel to sell more than 100,000 copies was
Mimi Bluette, Flower of my Garden
, by Guido da Verona, the story of a ballerina pure in heart though not in deed, who kills herself at the pinnacle of her renown. The book’s huge popularity in the trenches troubled Father Giovanni Minozzi, a priest who believed that immoral literature made the soldiers’ souls ‘flabby’. The following summer, he set up Soldiers’ Houses, where men off duty could relax amid improving books, discuss their worries with priests, and be helped to write letters home. These high-minded places were not much fun, but they did some good.

A senior medical officer with the VI Corps (Second Army) assessed the men’s health in early January 1916. Their clothing was of poor quality, torn and crusted with mud. Their feet were frostbitten and swollen. ‘Psychic disturbances’ were most acute where the trenches were continually exposed to the enemy. ‘Standing inert with the prospect of having to attack or be attacked, from one moment to the next, certainly has a great influence on the evolution of these disturbances of the nervous system.’

Morale was also damaged by the callousness of many senior officers, which Cadorna encouraged and even demanded. Regimental commanders vainly objected that men should not be sent against unbroken barbed wire. A corps commander on the Isonzo, General Vincenzo Garioni, argued that the massacre of infantry should be seen as ‘a necessary holocaust’. The slaughter was therapeutic, a purgative that strengthened the army for future battles, rendering it fit for victory. Whether this nonsense was more a cause or an effect of the senior commanders’ indifference to suffering, it is hard to say.

As well as the losses due to poor equipment, countless lives were thrown away because the men lacked elementary training, for example not even being told to keep their heads down when they reached the trenches. A staff officer in Carnia realised in summer 1915 that ‘Nobody has a clue how to lay wire, how to throw a hand-grenade, how to attack a trench system.’ A rare British witness of the 1915 campaigns was George Barbour, a Scottish Quaker who served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit on the Isonzo after several months in Flanders. He recorded his dismay at the sight of men trying to move along a road to the rear, in November. The road was under fire, and the Italians were clueless how to protect themselves. ‘When told to advance, they do so in the most inconvenient manner possible at a slow double and then again expose themselves under cover by lying against the projecting bank at the corner where the shells always fall … they seem to be babes in the art of war.’ Regular lunch breaks were further evidence of poor professionalism: ‘The victor will be he who can put his heart into the thing for 2 successive days – all the Quisca batteries stop for 1½ hrs at lunch time & the Austrians do the same with the same infantile regularity.’ This slack custom endured throughout the war.

Something that revolted foreign observers and sensitive Italians alike was the carelessness about latrines. Giani Stuparich’s reaction, cited earlier, was dainty compared to Carlo Emilio Gadda’s. For the future novelist, then a lieutenant in the 5th Regiment of Alpini, military defecation gave a frightful insight into national character. ‘Shit of every size, shape, colour, texture and consistency is scattered everywhere in the vicinity of the camp’, he wrote despairingly, ‘yellow, black, ash grey, swarthy, bronze; liquid, solid, etc.’ Incredibly, the men could not see how needlessly unpleasant they made life for everybody – themselves included – by not using latrines. This chronic inability to grasp the wider effects of their actions was a trait that he dubbed ‘the
cretinous egotism
of the Italian’. A British private who spent the last year of the war in Italy was shocked by the appearance of an abandoned camp: ‘literally a field of filth. I had never seen such a disgusting sight and wondered what kind of epidemic was being bred amidst the excreta and soiled paper.’ With such disregard for basic hygiene, how could the Italians hope to wage war properly?

These humble problems were beneath Cadorna’s notice. When in Rome, he grumbled that he felt much better ‘at the front’. By this he meant his headquarters, for he rarely ventured closer to the fighting. The Supreme Command, jokily known as the
Comandissimo
, was a world apart. To Rudyard Kipling’s visiting eyes, it was like a monastery or laboratory: simple, austere, dedicated. This was not the view of officers up the line, who saw Cadorna’s staff lavished with privileges: working in safety, with fine food and drink, their families installed nearby and chauffeurs at the ready; given fast-track promotions, contact with ministers and the King, and unmerited decorations.
2
It was hardly surprising if this pampered coterie did not question ‘the boss’, as they called him.

Enemy propaganda made good use of Cadorna’s lack of progress and carelessness about losses. One leaflet in the autumn printed maps of the paltry territory that the Italians had captured since May, alongside estimates of the casualties they had taken. Another, released over Italian positions from hot-air balloons before the Fourth Battle, reproduced an order of Cadorna that a certain position must be taken regardless of how many lives were lost.

These conditions frayed the bonds of discipline. The first proper mutiny occurred in early December 1915. After four months in the trenches, the 48th Regiment (Ferrara Brigade) was reduced to 700 effectives. Despite losing some 2,300 men, the regiment had just performed well during a month on San Michele. Then, on 11 December, some 200 of these survivors – almost all Calabrians, from the far south of Italy – were granted a spell of rest and recuperation while the remaining 500 were sent back to the front at Tolmein. The men’s sense of injustice welled up, and shots were fired. The divisional commanders set up an extraordinary court martial and two soldiers were shot, less than 24 hours after the offence.

Another incident occurred on 20 December at Kamno, on the middle Isonzo, directly below Krn, when a regiment of the Salerno Brigade was ordered back to the first line. Apparently fuelled by drink, someone fired a shot at the officers’ mess. The divisional command surrounded the regiment with four battalions, complete with machine guns and artillery. The following morning, an extraordinary court martial considered the charge of ‘revolt in the presence of the enemy’ – a dubious charge, as the rebels were not in the line. Eight were sentenced to death, others to hard labour for 20 years. The condemned men wept as they were led away. After witnessing the executions, the regiment was escorted back up the line by carabinieri (military police).

One of the chief grievances was the lack, and irregularity, of home leave. Cadorna believed he could not spare the men from the front during the autumn offensives. The longer they went without leave, and the worse the army’s results in the field, the more fearful the Supreme Command became that the soldiers’ accounts of life at the front would harm wider support for the war. The censorship of their letters and the press, and the relentlessly upbeat statements issued by Udine and Rome, left the public completely unprepared for realistic accounts of the war. Cadorna had set a trap for himself that time would spring.

With Christmas impending and the front locked down by winter weather, it was impossible to keep postponing the men’s home leave. When a fortnight’s leave was granted to tens of thousands of soldiers in December, the impact on public spirits was perceptible. Stories circulated about terrible losses on Mount Col di Lana in the Dolomites; entire regiments thrown at positions on the Carso that could not be taken; trenches that could be stormed but not held. The government warned that any soldier on leave who spread ‘tendentious or exaggerated rumours’ which weakened ‘faith in the success of our endeavours’ would be returned to his unit. The threat did not work; on 16 January, Cadorna ordered commanding officers to take harsh measures against ‘defeatism’ among soldiers on leave.

This was not his only political annoyance as the year drew to its end. Salandra wanted visible success – even though other fronts were stagnant too. Having given Cadorna sole charge of the conduct of the war, he was unhappy that a bloody stalemate was his reward. He found the supreme commander personally difficult; Cadorna refused to inform the government of his plans or curb his demands for weapons, ammunition and equipment.