Unto the Sons (55 page)

As a result of these tactics many Italian soldiers stationed in the hills suddenly saw the enemy in front
and
behind, and their ability to defend themselves depended on the amount of ammunition they had with them in the highlands. Since they were cut off from added sources of supply, and frequently cut off as well from telephone contact with their superiors, they were left in perplexed isolation and chaos. This had been the fate of several Alpino units who, before the seizure of Caporetto, believed they could dominate the area from their higher vantage point. But with the startling appearance of the German vanguard pouncing through the
misty morning, followed by the regular infantry advancing behind clouds of flying bullets and floating poison, the marooned Alpini found themselves desperately on the defensive. They fought as long and as courageously as they could. After their ammunition ran out, they hurled rocks down upon the Austro-German soldiers who were climbing up to eliminate them. Finally the Italians were reduced to fighting with knives and rifle butts. Such deterrents against their heavily armed pursuers, however, were futile. The Alpini died almost to a man.

Those Italians who did not die on the hills or on the plateau from bullets, shell blasts, or gas—and who did not abandon their units, or join them in the orderly retreat that General Cadorna was compelled to command—usually surrendered to the enemy quickly and compliantly, happy to be alive. Territory that had taken the Italians two years to conquer, including the town of Gorizia, was lost within hours as the breakthrough at Caporetto soon destabilized the entire Italian front. General Cadorna could not push up reserve troops from the rear because the narrow roads between the mountains ahead were jammed with retreating troops and pack animals, trucks and ambulances. The frantic and uncontrollable scene would be re-created by Ernest Hemingway in his novel
A Farewell to Arms
. Von Below’s army overran the Italian military headquarters at Udine, west of the Isonzo, five days after the invaders’ initial drive. King Victor Emmanuel III had often traveled from his villa outside Udine to visit the Italian front in happier days, early in the war—“the King pass[es] in his motor car … his face and little long necked body and gray beard like a goat’s chin tuft,” wrote Hemingway—but he was long gone from the ancient city as the Austro-Germans arrived on October 29, having crossed the path that had been used some fourteen centuries before by Attila and his Hun warriors on their way to burn and plunder Aquileia and other Roman cities on the Venetian plains. In fact, many injured but uncaptured Italians later claimed that as von Below’s ferocious troops crushed through their line, they were shouting loudly and in unison:
“Roma! Roma! Roma!”

By the end of the month, the German vanguard had gotten twenty miles past Udine and driven Cadorna’s defenders back to the Tagliamento River. Nearly 40,000 Italians had already been killed or wounded, and 250,000 had been taken prisoner. One young German lieutenant leading an attacking unit had himself captured 8,000 Italians in a single day, while his unit suffered less than a dozen casualties in the whole campaign. His name was Erwin Rommel. The fleeing Italians left twenty-five hundred artillery pieces in place, and tons of food and clothing supplies. Much of
what had not been sunk earlier by German submarines now fell into the hands of the German foot soldiers entering abandoned depots. In Rome, angry politicians in parliament demanded and accepted the resignation of the man who the year before had replaced Salandra as prime minister—Paolo Boselli, whom one colleague described as heading “the ministry of weakness simulating strength.” Boselli was replaced by the minister of the interior, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, who had been christened in honor of the current king’s grandfather, the crown head of the Risorgimento. Trying to bring unity and revive discipline in a nation stunned by defeat and despair, King Victor Emmanuel III urged in a public statement: “Citizens and soldiers, be a single army. All cowardice is treachery, all discord is treachery.” The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Milan newspaper editor he so profoundly influenced, Benito Mussolini, expressed similar sentiments. Mussolini, Socialist turned interventionist, had served in the army until February 1917—when, while operating a faulty grenade thrower during a training exercise, he killed five of his fellow soldiers and was hospitalized with forty fragments. Released from the army, he resumed editing
Il Popolo d’Italia;
and with the continued failings at the front after the fall of Caporetto, he increased his denunciation of the quality of the army’s leaders and the disloyalty fomented at home by his former companions the Socialists. What Italy needed, in his private view, was not a squabbling, impotent parliament but rather a single powerful figure, a dictator who could militarize the nation and restore pride to the Italian people.

But no pride would be evident through the first week of November, fourteen days after the beginning of the blitzkrieg. The war news continued to be disastrous. Of Italy’s original army of sixty-five divisions, only thirty-three were now militarily functional. Although the French would send six divisions to the Italian front in reaction to Caporetto, and the British five, nobody knew exactly what to do with these troops when they finally arrived. There was no organized plan of cooperation among the Italian, French, and British officers in the field, and as a result the incoming troops were not integrated into Italy’s frontline resistance.

Seeing the inadequacies of his army in correlation with his ever-declining opinion of the Italian officer corps, General Cadorna continued to downgrade or dismiss his commissioned subordinates. He would evict no fewer than 217 generals and 255 colonels in the course of the war. But on November 7—the day the Kerensky government fell to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia—General Cadorna himself was dismissed by the new prime minister. Cadorna was replaced by General Armando Diaz, who
had been born in Naples and was respected as both a military leader and a man who could communicate with the common soldier. But the war situation was gloomier than ever. The battered Italian army had been driven back more than seventy-five miles since the assault on Caporetto. It was now lined up behind the Piave River, with General Otto von Below’s forces charging forth from the other side. The attackers were now less than twenty miles from Venice.

But as one military historian, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, wrote: “Nothing concentrates the mind like the imminent prospect of being hanged.” The Italian army and its nation, which had for weeks been disgraced by inept officers and men, and by a disgruntled but insufficiently supportive citizenry, and which now seemed on the verge of surrender, suddenly established the Piave River as the locale of a dramatic turnabout, a point from which Italy would retreat no further.

26.

R
eleased from the hospital in early December 1917, Antonio Cristiani hitched a ride to Milan and walked through the crowded corridor of the main railroad terminal toward a southbound train that would bring him home in time for Christmas. It would be his first visit back to Maida in more than two and a half years. He had tried to inform his family that he was coming, but he doubted they had received his wire. There were few enough telegraph offices in the south, and all were currently overburdened with the handling of top-priority messages of the sort he was thankful the government was not sending in his behalf.

Yet reminders of death and tragedy were everywhere around him now as he continued along the stone floor under a high ceiling amid the sounds of whistles and hissing steam. Caskets were stacked at loading ramps. Groups of tearful civilians dressed in black lingered along the platforms. Hundreds of bandaged soldiers, many moving with the aid of canes, crutches, or wheelchairs, proceeded slowly within the lines of passengers headed toward dozens of trains bound for every part of Italy.

Carrying a small duffel bag, Antonio climbed the steel steps and entered a car in which all the seats were taken and some people were standing in the aisle. Except for two nuns and a half-dozen elderly people
dressed entirely in black, the car was totally occupied by young soldiers in gray-green uniforms. Several windows were open, but there was a pervasive smell of disinfectant, medicine, and sweaty woolen fabric. The bandages wrapped around some soldiers’ heads were slightly bloodstained. Many pairs of crutches lay horizontally along the overhead baggage racks on both sides of the car. As each newly arrived soldier entered, he was met with discreet glances that appraised his condition. If he seemed too disabled to stand or balance himself on an armrest in the aisle, a seated soldier who was less infirm would rise and offer to exchange places. Even the elderly women and nuns tried to yield seats to ailing servicemen. Except in the cases of the severely injured, the women were politely refused. Never was a crowded railcar more abundant with courtesy and concern.

Antonio made his way slowly up the aisle and stood in the rear next to a metal door that, as the train began to move, resounded with a loose chain banging against it from the outside. Near him stood three other apparently healthy servicemen. One was an airman, the others artillerymen. After greeting one another briefly, they stood in awkward silence for several moments as the train pulled out of the station and daylight streamed in to make more obvious than before the extent of the injuries suffered by many of the passengers. Half of the legs stretched out in the aisle bore casts or metal braces secured with leather straps. At least a third of the seated servicemen had cloth bands knotted around their necks to support the slings that held their damaged or partially amputated arms. There were a few groans now and then from soldiers in pain, and Antonio was reminded of his time in the hospital. He thought of Muffo, Branca, and Conti. The engineer moved the train very slowly, as if stalling for time until the soldiers’ tender flesh could become adjusted to the motion.

The airman standing with Antonio suddenly became quite talkative. He was a stocky round-faced man in his mid-twenties with a trim moustache and a cap that was too small for his head. He announced he was from Avellino, near Naples. He had served in the air force for two years and was part of the ground crew, not a flier. He said that he could fly planes very well, but that his instructors, all of them from Genoa, had given him failing grades whenever he took the pilot’s examination. In his voice there was little doubt that he had failed because he was not from Genoa. He had most recently been stationed at an air base near Udine that had been shelled and captured by Austro-German troops after the breakthrough at Caporetto. During the past summer, he said, he had helped fuel the squadron that Gabriele D’Annunzio had led to bomb the Austrian port of Pola in the Adriatic. The Austrians had placed a price of
twenty thousand crowns upon the poet’s head, the airman said, but he added that they would never catch him alive. As the airman continued to talk about D’Annunzio’s heroics and the war in general, Antonio and the two artillerymen mostly listened. One of the latter, who held on to his companion’s arm whenever the train took a sharp turn, listened intently while staring fixedly into space. Antonio soon realized that the man was blind.

The slow-moving ten-car train stopped at every station, and at each station one or two servicemen hobbled off. By the time the train arrived in Livorno, along the Tyrrhenian Sea, there were enough empty spaces in Antonio’s car for him and the other standees to sit down. Antonio sat next to a skinny eighteen-year-old who had lost his right leg below the knee during the big battle
before
Caporetto, the one on the Bansizza Plateau, when General Cadorna had been in command. The young soldier, who was returning home to his village just north of Naples, said that half the people in his unit had been killed by Austrian artillery, and that he had survived probably because the stray horse of a dead cavalry officer had fallen on him during an explosion—crushing his right leg, but protecting the rest of his body from the destructive impact of the shell.

After a night in which many passengers remained awake to the sounds of one another’s nightmares and physical suffering, the train pulled jerkily to a stop at yet another station. The sign bearing the name of the station was so weatherworn that Antonio could not read the lettering. In the middle of the platform, several feet from the track, stood three military policemen and hundreds of civilians of all ages, two-thirds of them women, straining against ropes trying to get a closer view of the troops seated in the train. Since the train had left Milan, every station had been jammed with people who apparently had received word that a spouse, son, or other relative would be returning home from the front during the day or night. Never knowing precisely on which train the persons expected would be traveling, the crowd waited with rising anticipation and hope as each train came and went. Every town’s station house was now the site of around-the-clock vigils, a place where people congregated for hours, noisily or in silence, until some among them yelled that they heard a whistle in the distance, or saw the smoke of a locomotive rising above a hill. Then all the others would hurry out to the platform, their heads all facing northward, their eyes transfixed upon the narrowing gauge of the tracks as they wondered if the train they had yet to see was the one they were waiting for.

People had been known to become uncontrollable in such gatherings.
Newspapers had recently reported that the mothers of two returning servicemen, overly eager to greet the train they assumed was carrying their sons safely home, tripped while running along the platform and died after hitting the tracks.

As a result of such incidents, the crowds were now cordoned off at all stations and overseen by the military police and local authorities. But Antonio could see that the police were having difficulty with this crowd. It was a dark, rainy morning, and after the train had stood idle for several minutes and no soldier had gotten off, many people began to push against the ropes and to direct their anguished cries toward the open windows of the train, calling out the names of the men they were waiting for.
“Giuseppe Nardi! Giuseppe Nardi!”
screamed one middle-aged woman, her sodden cloak hanging heavily over her gaunt features, while a younger woman next to her called out louder still:
“Andrea De Marco, Andrea De Marco!”
Two teenaged boys brandished their fists at the military policeman who had given them a hard push backward with his club after they had climbed under the ropes; an elderly woman at the end of the line, after calling out someone’s name, fell to the ground in a faint.