The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (12 page)

Hit in the spine by machine-gun fire as he tried to stop this suicidal attack, De Rossi was paralysed for life. Further north, where Mrzli converges with the Krn massif in a jumble of knife-like ridges and gullies, the Italians hurled themselves towards the summits with no greater success. As well as using their firearms, the Austrians piled boulders into pyramids and rolled them down the mountainside. By 4 June, the Italians had lost more than 2,500 men on this sector, including nearly a hundred officers. Cadorna’s judgement on the assaults on Mrzli was succinct: ‘heroic but senseless’. The Austrians were so dismayed by the loss of the little ridge at 1,186 metres that officers of the defending battalion were court-martialled. Nevertheless, Austria had got the better of this first engagement on the upper Isonzo.

The Italians had done better further north. Krn itself, which soars like a shark’s fin 2,000 metres above Caporetto, was taken in a daring pre-dawn attack by the 3rd Regiment of Alpini on 16 June, with their boots swaddled in sacks of straw to reduce noise. It was a glorious success, the first of the war, presaging others that never materialised. One of the three casualties provided Italy’s propagandists with a cult hero. Alberto Picco was a young officer from Tuscany, a handsome boy, the centre-forward and first captain of his home town’s team, La Spezia, where the soccer stadium still bears his name. He died in his captain’s arms.

Elsewhere the Italians were fatally diffident. They took the hamlet of Plava, halfway between Gorizia and Tolmein, at the end of May, but only managed to cross the river on 9 June. There were two objectives. One was Mount Kuk (611 metres), a couple of kilometres to the south. Looming in front of them was a smaller hill, which, like most of the nameless hills and peaks along the front, was known by its metric height above sea level: Hill 383.

Kuk was swathed with barbed wire, and the Italians were tricked by Austrian camouflage. The trees seemed to rain grenades, and death blazed from the undergrowth. The 37th Infantry Regiment lost half its men and most of its officers before being pulled back to the river. The survivors were ordered to join an attack on Hill 383, defended by a tough Dalmatian regiment, the 22nd Infantry, whose commander urged the men to defend their ‘Slavic soil’ against the ancestral foe. Decades later, a veteran recalled that the Austrians seemed to know exactly when the Italians would emerge from their positions on 16 June. Given the quality of Habsburg intelligence, they quite likely did possess this infor mation. Even if they did not, the cycle of preparatory bombardment and frontal attack was pathetically predictable.

It was like the end of the world and you would have thought a volcano was erupting. Down below, the Isonzo was boiling. I was wondering how a humble infantryman could come out of this inferno alive. We were going up all the time, under an avalanche of fire; I was praying all the time. There were already big holes in our line …

Despite horrific losses – almost five hundred dead, nearly a thousand wounded – the Italians took the hill. The Austrians hid in dug-outs and tunnels along their second line while the Italians celebrated and then slept. Early next day the counter-attack drove the Italians halfway back to the river. Among the prisoners taken was a lieutenant, a deputy in the Italian parliament, who spoke freely about his army’s desperately bad medical service and worsening morale.

At the northern end of the Isonzo front was the little town of Flitsch, overlooking broad meadows a dozen kilometres upstream from a dogleg bend in the river. By early June, the Italians controlled this bend and much of the ridge that runs from here to the Krn massif. Yet, the sector commander did not try to take the town, even though Cadorna’s orders were to do just this as quickly as possible. For Flitsch occupied a strategic position. It is dominated by a hulking mountain called Rombon, reaching up almost 2,000 metres from the valley floor. Whichever side held Rombon would have a stranglehold on Flitsch and control the access to the northern passes. The Austrians needed to make Rombon unconquerable; the Italian pause gave them the chance to make it so.

During the first month of war, Italy lost 11,000–20,000 men. Austrian losses were around 5,000. Cadorna’s army was incapable of successful offensives against competently defended positions. He had failed to instil the ‘offensive spirit’ into his senior officers. Circular orders were no substitute for direct exhortation, in person. To close observers, he gave the impression of being only half engaged. What he did do was start a rolling purge of the officer corps that continued throughout his tenure; by October 1917, Cadorna had dismissed 217 generals, 255 colonels and 355 battalion commanders. This ungentlemanly harshness shocked the career officers, who became more frightened of being ‘torpedoed’ than of carrying out absurd orders or sacrificing their men’s lives pointlessly. Combined with Cadorna’s intolerance of anything that might smack of insubordination, the sackings discouraged ambitious officers from sharing their thoughts on the course and conduct of the war.

In fairness, his faith in the frontal infantry offensive was no more dogged than Joffre’s or Haig’s. But he was fighting in terrain that exposed the flaws in this doctrine with utter ruthlessness. The poor quality of organisation and equipment was already having an effect. There were disturbing cases in June of conscripts spitting at the national flag. Many soldiers were disappointed by the local civilians’ cool response to their liberators, so unlike the acclaim promised by the newspapers. Instead they were met, for the most part, with shuttered windows and ‘hard Friulan faces’. Some of the soldiers began to wonder if their cause was just, after all. Their heroic idea of war was fading, and, in questions of morale, the volunteers were bellwethers; doubts that assailed them were soon felt more widely.

The opening moves in any military endeavour are likely to be clumsy, especially when the attacking army lacks relevant campaign experience.
5
Armies learn as they go, often more quickly than their own commanders. Translating fresh information into tactical thought is a challenge for any staff headquarters in war. Without free-flowing communication, lessons can hardly be learned. It was clear by early June that the channels in this army were badly clogged. Beyond this, the situation facing Cadorna in late May was worse than he had reasonably expected. Allied efforts to break through at Gallipoli had failed, so the Central Powers did not have to bolster the Turks. The Balkan neutrals, Romania and Bulgaria, had not come off the fence. Italy was alone.

By 10 June, Cadorna recognised that matters were not going to plan. He told his family that the advance faced great difficulties and a trench war was looming – a prospect he detested. Salandra was under pressure from warmongers whose euphoria was beginning to curdle. A note of asperity crept into his communications with Cadorna, who warned that the campaign would take a long time, and advised Salandra to inform the public of the real situation. This advice was not taken.

Meanwhile, as the clashes died down in the second week of June, Cadorna’s army set about hacking trenches and gun emplacements in the limestone, carving mule-tracks in zigzags up the mountains, and draping the valley with telephone wires and cable ways suspended from triangular wooden stanchions that can still be found in the forests that now cover the lower hillsides. Pontoons over the Isonzo were strengthened, swept away by late spring rains, rebuilt. Barracks were built in the rear. Cadorna took over the archbishop’s palace in Udine which he named the ‘Supreme Command’ instead of the traditional ‘General Headquarters’. The commanders of the Second and Third Armies set up their headquarters closer to their sectors. By 21 June, Cadorna was ready to start the war in earnest. With over a million men on the plains of Veneto and Friuli – the greatest force ever assembled in Italy – he issued orders for a general advance towards Trieste and Gorizia. The first battle of the Isonzo was about to begin, but the Austro-Hungarian army was better prepared than anyone had thought possible in May.

Source Notes
FIVE
The Solemn Hour Strikes

1
only two of the army’s 17 regular corps
: Rocca, 65.

2
lack of
‘
offensive spirit
’: Cadorna [1950], 232–41.

3
guarded in mid-May by only two divisions
: Sema, vol. I, 26.

4
‘
We are on the eve of an enemy invasion
’: Flores, 35–6 

5
An Austrian officer posted in the Dolomites
: Lt. Anton Moerl, quoted by Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxix.

6
‘
We expected them to do just that
’: Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxix.

7
So he attacked anyway, achieving no success
: Flores, 38. 

8
not admitted at the time, or under Fascism
: Alberti.

9
Carlo Emilio Gadda, who fought on the Carso
: Gadda [1963].

10
‘
Daddy, daddy, look at all the ladies
’: Pavan, 367

11
Other units, he was told, were active on Mrzli
: Details of operations on Mount Mrzli are from Alliney, 30

12
This man, Lieutenant Colonel Negrotto
: Alliney, 30.

13
urged the men to defend their
‘
Slavic soil
’: Schindler; Sema, vol. I, 43

14
‘
It was like the end of the world
’: Faldella, 14.

15
‘
hard Friulan faces
’: Mario Puccini, 114.

16
He told his family
: Cadorna [1967], 104

1 
Known in English as Bangalore torpedoes, the gelignite tubes were iron pipes, around 1.5 metres in length, with gelignite packed in one end. The wire-cutting party would thrust the explosive end under the wire, then light the long fuse with a sulphur match before retreating. When they worked, these devices could blast a gap of 3–5 metres in the wire.

2 
Cadorna’s original plan had foreseen offensives in this sector, but he changed his mind at the last minute, when he decided that offensive efforts should concentrate almost exclusively on the Isonzo.  

3 
The Bersaglieri (literally ‘sharpshooters’) were mobile light infantry, recognisable by the long black feathers in their wide-brimmed hats. Some units rode bicycles.

4 
The first Alpini companies were formed in 1872 to protect Italy’s mountainous northern border. Unlike the infantry brigades (except those from Sardinia), their units were recruited regionally, from the northern parts of the kingdom.

5 
For example, the Austrians counter-attacked by night from the start – something the Italians were not prepared for.

SIX

A Gift from Heaven

Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of
the enemy, will be fresh for the fight
.

S
UN
T
ZU

The superiority of the defensive (rightly understood)
is very great, and much greater than may appear at
first sight
.

C
ARL
VON
C
LAUSEWITZ
,
On War
(1832)

In the first days of May 1915, a battalion of the Austrian territorial militia detrained in a little town in the Puster valley, near the Italian border. One, two, three, four companies marched out of the station, complete with machine guns, horses, mules and muddy wagons, and formed a column. The officers stared at the road ahead. The men were not young or smart or well-equipped. The boys scampering around could not get a word out of them. The adults realised that the dreaded war with Italy must be very close. These men did not look up to much, yet they were better than nothing and surely others would follow, maybe with artillery.

The silent column marched westwards to the principal pass over the mountains into Italy. People lined the road to cheer, and the closer they drew to the border, the louder the cheers rang out. The soldiers halted at nightfall near the foot of the pass, without encamping. Under cover of darkness, they moved off again, quietly – not southwards to the border, but north. Early next day, four more companies climbed down from the train at Hermagor. ‘Look!’, people said, ‘we’re getting a whole army!’ The men fell in and marched off. At night they rested near the border before turning their backs on the border and disappearing northwards. Next day, the same happened again. The trainloads of arriving soldiers looked wearier and more unkempt as the days passed. Eventually some onlookers wondered if they were not the same men, marching more than 40 kilometres each day with full kit, then looping around to the next valley and arriving back in Hermagor each morning. A battalion of the damned, repeating their futile routine day after day, with no hope of release.

If they really were the same men, then the meaning of the deception was all too obvious. The empire had no more or better troops to spare. Italian spies were supposed to report a build-up on the border, so that Cadorna would expect to confront a great battle-hardened army. Whatever the truth about this particular story, it was true that Austria could ill afford a third front. In summer 1914 – spectacularly unpre pared for the war it was bent on fighting – Austria-Hungary had put 50 infantry divisions into the field against Russia’s 94 and Serbia’s 11 divisions. These divisions suffered early losses that almost beggar belief. The standing army’s peacetime strength had been around 450,000; this force took some 80 per cent casualties in the first few months. The winter operations against Russia led to 700,000 losses, reducing many infantry divisions to 3,000 or 5,000 rifles, instead of the standard strength of 12,000. The 1914 campaign against Serbia cost the lives of 600 officers and 22,000 men. In other words, the casualties between August 1914 and May 1915 equalled the size of the prewar army. The official history of the war would say that the old professional army ‘died in 1914’ and was replaced by something quite different, ‘a conscript and militia army’. The army that faced Italy in spring 1915 was a different force: ‘civilians in uniform’ for the most part, who were more easily moved by the nationalist currents washing through the empire.

Universal conscription had been introduced nearly fifty years before, but the army’s capacity to draft and train the annual intake was very limited. While the population increased by 40 per cent between 1870 and 1914, military strength grew by only 12 per cent. Lacking weapons and facilities, Austria-Hungary could mobilise fewer men than France, which had a smaller population. In the decades before 1914, military spending in the Habsburg empire had fallen behind that of the other great powers. When Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf became chief of the general staff in 1906, there was a new effort to modernise the armed forces and boost their share of the budget. But military spending, even at its zenith, represented only 21 per cent of the empire’s total budget. It was a quarter of Germany’s and Russia’s spending, less than half of France’s, and less even than Italy’s.

Still essentially pre-industrial, the empire produced less iron and steel than Belgium. While this lack of economic modernisation probably acted as a political preservative, it did the military no good, entailing permanent shortages. In 1914, Austria had the weakest firepower of any major army. Artillery support averaged only 42 light pieces per division (even the Russians had 48). Even so, they outgunned the Italians in the summer of 1915. Crucially, they had three times as many machine guns. The empire’s lack of industrial capacity only became crippling in the war’s later stages. Road and rail communications were also pre-modern – though it happened that Austrian rail links to the Italian front were far better than Italy’s to Friuli (six railheads compared with two).

The army mirrored the ethnic diversity of the empire. In 1914, a quarter of the infantry were Austro-German; 18 per cent were Magyar- speakers (Hungarians); 13 per cent were Czechs. The rest (some 45 per cent) were Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Romanians, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Bosniaks (Muslims from Bosnia), Jews, and also – in the pro portion of one or two per cent – Italians. Elaborate procedures were in place to accommodate the multiethnic, polyglot intake. By 1914, the officer corps was still 72 per cent German-Austrian and the language of command remained German, but it comprised only 80 or 90 expressions. For the rest, regiments used whichever of nine other languages – most of them mutually unintelligible – that their men under stood. Fewer than half of the 330 regiments were more or less homogenous in ethnic and linguistic terms. Fully half of them used two languages routinely. Officers were expected to learn the language of the troops within three years of joining a regiment. (Reservists who replaced officers lost in the early campaigns were often unable to communicate with their men.)

The high command was gloomily aware that the military could not be immunised against the rise of nationalism. Early in 1914, Conrad – whose opinion of Italians and Serbs verged on racist – sent a memo to the Emperor, ranking the nationalities in terms of their likely loyalty to the army in a war. The only ‘completely reliable’ elements would be the German Austrians, Croats, Slovenes and Bosniaks. The Serbs and Czechs, by contrast, were ‘completely Russophile’. His forecast proved broadly accurate for the first two or three years of the war, until the bonds of loyalty frayed beyond repair for all nationalities. Many Serbs from Bosnia wanted Russia, not Austria, to win. There were summary executions of ‘unreliable’ Serb soldiers on the Eastern Front. All the Serbian-language newspapers in the Habsburg province of Vojvodina (now northern Serbia) were banned at the start of the war. As for the Czechs, when two infantry regiments surrendered to the Russians in the spring of 1915, they were officially disbanded. Over the course of the war, the Bohemian Germans, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims suffered the highest casualty rates – a rough but valid indicator.

Against this background, the high command was astonished when the mobilisation in 1914 proceeded without problems, indeed with fervour. No sooner had the failures against Russia and Serbia burned away the initial enthusiasm than the Italians gave Austrian morale a desperately needed lift. The Emperor’s message to his people, announcing Italy’s declaration of war, was crafted to stir deep emotions. Italy, he said, had committed a betrayal unique in history. After more than thirty years of alliance, the kingdom had ‘abandoned us in the hour of danger’ and unfurled its banners on the field of our enemies. But the ‘great memories of Novara, Custoza and Lissa, which formed the pride of my youth, and the spirit of Radetzky, Archduke Albrecht and Tegethoff’, the Habsburg commanders who had won those famous victories, guaranteed that ‘we will also successfully defend the borders of the monarchy in the south’. They had always beaten the Italians in the past, and they would now do so again.

Anti-Italian propaganda pushed at an open door. The German Austrians had a set of prejudices about the uncivilised, unreliable, cowardly Italians that could easily be mobilised.
1
As early as August 1914, Conrad believed that the likely struggle with Italy would hinge on successful appeals to ‘the good German and Slav peoples’ of the empire, ‘still loyal to the Emperor, and determined to fight valiantly for hearth and home’. The Slavic peoples could be encouraged to share the feeling that the Italians were perfidious, sly in the Latin way. This stereotype was a priceless asset; the high command’s hope that Slavic soldiers would fight valiantly proved well-founded from the first clashes.
2
A few weeks into the war, the Papal nuncio in Vienna reported that hatred for the Italians was widespread. There were even mutterings that the Church in Austria might split away from Rome. The Archbishop of Vienna agreed that anti-Italian passions posed a grave danger to Catholic unity. The Italians, by contrast, had no such universal ‘enemy image’ to manipulate. Hatred of the Austro-Hungarians was a middle- class emotion, and smart talk about Prussian militarism or the Habsburg prison-house of peoples was for intellectuals only.

General Ludendorff, Germany’s First Quartermaster General but in reality the senior strategist, contrasted the Habsburg troops’ lacklustre record on the Eastern Front with their ardour against the ‘hereditary enemy’. Field Marshal Hindenburg, too, would write that they fought the Russians with their head but attacked the Italians with their whole soul. Czech and Slovak troops who had failed against Russia ‘did excellent work against Italy’. Even greater excellence was shown by the Slovenes, Dalmatians (meaning Croats and Serbs from Croatia), and Bosnians, for these peoples – who entered the Yugoslav state together in 1918 – stood to lose most from Italian expansion in the Balkans. The high command played the ethnic card against Italy from the outset. Regiments from Slovenia were deployed to the Italian border in 1914. Dalmatian and Bosnian regiments were later sent where the fighting was fiercest. The front-line troops were supported by reservists from Trieste and Istria. The last Habsburg census before the war showed that some 7 million ‘Yugoslavs’ (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks) lived in the empire – around 14 per cent of the total population. In 1914, they formed 11.5 per cent of the armed forces, and 3.1 per cent of the officer corps. By 1917, these proportions rose to 17 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. On the Isonzo front, Yugoslavs were 42 per cent of the Habsburg forces.

With its population of Orthodox Serbs (44 per cent), Muslim Bosniaks (32 per cent) and Catholic Croats (22 per cent), Bosnia compacted the empire’s fractious diversity in a little space. The high command tried to ensure that the four Bosnian regiments all reflected the ethnic make-up of Bosnia as a whole. This was impossible to sustain when the purge of many Serbs early in the war reduced the strength of the Bosnian units by a third. Nevertheless, these regiments earned a reputation on the Italian front for supreme valour and toughness.

Conrad never trusted Italian neutrality. He placed the border units on alert in August 1914 and appointed General Franz Rohr to organise the defences so that Austria could resist the Italians ‘most resolutely’. With the Habsburg army fully stretched on other fronts, Rohr’s forces were a motley collection of training battalions, militia units, border guards and customs officers, armed with old rifles and no artillery to speak of. If they were attacked, they could be crushed in a few hours. (Falkenhayn wrote after the war that the Central Powers could ‘scarcely’ have held ‘another enemy at bay’ over the winter of 1914–15.) Rohr’s men would not be reinforced by regular units until early 1915, when they were also joined by Tyrolese
Standschützen
, volunteer riflemen with a proud local tradition. Around 20,000 of these ‘schoolboys and grandfathers’ were soon under arms. (The regular troops from the Tyrol were away in Galicia and Serbia.) Similar units were formed in Carinthia, Slovenia and Trieste.

Conrad realised that Austria could not win a third war. His strategic aim was twofold: to delay an Italian advance towards Vienna, and keep possession of the Tyrol. (He did not believe Trieste could be held.) His first idea was to draw the Italians over the mountains, cut them off, and smash them in the valleys of Carinthia and Slovenia. He reckoned that public opinion in Italy was so divided over the war that this would deal a terminal blow. But it would be very risky, and he needed 10 German divisions. When Falkenhayn refused to deplete German forces on the Western and Eastern Fronts, Conrad was compelled to adopt a purely defensive strategy. His relationship with Falkenhayn, never good, deteriorated.

Conrad announced on 21 April 1915 that no ground should be ceded without a fight. The Austrians faced a much stronger enemy, and neither the quantity nor the quality of their supplies and equipment was likely to improve. On the contrary, it would be a miracle if these did not decline. So they took their stand not at the border but further back on the first high ground. They had learned from their campaign against Serbia, where small units of irregulars who knew the ground well and were supported by the people had defeated a much stronger but poorly informed force. They fortified the western edge of the Carso plateau and the hills around Gorizia, aiming to prevent the Italians penetrating the valleys that led to the interior. Working around the clock, they entrenched the plateau rim, laying landmines and triple rows of barbed wire. Bunkers were prepared for machine guns and artillery. The Italians apparently discovered little about these preparations. By mid-May, the defences around the Tyrol were complete, with wire entanglements 6–12 metres deep, trenches and emplacements excavated and sometimes armoured, magazines prepared, telephone lines laid, and sight-lines cleared of vegetation. Further east, the work in Carnia was delayed by late snowfalls.