The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (19 page)

You are a Slav, a son of the new race. You came to this land where nobody could live and you made it fruitful. You, a son of the soil, took the Venetian fisherman’s nets away from him and made a sailor of yourself. You are steadfast and frugal. Strong and patient. For long years your servitude was flung in your face; but your hour, too, has struck. It is time you were master. For you are a Slav, son of the great future race.

By contrast, the Italians seem anaemic and exhausted, bragging about their ‘twenty centuries of culture’, unable to channel the Carso’s nourishing energy into their city. Their ‘vital force’ has been sapped. The Slovenes have a place in Trieste’s future – perhaps the foremost place.

In
My Carso
, Gioietta remains off-stage, impalpable as mist. ‘Filled with grief and death’, the author yearns for her. The Carso’s petrified expanses fit him like a glove. ‘Boulders grey with rain and lichen, contorted, split, whetted.’ The cold north-easterly wind called the bora. Fierce sunlight and bristling grass. Grief turns into leave-taking: burn her pale corpse on a pyre of pine branches, cover her grave with junipers. When this mood, too, works itself out, he discovers a work ethic. Her suicide wiped away the petty truths he once lived by. Realising that ‘work is a vain quest for something that has been lost’, he resolves to be strong and to toil without hope. He blesses the day of Gioietta’s birth and the day she chose to die. A timely southern wind brings health and joy from the green Adriatic. Purged of grief, he can celebrate the Carso again, a landscape that offers no quarter, ‘an inferno’ – Slataper exults in the Dantesque metaphor that soldiers would use again and again to describe the battlefield a few years later. He returns to Trieste with a new sense of purpose. ‘We love and bless you, for we would even be happy to die in your blaze.’ It was another ominous tribute.

This sense of purpose led him to support Angelo Vivante against the militants who denounced his peaceful vision for the Habsburg Italians. ‘The historic task of Trieste’, Slataper said, ‘is to be the crucible and propagator of civilisation, three civilisations.’ He and his friends decided to try to change the climate of ideas in Italy and Austria by establishing an intellectual centre of ‘centripetal energy’. They would tackle the leading problems of the day, starting with the national question. Each of them would study a different language. (‘With ten of us, we can cover Europe, if not beyond,’ he enthused.) Using Trieste as an ‘observatory’, they would publish a review called
Europa
to debate ‘the general problems of modern civilisation: races, Semitism, feminism, democracy, religion, political activism’.

He fell in love again, with another of his Triestine circle: Luisa Carniel. They married in 1913 and moved to Hamburg, where Scipio worked at the university. The third muse, Elody Oblath, still deeply smitten, trailed after them and shared their quarters for several months, surely an excruciating arrangement. Scipio’s mind was fixed on Trieste, as always when he lived abroad. The couple returned home in August 1914. From the outbreak of the Great War until his death in December 1915, he was prolific even by his own standards, as he strove to increase public support in Italy for war.

Until the start of the war, he had refused to take sides on the irredentist question. He thought Italian nationalists underestimated Trieste’s economic links with Austria, while socialists like Vivante tended to intellectualise the national question. Yet he believed that conflict between nations was proper, because civilisations do not hold equal rights before history. It is ‘morbid and harmful’ to concede something to one nation simply because ‘another has reached the stage of deserving it’. The Italians stood above ‘the Slavs’ because they ‘have a richer civilisation’ and were ‘right to affirm it
and fight for it
’. Even so, he would not call for war unless it was in Italy’s own interest to fight. August 1914 presented exactly the scenario that would swing his position. He decided that Italy should enter the war with a view to sharing the territorial spoils with Serbia. Italy would take Friuli, Trieste, the Alpine frontier, all of Istria, a Dalmatian island or two, and eventually Albania.

As summer became autumn and Serbia defended itself against immense odds, while Russia attacked the Austrian Empire in the east, the case for Italian intervention became – in Slataper’s view – rock solid. Italy should fight for the rights of the non-German peoples of the empire, but also for the territorial claims that stemmed from the Italians’ superior civilisation. Avid for a national readership, he wrote for a pro-war newspaper in Bologna (the same one that channelled funds to launch Mussolini’s newspaper in November 1914). His despatches were gossipy and vivid. When war broke out, there was confusion in Trieste. ‘No one could make head nor tail of it.’ The military band played marches in the streets and there was much flag- waving. News of Britain’s entry into the war was met with stunned silence in the city stock exchange, broken by a trader who cried ‘It’s all over!’ The city was practically undefended; the garrison had been sent to the Eastern Front. Apart from a few reserve companies on the Carso, only a few hundred Slovenian military police were left. The Austrians evacuated their archives and transferred the regional capital to Gorizia. They were so jittery about a British naval raid that the governor slept outside the city every night. The bank vaults were emptied: strongboxes were loaded onto wagons and pulled by oxen through the deserted city at night. The mass exit of
regnicoli
caused dozens of shops to close; barbers and waiters were particularly hard to find. The cafés were quiet, after losing their clientele as well as their staff. People wandered down to the quays at night, which were empty for the first time, dark and silent. Gas lamps were unlit, to save fuel. Access to border areas was restricted, so rumours of troop movements across the Isonzo could not be verified.

Privately, Slataper was exasperated by the local Italians’ ‘lack of historical responsibility’. Instead of seizing the chance to throw off the Austrian yoke, they got on with their lives as best they could. Under this pressure, he became a propagandist. An article in December 1914 ended with a steely call to arms: ‘For 32 years of forced peace we could not say the name of Oberdan. Oberdan is a duty: he is war. Simply that. We shall sing his name when our soldiers enter the barracks in Trieste where he was hanged.’ He assured his readers that Austria’s border on the lowlands of Friuli was ‘absolutely indefensible’. He came to share the nationalist contempt for Habsburg fighting abilities, claiming that ‘the Austrian soldier cannot win because he has no will to win’. One of his last publications was a silly pamphlet predicting that Trieste would be liberated within a few days and Laibach after a few weeks. His old insights into Italian–Yugoslav relations, and Slavic toughness in particular, were forgotten. Yet even now he could be surprising. His last article, datelined 22 April 1915, admitted that the pursuit of nationalist claims would never produce a stable order in Europe, because every success triggers counter-claims by another minority. Only ‘healthy liberalism’ could provide a ‘true guarantee’ for Europe’s minorities.

By May 1915, he was living in Rome. He volunteered at once and found himself in the Sardinian Grenadiers. The troop train pulled out of Portonaccio station under heavy rain. Slataper wore a red rose in his cap. Wounded in June by friendly fire, he returned to the line as quickly as possible. In November he was sent to Podgora, the hill above Gorizia that the troops called ‘Calvary’. Five years earlier, he had foreseen his death:

One day, when I’m still young, when I’m walking on the Carso and the stones and flowers are telling me things I already know, some Slav will hurl an eroded, heavy rock full of sharp edges at me. And that’s where I’ll fall, up on the Carso. Not in bed, amid tears and stinks and whispers and people walking softly in the room. I want to die at the height of my life, not down there.

 His wish was granted on 3 December, when a Croatian or Bosnian bullet killed him during an action that he had volunteered for. He was 27 years old.

Slataper’s biographer tried to explain his hero’s attitude to the carnage.

He did not approve of so many lives being lost due to lack of planning or resources, but if blood had to be so grievously shed to cement the future history of the fatherland, he could not spare his own with the excuse that the Italian generals were so many contemptible executioners … For all those who
did not
know why
, it was necessary for someone to go in full knowledge, but with their same humility.

Slataper was a sublime educator, showing by example how the Italian soldiers must go like cattle to the abattoir. His search after Anna’s suicide for what he called ‘a harder, more heroic and disinterested life’ led to what his biographer praised as devotion to ‘violent liberty and complete sincerity’ – dangerous goals at any time, and fatal for many in 1915. The Slovene peasant who was guardedly admired in
My Carso
became his mortal enemy. Slataper the vivifier finished as an apostle of the twentieth century’s worst malady – aggressive ethnic nationalism. A decade after the war, Elody Oblath, his truest soulmate, looked back on the inbred intensity of their group:

We thought we knew all about the horrors of war, but we knew nothing except our own exaltation. Yet we did know with conscious certainty that whatever these horrors would be, none of us would hold back. Our plotting for war really was like [the revolutionaries in] 1848. Thinking today of our inviolable closeness, and everything we tried to do and did do with such effort, I feel admiration and also pity for that limitless and truly heroic enthusiasm. Ours was an ideal co-operation for a collective truth. For the sake of this truth, each of us, I am sure, would have gone to the gallows, just as we consciously instigated and helped all our friends (the best part of ourselves) to go forth and die. Days of mad illusions, faith in a better humanity, which made us exult and demand the deaths of millions of men.

The news of Scipio’s death ‘shattered our fanaticism for ever’.

Source Notes
TEN
The Dreaming Barbarian

1
Fabio Todero has exposed this claim as a myth
: Todero [2005].

2
a fifth of the population
: Cecotti, 67.

3
‘
the soldiers look at us as if we were the reason
’: Alliney, 50.

4
‘
Everything we hated about Austria
’: Arrigo Arneri, quoted by Fabio Todero [2005].

5
‘
a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse
’: Ellmann, 233.

6
a silly pamphlet predicting that Trieste
: Slataper [1915].

7
‘
We thought we knew all about the horrors of war
’: Oblath Stuparich, 32–3.

1 
James Joyce, that adoptive Triestine, had a similar reaction to Rome in 1906: the Eternal City reminded him of ‘a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse’.

ELEVEN

Walking Shapes of Mud

It is a military axiom not to advance uphill
against the enemy
.

S
UN
T
ZU

The Third and Fourth Battles of the Isonzo

Cadorna was in no hurry to start a third offensive. Aware that his resources lagged behind the nation’s ambitions, he needed more heavy artillery and munitions if his breakthrough strategy was to succeed. He scraped together medium and heavy guns from far and near, including some naval batteries, and pushed the government to boost domestic production. The economy had to be put on a war footing, but the government still regretted its dream of a short campaign and feared the public’s reaction when it awoke from the same dream. Cadorna’s case was not helped when the Minister of War, Zupelli, criticised his use of resources, particularly the dispersal of men and artillery.

Cadorna estimated that Italy’s arms manufacturers would need the best part of a year to produce the quantity of heavy artillery that he wanted. He had no doubts about the ultimate outcome, and urged the government to prepare for a long haul to victory. But governments are shy of long hauls when the stakes are so high, and Cadorna’s relationship with Salandra began to sour. He had to put up with a string of high- profile visitors from Rome, warning that the nation needed a resounding victory by the end of the year. If they could not have Trieste, what about Gorizia, the only other city in the ‘unredeemed lands’ around the Adriatic? Other pressure came from the Allies. In October, when Britain and France wanted Italy to relieve the strain on Serbia and the Western Front, the onus on Cadorna to attack became irresistible.

In the meantime, the Supreme Command assessed its failures to date. As thousands of dead were collected in raw new cemeteries along the valley bottoms, where the villages stood empty and the crops rotted, senior officers drafted memoranda on tactics. These discussions centred on the reasons why Italy’s offensives had failed. The theory of attack was clear; the preliminary bombardment had to be heavy enough to wreck the enemy’s forward positions, but not so long that reinforcements could be brought up to the attack zone. The ‘methodical advance’, introduced over the summer, was meant to deter the Austrians from building up their strength at strategic points.
1
Diversionary assaults were timed to prevent the enemy transferring forces to block the main thrust. When the infantry attacked, artillery fire should be lengthened to strike the enemy rear, to block counter-attacks from the second defensive line. The attacking infantry line should be spaced out, with the soldiers a metre apart, except where they poured through the breaches in the barbed wire that had been made the night before by the wire-cutting teams, and widened by the artillery. These teams comprised four or five men with a pair of cutters, some sacks, half a dozen hand- grenades, and gelignite tubes.

In practice, matters had gone very differently. The Italians could not knock out the enemy batteries if they did not know their location; aerial reconnaissance was not yet developed, and even the observers perched at the top of church towers could not see over the brow of the Carso. Co-ordination between the attacking infantry and the supporting batteries was often poor, as was the communication between observers and gunners. The fire was not accurate enough to pinpoint the enemy reserves as they moved up to counter-attack. Rigid fire tables prevented the gunners from reacting flexibly to evolving situations. Shells were in short supply and many guns had been damaged by over use. At the end of August, the Supreme Command set a daily ceiling on use of artillery. This helped to preserve the guns, at the cost of sparing the enemy. New approach roads were constructed, so heavy artillery could be brought closer to the front. Artillery fire was reduced when the infantry attacked, rather than switched off abruptly.

No reliable way had been found to breach barbed-wire entangle ments. Heavy artillery could do it, but could rarely be spared for this task. Even when the gelignite tubes exploded (the fuses easily became damp and refused to ignite), the gaps were so narrow that they formed deadly bottlenecks when the Italians tried to crowd through – a gift to enemy machine gunners. Unless enough cylinders were used, the explosions failed to break the wire. Even then, the Austrians usually had time to patch over the gaps before dawn. In desperation, weird alternative devices were tried out. A large rectangular shield was fitted with an axle and two wheels that the soldiers pushed in front of them, up to the wire. A wheel was equipped with spiked blades and launched at the enemy lines by catapult. While the blades sliced through the first strands of wire, the wheel got snarled up in the wire. An explosive charge in the wheel hub would then detonate, blasting a wide hole. It worked as well as would be expected. Wire-cutting teams were given portable shields of iron for carrying up to the wire, where they presented a splendidly static target.

Even local successes had exposed crippling defects. When the Italians did manage to break into an enemy trench, after heroic efforts, they seemed at a loss. Their resolve disintegrated at the first burst of gunfire, flurry of grenades, or bayonet charge. The Austrians found they could stampede the Italians back to their own lines quite easily. Cadorna was oblivious to such omens about training and morale. On 9 October, he suspended all leave except for convalescence, a crushing blow to soldiers who had been in the line since June.

The reserves were another problem. Before the Italians could bring theirs into an occupied line, the enemy’s had moved up from the second and third lines. The Supreme Command realised that the first wave of attacking infantry had to be supported by second and third waves – and even fourth and fifth waves, entering the fray before the Austrians mounted their inevitable counter-attack. This could not be done unless more reserves were brought up before an attack, especially difficult when communication trenches were lacking in many places. Cadorna’s answer was to establish ‘men-reservoirs’ as close to the front line as possible, like a human munitions dump. Unfortunately this created another problem: how to protect the reserves against well-targeted Austrian artillery?

Then there were the problems of defence. The Italians still lacked rock-drills and explosives to deepen the trenches, so – like the Austrians – they piled up stones into parapets, and piled sandbags on the stones.
2
The Austrians could aim almost at will; as a rule, their observers high up on the hills had sight of the front lines and the rear. And Italian losses were increased by sheer carelessness, born of inexperience and also ideology. Many officers disdained to organise their defences properly because they thought the Austrians did not deserve the compliment. Only tragic experience would expunge this prejudice.

In short, the Austrians were masters of the front. By day, their lines were generally quiet, though sharpshooters were quick to fire on Italians who forgot to stay under their parapets. Their artillery was well back, out of Italian view. By night, they kept up intermittent fire while their searchlights played over the Italian lines, interrupting the drilling, digging and provisioning. By October, most sectors on the lower Isonzo front had three main lines, zigzagging in textbook style and linked by communication lines. These defences were deep enough to absorb local break throughs, like an airbag in a car crash. During Italian bombard ments, the first line was almost empty except for observers. The forward troops waited in deep dug-outs behind the trenches, often six or eight metres deep, swarming with vermin. As soon as the fire lengthened towards the communication lines, the infantry clambered up the ladders and poured out of these dug-outs, quickly joined by units from the second line. They usually reached the front in time to repulse the Italians. Inured to hardship and ferocious discipline, they were skilled and savage at hand-to-hand fighting – the essence of counter-attack – with bayonets, spiked clubs, daggers and knuckledusters.

It was difficult to anchor barbed wire in the Carso rock, a job that could only be attempted at night. Luckily it was even more difficult for the Italians to cut through wire, anchored or not. At the same time, the Austrians were making geology work for them. The second and third defensive lines made good use of grottoes and caverns. When these were not accessible through fissures, holes could be drilled or blasted through the limestone. Lined with planks, creosoted against damp, these shelters accommodated hundreds of soldiers. Although the heaviest shells could not smash through more than a metre and a half of solid stone, prolonged shelling made the cavern walls tremble, inducing panic and claustrophobia – a fear of never seeing sunlight again. But it was better than being blown up.

Bulgaria came off the fence in September – and joined the Central Powers. From mid-October, assailed by Austria from the north and west and Bulgaria from the south-east, Serbia was fighting for its life. Meanwhile the Allied offensives in France were at a bloody standstill. The Allies called on Italy to take some of the heat.

Cadorna believed he had enough artillery and shells for another attack. Trieste had mocked his efforts so far; it was inconceivable that an impressive breakthrough would be achieved in that direction by the end of the year. Gorizia was another matter. It was worth very little strategically, but it lay only one or two kilometres beyond the Italian lines. If he could outflank the city by taking Plava and Tolmein to the north and Mount San Michele to the south, the fanatical resistance of Zeidler’s Dalmatian and Hungarian forces in the bridgehead could, Cadorna supposed, soon be reduced. Gorizia and its 15,000 citizens would drop into his hand.

Under General Frugoni, the Second Army prepared to attack Tolmein and Plava, as well as the hills of Podgora and Sabotino. Meanwhile the Duke of Aosta’s Third Army would attack Mount San Michele once again and try to drive forward elsewhere on the Carso plateau. Austrian intelligence, helped by talkative Italian deserters, was well informed about these plans.

The offensive started on 18 October, a chilly autumn day, with more than 1,300 Italian guns shelling along a 50-kilometre front, from Krn to the sea. The bombardment was more intense than anything the Austrians had seen on this front.3 Yet, as before, the brunt of it was fired by 75-millimetre artillery, too light to harm trenches or wire. When the Italians moved out of their trenches on the 21st, they expected large gains. The Austrians, however, were more than ready. Enough machine guns always survived to check the Italians – even when they advanced in armour of steel plates, as they did in some places. Very little was achieved on the northern Isonzo. The Italians had briefly recaptured the ‘Big Trench’ on Mrzli at the end of September, only to lose it to the usual ferocious counter-attack. They hauled artillery onto Krn to pound the summit of Mrzli and its rear lines from the north while the infantry drove up from the south and west. Assisted in this way, the Salerno Brigade took the Big Trench on 21 October. Success was clinched with bayonets. Losses on both sides were very high. Hundreds of mud- plastered prisoners, including Bosnians with their sky-blue fezzes, were led down to the valley. The front lines were so close that working parties, collecting the dead or bringing up supplies, sometimes found themselves on the wrong side. At dawn on the 24th, the Italians made their first real grab for the elusive summit of Mrzli. They were driven back once, then twice. These failures were mitigated by advances elsewhere on the mountain, pushing the Austrians back towards the summit on either side of the Big Trench. But there was no breakthrough.

3 The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, strolling in Agram (now Zagreb) on 20 October, nearly 200 kilometres away, imagined he could feel the ground vibrating under his feet. ‘Subterranean rumblings’, he noted in his diary. ‘Guns on the Isonzo.’ Next day, he reported rumours circulating in the cafés ‘that the guns on the Isonzo are audible. The Isonzo has its magnetic field and we all walk around inside its spell.’

The Italians were nowhere near taking Tolmein. Hill 383, looming over Plava, remained impregnable. As for Gorizia, there were 30 assaults on Sabotino and Podgora, often in driving rain. The corps commander on this sector was General Luigi Capello, promoted from divisional commander on the Carso, where his ruthlessness justified the nickname he had earned in Libya: ‘the butcher’. This reputation commended him to Cadorna, who otherwise disliked Capello as too political and, especially, too active as a Freemason. Their on-off partnership defined much of the Italian war for the next two years.

On the Carso, control of San Michele switched from one side to another amid savage fighting over three days. The Italians repeatedly overran the Austrian front line, but could not withstand the counter-attack. Again and again, they charged at positions that turned out not to have been seriously damaged. Their assaults were stopped short by intact wire. The Austrians had made good use of the quiet months since the Second Battle. By the time the Italians had taken the first line of enemy trenches, the enemy reserves had reached the second line, which was in better condition than the first line and well able to block any further advance while the Austrians prepared their counter-attack.

Between San Michele and Monfalcone, the Carso escarpment rises and falls without any clear summits. The name given to this limestone wilderness is Monte Sei Busi, which translates as Six Holes Mountain. (To someone walking over the surface, the name could as well be Sixty or Six Hundred Holes.) The Siena Brigade’s task in the Third Battle was to take the Austrians’ long, well-fortified front line on Sei Busi. On 23 October, the trench was taken after three days of bloody assaults, with all three battalions engaged. The rejoicing was short-lived; that night, the Italians were driven back to their jump-off position. As usual, they had no time to prepare their defence. The next morning, the Austrians called for an hour’s ceasefire to tend the wounded and collect the dead. Soon afterwards the Siena Brigade was replaced with a regiment of Bersaglieri and the Sassari Brigade. Together, these fresh forces retook the trench early in November, and kept it. Yet another massive effort had yielded a ‘success’ which was scarcely visible on the map.