The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (2 page)

4
‘
What do you want, to kill them all?
’: This witness was Adelmo Reatti. Foresti, Morisi & Resca.

5
‘
like toads
’: Salsa, 85.

6
A few weeks earlier
: This witness was Bersagliere Giuseppe Garzoni. Bianchi [2001], 356.

7
As the survivors drew close
: Lussu, 97–8. This book is a lightly fictionalised memoir, not a journal or a work of scholarship.

8
A Turkish officer
: See Patsy Adam-Smith,
The Anzacs
(West Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1978), Chapter 12.

9
‘
offered such a target
’: A German source quoted by Warner, 45.

10
‘like a great wall
’: Wanda Newby, 65.

11
‘in Vienna for Christmas
’: General Porro, deputy supreme commander. De Simone, 202.

12
‘
Our entire war is viewed
’: Isnenghi & Rochat, 446.

13
The worst-paid infantry
: Schindler, 132.

14
Italy’s situation after the war
: Giuliano Procacci, 237.

1 
Eastern Friuli and Trieste comprised some 3,000 square kilometres. Istria – where no fighting took place, though it was equally an Italian objective – is about 5,000 square kilometres. South Tyrol, comprising what Italians called the Trentino and Alto Adige, has 13,600 square kilometres.

ONE

A Mania for Expansion

My Native Land! I See the Walls, the Arches,
 
The columns and the statues, and the lone
Ancestral towers; but where,
I ask, is all the glory?

    L
EOPARDI
, ‘To Italy’ (1818)

Europe before the First World War was rackety and murderous, closer in its statecraft to the Middle East or central Asia than today’s docile continent, where inter-state affairs filter through committees in Brussels.
1
It was marked by the epic formation of two large states. When Germany emerged in the 1860s, Italy had taken shape in a process of unification called the
Risorgimento
or ‘revival’. Led by Piedmont, a little kingdom with its capital at Turin, the Risorgimento merged two kingdoms, the statelets controlled by the Pope, a grand duchy, and two former provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

By 1866, the Italian peninsula was unified except for Papal Rome and Venetia, the large northern province with Venice as its capital. Rome could not be liberated until France withdrew its support for the Pope. Against Austria, however, the Italians found themselves with a mighty ally; Prussia’s prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, invited them to attack Austria from the south when he attacked from the north. Italy lost the two decisive battles of the war and won the peace. Austrian Venetia became the Italian Veneto.
2
The Italians even gained a fraction of Friuli, but not the Isonzo valley or Trieste.

In the east, the new border ran for 150 kilometres from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea, partly along the courses of the Aussa and the Judrio rivers, hardly more than streams for most of the year. Elsewhere the new demarcation ran across fields, sometimes marked by wire mesh hung with bells. Local people came and went to church or market as they pleased. The customs officers knew which women smuggled tobacco and sugar under their broad skirts, and waved them through all the same. Personal contacts were everything. Austrian border guards looked the other way when Italian nationalists crossed the border for Italian national holidays in Udine or Palmanova. In the language of the day, the new border was cravenly
administrative
instead of nobly
national
. It was makeshift and relaxed, not the absolute perimeter that nationalists dreamed of. Even worse, Austria kept control of the high ground from Switzerland to the sea. Trieste, like south Tyrol, remained a dream. ‘Is it possible’, lamented Giuseppe Mazzini, the father of liberal nationalism, ‘that Italy accepts being pointed out as the only nation in Europe that does not know how to fight, the only one that can only receive what belongs to it by benefit of foreign arms and through humiliating concessions by the enemy usurper?’ 

The 1866 war could have had a much worse outcome. As Garibaldi, the figurehead of unification, would admit in his memoirs, the alliance with Prussia ‘proved useful to us far beyond our deserts’. The legendary warrior heaped contempt on the regular army commanders, whose arrogance and ignorance had negated Italy’s massive advantage in strength and dumped the nation ‘in a cesspit of humiliation’. And it was Garibaldi who said the best that could be said of the campaign: Italians from all over the peninsula had joined forces for the first time. This was a landmark in national history, though it could not outweigh the military failure, which bequeathed the young kingdom a complex that the Italians could not win anything for themselves. For decades afterwards, foreign leaders winked at Italy’s diplomatic achievements: they had to lose badly to make any gains!

The nation’s leaders yearned for spectacular victories to expunge the bitter memory of those defeats in 1866. The army was in no condition to provide such solace, even after the command structure was amended on Prussian lines in the 1870s. This thirst for great-power status led to defeats in Ethiopia in 1887 and 1896, and the pointless occupation of Libya in 1911. King Victor Emanuel II’s refusal to clarify the army command in 1866 led the next generation of commanders to insist on a unified structure with no ambiguities. His determination to exercise his constitutional role as commander-in-chief, despite being wholly unfitted for that role, would deter his grandson, Victor Emanuel III, from holding his own chief of the general staff to account during the Great War.

Then there were the borders. It was well and good to have Venetia, yet Austria’s continuing control of the southern Tyrol meant the newly acquired territory was not secure. Venice was still a hostage, for Austrian forces could threaten to pour down the Alpine valleys and swarm over the plains to the sea. The new demarcation in the far northeast was even worse. Patriots denounced it as humiliating, indefensible, and harmful to Friuli’s development.
3
They quoted Napoleon Bonaparte’s remark that the natural demarcation between Austria and Italy lay between the River Isonzo and Laibach (now Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia), taking in parts of Carniola (the Austrian province roughly corresponding to today’s Slovenia) and Istria, joining the sea at Fiume (now Rijeka), and his reported comment that the line of the Isonzo was indefensible, hence not worth fortifying. Garibaldi called it an ugly border, and hoped it would soon be moved 150 kilometres eastward.

One of these protesting patriots was Paolo Fambri. Born in Venice, he fought as a volunteer in 1859, became a captain of engineers in the regular army, and then a deputy in parliament and a prolific journalist who ridiculed the new border at every opportunity. Fambri defined the problem by its essentials. What is a border? It may be literal (a river) or symbolic (a pole across a road), but between states with the power and perhaps the will to threaten each other, it must be solid, ‘a force and not a formality’. The Alps should serve Italy as its ramparts. Instead, they enclose the country like a wall. As for the new frontier near the Isonzo, ‘a more irrational and capricious line was never yet imposed by arrogance or conceded by the most abject weakness’. There was no coherent historical, ethnic, physical, political or military concept behind it. Just as Italy’s security in the north was a hostage to the Tyrol, so its security in the east was threatened by three great natural breaches in the Julian Alps: at Tarvis through to Villach (today in southern Austria); at Görz (now Gorizia) and the valley of the River Vipacco (now the Vipava, in Slovenia), through to Laibach; and up the coast from Fiume and Trieste. Italy could not be secure without controlling all this territory, but the chances of a successful pre-emptive attack were ‘worse than bad’, because the enemy held all the high ground. The Austrians, by contrast, could stroll over the Isonzo and onto the plains of Friuli ‘without a care in the world’. Either Austria or Italy could hold all the territory from Trieste to Trent (now Trento), but they could not share it, so the 1866 border could never become stable. 

Giulio Caprin, a nationalist from Trieste, was equally scornful: the new border ‘is not a border at all: neither historic nor ethnic nor economic; a metal wire planted haphazardly where nothing ends or begins, an arbitrary division, an amputation… alien to nature, law and logic’. Foreign analysts agreed the border would not last. A British journalist wrote in the 1880s that if Italy ever fought Austria without allies, defending the Veneto would be very difficult. Not only would Austria hold the high ground in the east; the southern Tyrol would become ‘the most threatening salient’, looming above the Italian lines. Further east, where the Alps curve southwards, turning the plains of Friuli into an amphitheatre, Austria’s position enjoyed ‘peculiar excellence’. Just how excellent would be tested half a century later. Perceptive observers noted another effect of the 1866 border. By putting pressure on the south-western corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this border encouraged Habsburg high-handedness towards Vojvodina and Bosnia, the empire’s restive Slavic lands close to Serbia. In this way, Garibaldi’s ‘ugly border’ added a line of gunpowder to the incendiary pattern of 1914.

The abortive bid for Trieste in 1866, when an army corps marched around the northern Adriatic, hoping to capture the Austrian port before Bismarck forced a peace settlement on Italy, fired Italian nationalists on both sides of the new border with fresh enthusiasm. Their watchword became irredentism, coined from the slogan
Italia
irredenta
, ‘unredeemed Italy’. The irredentists wanted to ‘redeem’ the southern Tyrol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria and Dalmatia by annexing them to the Kingdom of Italy. The Christian overtone was anything but accidental: for these nationalists, the fatherland was sacred and their cause was a secular religion.

Formed by cells of disillusioned Garibaldians, Mazzinians and other hotheads gathering in groups such as the Association for Unredeemed Italy (founded in 1877), they were inspired by ambitions that were almost comically beyond their grasp. Not only were the Austrians determined to stop them spreading their revolutionary ideas; successive governments in Rome were ready to sacrifice them as the price of staying in the good graces of Europe’s great powers. Governments could do this because the irredentists swam against the tide of public as well as diplomatic opinion. With the capture of Rome in 1870, most Italians reckoned that Italy was complete.

The human cost of unification since 1848 was around 6,000 dead and 20,000 wounded: as such things went, not excessive for the creation of a nation state with 27 million people. Yet the achievement left a hangover. The compromises entailed by state-creation tasted bitter to the very idealists who had inspired the Risorgimento. Their feeling was caught long afterwards by Valentino Coda, a veteran of the Great War who became a leading Fascist: ‘In a nation that was only born yesterday and lacks unitary traditions, irredentism was the only spring of patriotic action, even if the bourgeoisie and the socialists conspired to suffocate it.’ Irredentism was the best cause around for disaffected nationalists, at a loss for direction in a country where ‘civil society’ was a crust of professionals – lawyers, merchants, scholars, administrators, army officers – resting on a magma of industrial workers, peasant farmers and labourers, unenfranchised, extensively illiterate, patchily becoming a political class.

There was more to this bitterness than dislike of the way that Venice and the Veneto had been brought into Italy. Mazzini spoke for many when he denounced the course and outcome of unification. From their point of view, the kingdom had been hustled into existence, leaving two large communities of ethnic Italians outside its borders. Even worse, the pre-1860 élites – the court, landowning aristocracy and professional classes – kept their power, ensuring that their interests were not threatened by broader involvement. There had been no transformation of the political system or culture, nothing like a revolution in values. The House of Savoy blocked the way to progress. The masses were still alienated subjects rather than active citizens.

Other prominent figures made this analysis, but no one was as sharp as Mazzini. The executive, he wrote near the end of his life, governed with ‘a policy of expedients, opportunism, concealment, intrigue, reticence and parliamentary compromise characteristic of the languid life of nations in decay’. Like dissident leaders in other times and places, he was tormented by the low means that politicians used to achieve a great purpose, by his own impotence (as distinct from moral stature), and by ordinary people’s sluggish reluctance to rise against their oppressors, whether foreign or domestic. Visionary, cadaverous, clad in black, Mazzini in old age seemed more spirit than man, kept alive by a burning will to sustain the people’s faith in self-determination. He wanted a strong state, but one that had been transformed by revolutionary idealism.

This prophet of European integration believed Italy had a mission to extend European civilisation into northern Africa. He scorned the ‘brutal conquest’ that typified European colonialism; foreign engagement should be emancipatory, extending the rights and freedoms that European citizens fought for at home. The fact that politicians do not take the huge risks incurred by foreign adventures without more selfish ends in view did not distract him. He saw Austrian control over the south Tyrol and Trieste as ‘the triumph of brutal force’ over popular will. On the Tyrol, he was an orthodox nationalist: everything up to the Alpine watershed must be Italy’s, including the wholly German areas around Bozen (now Bolzano in the Alto Adige). Yet he was uncertain about the north-eastern border. Sometimes he said it should follow the crest of the Alps down to Trieste, at others, that it should follow the Isonzo. Shortly before his death, he wrote that Istria must be Italian because the poet Dante had ordained it six hundred years before, in lines known to every patriot: 

a Pola presso del Carnaro

che Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna
.

to Pola by the Quarnero bay 

washing the boundary where Italy ends. 

(The town of Pola is at the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula.) He was never a maximalist, however: he had too much respect for Slavic self- determination to claim that Dalmatia – the eastern Adriatic coast – should be controlled by its tiny Italian minority. His views on Italian– Slav relations were far-sighted: the two peoples should be allies in seizing freedom from their Austrian oppressor. After his death in 1872, the irredentists imitated his style of total dedication to an ideal. His legacy was an ascetic commitment to the fatherland, a radical libertarianism that was ultimately contemptuous of liberalism, with its unavoidable compromises and calculations, its suspicion of state power. This fanaticism was handed down to later generations, including the volunteers of 1915.