The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (20 page)

Bad weather lasted throughout the battle, intensifying at the end of the month. By early November, the trenches were quagmires of filth, the roads almost impassable. The first snowfalls forced the fighting to stop.

The last days of the battle, 3 and 4 November, were extremely violent. Brigade diaries reported fears that some units might crack and desert en masse. The attacks on San Michele were weakening under the internal pressures of exhaustion and hopelessness. The Italians had sustained 67,000 losses along the front. On San Michele, the Catanzaro Brigade alone lost almost 2,800 men and 70 officers between 17 and 26 October, nearly half of each category. The Caltanisetta Brigade, deployed alongside the Catanzaro, took even heavier casualties, losing two-thirds of its men and 63 per cent of its officers between 22 October and 3 November. South of Monfalcone, the 16th Division carried out a frontal attack on Hill 121, the nearest point to Trieste that Cadorna’s army had yet reached. This one failed attack cost 4,000 Italian casualties. The battle’s only gains were trivial: some ground along the river, south of Plava, and two hills to the west of Podgora, bringing the Italians a hundred metres closer to Gorizia.

The extra artillery and tinkering with infantry tactics had made little difference. One reason was the rigorous centralisation of command and control. Given the poor communications on the battlefield, this made bad decisions inevitable. An episode involving the Lazio Brigade, recovered by the historian Giorgio Longo, illustrates this with tragic clarity.

The brigade was stationed on the northern slope of San Michele. It is the steepest face of the hill, rising 270 metres from the Isonzo within 900 horizontal metres. The 132nd Infantry Regiment (Lazio Brigade, 29th Division, Third Army) was stationed between regiments of the Perugia and Verona Brigades. It faced formidable Austrian defences, guarded by multiple rows of barbed wire and machine-gun nests, backed by batteries to the east. Flanking movements along the river were barred by a redoubt with outlying trenches that the Italians judged to be impregnable. On 21 October, the 132nd Infantry was ordered to take a ridge on the northern slope. Known as Hill 124, this ridge was ringed with barbed wire that had suffered only a few narrow breaches. Efforts to widen the breaches with wire-cutters and gelignite tubes had mostly failed. Inevitably, the attackers suffered heavy losses; over ten days of continuous assaults, the 132nd lost 26 officers and 707 men. The survivors sheltered in muddy holes; their soggy uniforms could not be dried.

On the evening of the 31st, the regiment was ordered to renew its attack the following morning. The commanding officer, Colonel Viola, decided to resist. He reported to the brigade commander, General Schenardi, that attacking in these conditions was impossible: the rain had made the steep slopes too slippery; the paths disappeared under sliding mud; the triple rows of wire were intact; enemy fire turned the assaults into pointless butchery.

Schenardi knew Viola as a courageous CO who would not refuse an order without good reason. Throughout the following day, he urged him to proceed with the attack. The other man bought time by sending out wire-cutting patrols. That evening, Schenardi put the best face possible on the colonel’s refusal in a report to his divisional commander, General Marazzi. Wire had blocked the 132nd Infantry’s progress, and subsequent wire-cutting patrols had been killed by enfilade fire from above. They would send night patrols to try again, but if these failed to widen the breaches, the next day’s attack could only succeed if the Verona Brigade, adjacent to the Lazio, gave timely support. He ended by assuring the general that every effort was being made and every hardship endured to achieve success.

At divisional headquarters in Sdraussina, two kilometres away, Marazzi warned that the men’s ‘extreme energy’ might be undermined by weakness in the officers. Any commander suspected of shortcomings should be replaced. Behind their defences, the enemy were few and disheartened. ‘Strike a vigorous blow with every means, and victory shall be ours.’ Marazzi was under pressure from the corps commander, General Morrone, who had been stung by a phone call from the Duke of Aosta himself, in his headquarters at Cervignano some 16 kilometres away, regretting that the previous day’s action had brought ‘no appreciable result’. On the morning of 2 November, Marazzi informed the irate Morrone that ‘the most energetic orders’ had been given ‘to drive the troops forward with the utmost vigour’. Every man would do his duty to the last, at whatever cost.

General Schenardi ordered the attack to take place at 13:00 hours. Colonel Viola protested that the breaches in the wire were still too narrow, due partly to damp fuses in the gelignite tubes. Without support from the Verona Brigade, the 132nd would be massacred again. Once again, zero hour passed without an attack. When Schenardi asked about the Verona Brigade, General Marazzi snapped back: attack at once, never mind the Verona Brigade! A quarter of an hour later, he followed this order with another: if Colonel Viola hesitates for an instant, relieve him of his command.

Viola duly gave orders to advance. As usual, he led from the front. The platoons poured uphill in waves, only to break against the wire, still ‘nearly intact’ according to the brigade diary. Reinforcements arrived, but the enemy fire was overwhelming. Around 19:00, the regiment fell back. The following day, Viola prepared to lead his men back up the hill, but torrential rain forced a postponement. The same happened on the 4th. The 29th Division was exempted from the next rotations, so the men of the 132nd stayed at their sodden posts. By 10 November, the regiment was stunned by exhaustion, in terrible condition. That evening the steady downpour became a cloudburst, flooding the trenches and turning the paths into foaming streams. Two days later the 132nd was granted a week’s leave. Colonel Viola died on 22 November, leading his men in yet another attack against Hill 124.

The Third Battle was suspended on the evening of 4 November, but Cadorna was unreasonably convinced that Boroević’s army teetered on the edge of collapse. Knowing that 24 fresh battalions were due to arrive within a week or two, he felt sure Gorizia could still be taken. After a week’s pause, the Fourth Battle was launched with a short bombardment. The infantry did their best to charge up the open slopes of Mrzli, Podgora, Sabotino and San Michele, swept by machine-gun fire. The rain pelted down, the temperature sank, and then – on 16 November – heavy snow fell. There would not be a proper thaw until spring 1917, when corpses were revealed after a year and a half.

Thanks to the wire and machine guns, Austrian units that had lost half their men held back Italian advances with three times their own strength. A bit of ground was taken here and there, after huge losses, but nothing decisive. Capello, an intuitive soldier, knew it was impossible to succeed in such conditions, with the men exhausted. He sent a graphic report to General Frugoni, commanding the Second Army. As the rations were cold by the time they reached the men, and short as well, the mud-soaked infantry could not ‘restore their strength with hot, abundant rations’. Some units went more than two days without food. They were not so much men as ‘walking shapes of mud. It is not the will to advance that’s lacking … what they lack is the physical strength.’ Even the reserves had spent days in water and mud, hence were not capable of reinvigorating the first-line troops. Malingering and self-mutilation were serious problems. Malingerers imitated symptoms that doctors found hard to verify. With so many infantrymen presenting tidy wounds to their hands or feet, officers learned to look for telltale scorchmarks. Self-mutilation could be punished with summary execution or jail, but the trend was only reversed much later, when the Supreme Command sent all suspects straight to the front line.

Amid the routine slaughter, 18 November marked a turning point: the Italians shelled Gorizia for three hours. This was the start of ‘total war’ on the Isonzo. Until now, both sides had mostly refrained from targeting civilians – though Austrian ships and planes had shelled several Adriatic cities in May 1915. Astutely, the Italians had milked the fact that they had less to gain from targeting civilians. In July, Cadorna offered to support a joint commitment against targeting ‘open cities’. The Austrians were not interested: they wanted to exploit their superiority in the air.

Gorizia was known as the Austrian Nice, the city of roses or violets. Blessed by a mild climate in winter, with hills behind and the turquoise Isonzo in front, it flourished under the Habsburgs. Long avenues were lined with handsome villas. The public gardens were exceptionally pretty, the medieval castle on the hill was picturesque. The hospitals and convalescent homes were patronised by wealthy Viennese and Bavarians, who formed a German crust on top of the mixed Italian and Slovene population. After May 1915, fighting quickly reached the city’s edge. The first wave of refugees brought some 40,000 people through the city, local Italians as well as Slovenes, carrying or dragging whatever they could save from the invaders; many would spend years in internment camps. Although the prewar population of 31,000 soon halved, as citizens fled to safer regions, numbers were kept up by several tens of thousands of Habsburg troops quartered in the city, turning it into a virtual third line. Curtains of reeds were hung across the streets to block enemy snipers’ sight-lines; otherwise life continued almost normally. Officers and their wives strolled in the gardens, sat in the cafés, and kept local businesses afloat. Authority passed from the mayor to General Zeidler, legendary commander of the 58th Division, who chose not to evacuate the city, perhaps because the attack was a gift to Habsburg propaganda.

Why did Cadorna abandon the moral high ground now, when he knew that Gorizia could not be taken during this battle? His memoirs offer no clue. Perhaps he decided that civilised restraint had become a luxury, or the spectacle of the city’s near-normality so close to the front line harmed his own men’s morale. Joffre, who visited the front, may have advised that he could not afford to spare the city. Whatever the reason, Cadorna privately admitted that Gorizia was more a political than a strategic objective, and the shelling brought no advantage to offset the propaganda loss.

The Supreme Command ordered a last offensive on Mount Mrzli and around Tolmein for 23 November. Senior officers were unconvinced. Many of the men could no longer fit their boots onto their swollen feet, and frostbite was a danger. The mud, too, undermined morale: when their uniforms dried out, they were stiff as boards. The sight of Sicilian peasants shivering in a trench, hands purple and swollen, unequipped for climatic extremes that were as inconceivable to them as the war itself, could sow doubt in any observer’s mind about continuing the assaults in sub-zero temperatures. But Cadorna was not an observer; he was in Udine, nearly 40 kilometres from Mount Mrzli, surrounded by deferential staff officers.

Even so, on 26 November, the Italians pushed the Austrians back to within 20 metres of the summit. Taking advantage of a rising mist, the counter-attacking Austrians quickly drove the Italians back to the Big Trench. A separate push to take the southernmost end of the ridge, directly above Tolmein, was also repulsed. Inching up the mountain, the Italians eventually found themselves only eight metres below the Austrian front line. Pelted with grenades, rocks, barrels, even tins filled with faeces, they could get no further. It was rumoured that a corps commander shouted at his staff, ‘Don’t you see I need more dead men,
lots
more, if we’re to show the top brass that the action against Mrzli cannot succeed?’ By the end of 1915, the losses of two brigades that had served on Mrzli from the start – the Modena and Salerno – exceeded 9,000 men.

Operations petered out in the first week of December, when heavy snowfalls obliterated trenches and wire. The Fourth Battle had added 49,000 Italian casualties to the 67,000 from the Third. Austrian losses were 42,000 and 25,000 respectively. Summarising the reasons for failure, the Italian official history of the war blamed the barbed wire, which was ‘practically impossible’ to destroy. Many months would pass before the Italians found a remotely effective solution.

Source Notes
ELEVEN
Walking Shapes of Mud

1
‘
Where are the trenches?
’: Salsa, 49.

2
‘
restore their strength with hot, abundant rations
’: Rocca, 102–3

3
‘
Don’t you see I need more dead men
’: Balbi & Viazzi, 245.

4
49,000
Italian casualties to the 67,000
: Isnenghi & Rochat, 167.

5
‘
practically impossible
’
to destroy
: Alliney, 78.

1 
The ‘methodical advance’ engaged front-line units in raids and other small-scale actions along the front. The purpose was to keep the Austrians in ‘continual tension’, denying them the advantages that accrued from the Italians’ predictable cycles of preparation and attack. However, as these smaller actions were largely fruitless and costly, they also sapped the Italians.

2 
‘Where are the trenches?’ asked a junior officer, arriving on San Michele in November 1915. ‘Trenches, trenches …’ came the wondering reply. ‘There aren’t any. We’ve got holes.’

TWELVE

Year Zero

Civilians on the Italian Front

Before Cadorna settled into the winter’s work of preparing to campaign again in the spring, he helped the government fend off its critics in Rome. Although they dominated parliament, the Liberal and Socialist deputies had been subdued since May. Massive public support for the army made it almost impossible to challenge the government politically. But the failure to gain a breakthrough in 1915 made Prime Minister Salandra more vulnerable, and some opposition deputies tested the water by raising a problem that was genuine and might be eye-catching, but stopped short of implicating the military. This was the government’s policy towards civilians in the occupied areas. The deputies were particularly concerned about the internees, men and women arrested on the orders of the Supreme Command without a legal basis and often on flimsy pretexts. The internees were forcibly transferred – sometimes with their children, sometimes by cattle truck – to locations the length and breadth of Italy, where they lived under police surveillance, subsisting on hand-outs, amid suspicious Italian patriots.

On 11 December, having agreed a line with Cadorna, Salandra assured parliament that only 200 or 300 of the internees were Italian citizens. The remainder – numbering no more than 2,000 – were Austrian subjects from the liberated territory. Internment was only used with people whose presence in the occupied territory might, ‘even unconsciously and without blame on their part’, benefit the enemy. Nevertheless, he promised to review the cases of the Italian citizens and let them return home when security allowed. A week later, the Supreme Command followed up with a soothing (and hollow) assurance that internment would no longer be ordered on the basis of vague allegations. In fact the number of internees was already 5,000 and would rise to 70,000. Internment began as soon as the army marched into eastern Friuli and the Dolomites. As the highest authority in the war zone, the Supreme Command decided who should be interned and on what grounds. There were no fixed criteria for these judgements, and decisions were made by the commanding officer on the spot, or by military police.

The occupation created a golden chance for score-settling. Local nationalists, prone to the intolerance that partners revolutionary idealism, prepared blacklists of their opponents, who were not lacking, for most Habsburg Italians were not nationalist at all. Kinship ties, ethnic origins, hearsay, anonymous letters, the testimony of ‘trusted’ informants, and sheer malice: all these played a part in the drama of internment. Francesco Rossi, a labourer, was arrested and interned after he was overheard saying that Italy was poor and would never be able to help poor people, as Austria had done. A family of seven was deported to southern Italy for giving their youngest child the ‘disrespectful’ name of Germana. The infant’s godfather was interned as well for good measure. Six men from Villa Vicentina were interned for allegedly criticising the Italian army in a bar. Their offence was ‘defeatism’, like Leonardo Mian of Aquileia, interned after insulting army officers when in his cups. Another man was reportedly slow to help an Italian soldier who fell in a river, so he was packed off to Puglia at the far end of Italy. Few internees were given any reason for their treatment. Many files contain no allegations at all. Lack of open enthusiasm for the occupation was enough to prompt misgivings. Giuseppe Leghissa, a trader, was banished to Tuscany for being ‘notoriously hostile to the cause’.

‘Spying’ was a standard accusation. Actual espionage did not have to be proven; arrest and internment followed from being in the wrong place at the wrong moment, or asking about Italian strength or intentions. A housewife could be charged with collaboration for hanging sheets out of windows facing the Carso, allegedly signalling to the Austrians. Parish priests were interned for ringing the church bells (and they were rung everywhere when the Italians marched in, because Pentecost fell on 23 May). So bell-ringing was prohibited, along with possession of firearms and keeping pigeons. A Germanic accent and old-world Viennese manners aroused suspicion, as several titled landowners learned to their cost. Accusations were thickest in the areas where Slovenes lived. In some cases, internment was justified with the single word: ‘Slav’.

A powerful factor was the irredentists’ animus against the Catholic Church, for Catholicism was still regarded as nearly synonymous with anti-Italianism. When the Ponton brothers, Massimiliano and Giuseppe, were arrested and taken to the main square in Palmanova at the end of May 1915, a local man jumped at Giuseppe ‘like a wild animal’, according to a witness, screaming, ‘We’ve got you now, you filthy German, you spy! Now you’ll pay for your wrongdoings!’ He punched Giuseppe hard on the head, then threw him back against a wall. Onlookers cheered as Giuseppe bled. The brothers were led away to join the other internees who had been rounded up, thirty or so altogether, to be handcuffed and shoved into carts (for the peasant farmers) or open carriages (if they were landowners or priests), then taken under military escort to prison, where a crowd was waiting with stones and sticks, led by ‘well-dressed men’ who shouted, ‘Now you’ll see who’s master! You’ll see what happens when you side with the Catholic swine!’
1
The police stood by as blows rained down on the handcuffed men.

The Ponton brothers were pillars of their community. What had they done to deserve this violence? Giuseppe’s offence was logged as ‘ex- Mayor, Catholic’, while Massimiliano’s was ‘pro-Austrian, member of Catholic associations’. Making matters still worse, their brother Olivo was active in the movement against irredentism, and had fled to Gorizia at the start of the war. This movement was led by the People’s Catholic Party of Friuli (PCPF), with a programme that chilled the marrow of Italian nationalists on both sides of the border. For the PCPF argued that Italian identity and rights could thrive within the empire on a basis of strong local autonomy. This was precisely what the irredentists denied. Every Habsburg Italian who believed in a bland constitutional settlement for Italians in the empire had made life harder for the irredentists and now, logically, would do so for the occupying forces. Activists who shared this vision were the worst enemies of the irredentists, rather as, elsewhere in Europe, democratic socialists would soon be the worst enemies of communists. The PCPF was led by a priest from Gorizia, Monsignor Luigi Faidutti, demonised in the nationalist press as a ‘renegade’.

The clergy were automatically suspected of supporting the PCPF. Of the 80 priests in the occupied territories, 59 were interned in 1915 on generic grounds of spying, inciting resistance, and ‘Austrophilia’. They were replaced by Italian priests in military service, often natives of western Friuli. The Supreme Command described this policy as ‘just and praiseworthy’, for the local priests had ‘always supported the Austrian government, and hence could contribute to a state of mind not at all favourable to the new regime’. This was a slur on many priests, who simply had a different notion of what was good for the Habsburg Italians, but as a policy it made sense. Apart from their loyalty to the Apostolic Majesty in Vienna, most of the clergy were Slovenes, like their flock, and their opinion of the invaders was sharpened by ethnic antagonism. The Habsburgs were defenders of the faith, whereas the Italian army – led by Cadorna’s father, as it happened – had conquered the Papal States and confined His Holiness to the Vatican, like jailers. Many saw Cadorna’s forces in the darkest terms as profaners and rapists, and warned their congregations accordingly from the pulpit.

Other influential figures in the community were also targeted. Mayors, retired officials, teachers, tradesmen: all were likely to be interned. Some were sent to Udine or the Veneto; others to Piedmont and Lombardy; most ended in Tuscany or further south. All men between 18 and 50 from the ‘redeemed’ territory were supposed to be confined to the island of Sardinia. Consequently, three-quarters of the internees found themselves in one of the poorest, least healthy parts of Italy, where Habsburg Italians – let alone Slovenes – could make no sense of the impenetrable dialect. Italians sent to Sicily baffled the local people by speaking Italian – the Sicilians assumed that enemy civilians were bound to be German.

The state gave the internees one lira each per day: twice as much as a private in the infantry, but not enough to meet elementary needs. If they managed on their own savings or income, they could choose where to live. While some sank into ruin, most managed to find their feet. Clubs of local patriots would denounce internees to the police, but the police did not always listen and there were open-minded families ready to share food and lend clothes.

As well as internments, Cadorna’s Supreme Command ordered mass evacuations. Everyone living within 500 metres of the ‘zone of military operations’ was supposed to be moved away. Many villages were virtually emptied. In all, more than 40,000 civilians were evacuated during the first year of the war. Some were sent a few kilometres down the road; most ended up unthinkably far from hearth and home, anywhere between Sicily and the French border, until 1919.

Families were given a few hours’ notice to collect whatever they could carry, then escorted to collection points at Udine and Palmanova to be registered, disinfected and vaccinated against cholera and dysentery, then moved on to their destinations, where no camps had been prepared and there was no prior co-ordination with local authorities. Only when the Austrian offensive in 1916 drove almost 80,000 Italians off the Asiago plateau did the government realise that provision for refugees should be systematised. Even then, unlike in France or Britain, no central body was set up to organise refugee affairs.

Official and popular suspicion was pervasive; these people might have been ‘redeemed’, but they were still Austrian subjects. People spat on the evacuees in the streets of Livorno: ‘You Germans, coming here to eat our bread.’ They were moved around in convoys, under police escort. Their movements were often restricted. In some places, priests and teachers reached out to the evacuee groups. Yet they were practical people, ready to make the best of things – even the baffling foodstuffs. (Pasta and rice were unknown in eastern Friuli before the war.) As well as the daily subvention from the state, they were allowed to take paid work. A March 1916 report on Habsburg Italian evacuees in the southern province of Abruzzo observed that they mourned ‘the tranquillity that they have lost and the prosperity they believe is gone for ever. But there is no rancour or hatred.’

Evacuee life was especially tough for the 10,000 or more Habsburg Slovenes who had to move to the interior of Italy. Apart from the shock of displacement, few of them could communicate with local people, who resented them more than the Italian evacuees. The same report from Abruzzo described the Slovenes as ‘very submissive and docile’ but also ‘closed and suspicious’. The adults kept a distance from local people, though the children were more prepared to mix. In some places, the local authorities did not want to accept Slovenes at all.

The Supreme Command set up a new office to manage the evacuations and other civilian matters in the occupied territories. This was the General Secretariat for Civil Affairs, led by a lawyer, Agostino D’Adamo. Although he reported to Cadorna, D’Adamo came from the Ministry of the Interior. He was a key figure, the man who would prepare the full-scale integration of the ‘redeemed’ territory into the Kingdom of Italy. Cadorna’s priority was his army’s security. Salandra supported this, but he wanted something else as well: a political revolution to entrench Italian sovereignty over the conquered land. It was a delicate project, for Italy was party to international conventions that forbade occupying powers from imposing permanent changes in territory occupied in war. An occupying regime could only impose its national laws as far as necessary to ensure public order. It was entitled to demand obedience but not loyalty, a fragile distinction.

The Italians now disowned their international obligations, claiming exemption in the name of ‘special considerations of law, of political opportunity, and sentiment’. From Rome’s point of view, the occupation should
from the outset
mean ‘the reality of the redemption, the stabilisation of liberty, and the accomplishment of national solidarity’. Without formally claiming the conquered land, as Bulgaria for example would do with Serbia, Italy laid the foundations for postwar annexation by integrating it into Italian life. D’Adamo spelled out the implications to the Supreme Command in March 1916: the population of the ‘occupied territories’ must understand that there could be ‘no return to the preceding state’ and they were subject to Italian sovereignty.

As these areas had been part of the Austrian Empire for four centuries, compared with the Kingdom of Italy’s half-century of existence, and the local people had no reason to prefer Italy, it was not easy to induce this understanding. D’Adamo aimed to preserve the form of Habsburg administration while filling it with new national substance. ‘Pro-Austrian elements’ were to be removed from public life and replaced by individuals with ‘Italian sentiments’. The purges were directed at local level by civil commissars. Italian became the sole official language. Slovene-language education was stopped; Italian history and geography loomed large in the new curricula. Army officers taught the lessons, and military chaplains took catechism classes. Pupils celebrated the birthdays of Italy’s king, queen, and queen mother. German and Slavic place-names were Italianised in order to ‘restore dignity’ that had been lost to ‘Austrian mangling’. By the end of 1917, some 2,500 toponyms had been changed. A project to impose Italian versions of Slovene surnames was launched.

Yet D’Adamo was a humane pragmatist who did his best for the people. Food and healthcare were provided, and state support was not withheld from families with men serving in the Austrian army. Even the Slovene press, across the border, gave credit where it was due, quoting the villagers’ praise for the new regime. And he had a spine: when the government squeezed the local population unreasonably, he spoke up – as when Rome wanted to force the introduction of Italian currency – for he believed the population should be won over, not simply coerced. This was a rare insight; the government mainly acted as if the locals should have their noses rubbed in the reality of Italian power. Despite a few enlightened policies, there was no systematic effort to convince them of the benefits of the new regime. As often in Italian history, individuals redressed the negligence and callousness of institutions.