The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (24 page)

22
‘
intolerance of every judgement
’: De Simone, 144.

1 
The Casale Brigade would lose 2,000 more men on the Asiago plateau in May and June 1916, then another 3,000 in the battle for Gorizia in August 1916.

2 
Lieutenant Ugo Ojetti, a middle-aged art historian doing propaganda work at the Supreme Command, was given the Bronze Medal for Military Valour for entering Gorizia on 9 August 1916, shortly after the first Italian troops. The joke went around that he was then awarded the Silver Medal for Civil Valour, honouring the nerve he had shown by accepting the first medal.

3 
In January 1916, Cadorna solicited comments on tactics from senior commanders. The conventional replies showed that no higher wisdom was circulating away from the Supreme Command. On the other hand, free-thinking officers may have kept their real thoughts to themselves.

4 
Was this a rhetorical flourish, or had D’Annunzio sensed the irresolution beneath Cadorna’s tenacity?

FOURTEEN

The Return Blow

The defensive in war cannot be a state of endurance
…
a defensive, without an offensive return blow
,
cannot be conceived
.

C
ARL VON
C
LAUSEWITZ

Austria’s passivity on the Isonzo did not suit the fiery Conrad, chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, who longed to take the battle to the traitors. After Serbia was overrun in mid-November, the Habsburgs were fighting on only two fronts and Conrad believed he had an opening. He cherished two bold ideas for an offensive. One was an attack across the upper Isonzo, between Tolmein and Flitsch. The other was an operation out of the Tyrol towards the sea. As 1915 drew to its end, this second idea became an obsession. If the Austrians surged across the mountains onto the plains of the Veneto, their impetus and the enemy’s disarray would make them unstoppable. Reaching the sea near Venice, they would cut Cadorna’s supply lines. Even if the Italian reserves improvised defences in front of Padua and Venice, they would not be able to counter-attack effectively. Unless Britain and France sped to the rescue – an unlikely prospect, he thought, given their focus on the Western Front – Rome would have to sue for peace.

Conrad calculated that he needed 16 full-strength divisions – more than 160,000 men – to give him a 2:1 advantage over the Italians in the Trentino. As the Austrians’ total strength on the Isonzo front was 147 battalions, each with no more than 1,000 men, they would need Germany’s help. Conrad sat down with his German counterpart, Erich von Falkenhayn, on 10 December. While he accepted that the French were the principal enemy, he argued that a decisive success was much more likely in the Italian theatre. If they struck early the following year, before Cadorna built up his strength and materiel, Italy could be eliminated altogether. At the least, the front would be shortened dramatically, freeing 200,000 Austrian troops for deployment elsewhere. Germany was not formally at war with Italy, but if Falkenhayn saw his way to releasing nine Austrian divisions from the Eastern Front, around 100,000 men, he would greatly improve the odds of dealing Italy a terminal blow.

Conrad had the impression that Falkenhayn was not opposed, so he felt let down when Germany said no. Falkenhayn’s logic was, however, impeccable. First, Conrad underestimated the strength needed for a successful attack: realistically, he should have 25 divisions, not 16, and finding 25 divisions was out of the question. Second, the Germans would only support the operation if it could knock Italy out of the war; simply pushing the front line back, even to Lake Garda and Padua, would bring no advantage. But Italy was utterly beholden to France and especially Britain, which would not allow her to capitulate. Therefore the operation did not justify the diversion of German forces from the Western Front.

Privately, Falkenhayn thought the Austrians were blinkered by a fixation on their ‘own private enemy’, and missing the wider picture. Conrad confirmed this insight by taking the rebuff as a personal slight, and the relationship between the two, always difficult, now broke down. Liaison between their staffs virtually ceased. Mirroring more sharply Cadorna’s attitude to the French and British, Conrad resented Germany’s deprecation of the Italian front. Again like Cadorna, resentment bolstered his stubborn self-righteousness. In late January, encouraged by Austria’s conquest of tiny Montenegro, he decided to go it alone against the Italians.

What Falkenhayn had chosen not to mention was that every last German division was needed for a colossal new operation on the Western Front. When Conrad learned about the Verdun offensive, only a few days before it was unleashed on 21 February, he decided to keep the Germans in the dark about his own plan for Trentino. His army’s recent stronger showing on the Eastern Front seemed to confirm that significant front-line forces could safely be withdrawn without German substitutes. He informed Archduke Eugen, the commander on the empire’s South-Western Front, that Italy would be attacked between the Adige and Sugana valleys. The initial bombardment would last only a few hours before the infantry were unleashed. Cadorna’s army would have seen nothing like it.

Boroević was instructed to send four of his best divisions and many of his heavy batteries. By mid-March, there were only 100 Habsburg battalions on the Isonzo; medium or heavy guns were down to 467 from 693. With five divisions and much artillery subtracted from Galicia (against Falkenhayn’s express request) and other forces transferred from Serbia, Conrad scraped together 15 divisions: nearly 200 infantry battalions with more than a thousand artillery pieces, including 60 heavy batteries. With nearly 160,000 fighting men, he should still have a powerful advantage in manpower and a 3:1 superiority in medium and heavy guns. Mild temperatures in February led Conrad to propose a mid-April date for the attack. Given that his forces would have to capture peaks and ridges over 2,000 metres high, this was rash. The likelihood that the terrain would be passable by 10 April was always slim. Conrad lost his wager on the weather. Snow began to fall heavily on 1 March, and kept falling. By early April, the invasion routes were under more than two metres of snow, forcing Conrad to postpone the operation.

The Italians registered the enemy build-up in the Trentino without grasping its import or realising the implications for the Isonzo campaign. It was a classic case of a headquarters possessing intelligence without the ability to interpret it.

The sector commander who would face Conrad’s onslaught was General Roberto Brusati. By mid-February he sensed that the Austrians were stirring; he asked Cadorna for reinforcements, and was told curtly that he had enough for any need that might arise. A month later, on 22 March, the very day that Conrad’s strike force was assembled and ready to move, Brusati reported that a substantial attack could be expected within a few days, striking down from Trento towards Vicenza and the Veneto plains. There would be flanking support along the Sugana valley. ‘I have already reported that, in the event of a serious enemy attack, this Army absolutely lacks any reserves.’

As Brusati’s tone suggests, his relationship with the Supreme Command had a history. For he had chafed under Cadorna’s refusal to pursue offensives in his sector, between the Dolomites and Lake Garda. Dismayed by Cadorna’s failure to realise in May 1915 that the Austrians had withdrawn to a defensive line behind the state border, Brusati had tried to compensate ever since by attacking towards Trento, despite Cadorna’s order of 24 February to prepare the First Army’s main defence on the stronger rearward lines. He had pushed his forces forward over the summer and autumn and now they were strung along advance positions, without reserves or reliable communications. These positions had not been tested in action and were extremely vulnerable. His defensive lines, too, were in poor shape. Yet Cadorna, usually the scourge of free-thinking officers, neither disciplined Brusati nor compelled him to ensure that his defences were in order. Probably he was relieved that a bit of progress was being made.

Cadorna received Brusati’s report with scepticism, if not incredulity. Distracted by the aftermath of the Fifth Battle, he saw no need to revise his judgement that the Austrians were fighting a purely defensive war. Why, anyway, would they suddenly go on the offensive when the Russians were attacking in the east?
1
His composure was not disturbed by the detailed testimony of Habsburg deserters, one of whom – an ethnic Italian – even produced documents about the build-up. While consenting to reinforce the First Army with five extra divisions, Cadorna rebuked Brusati for lacking the ‘imperious calm’ which reigned at the Supreme Command. The enemy movements were, he maintained, a bluff to divert attention from an imminent offensive on the Isonzo.

Brusati made matters worse by committing the extra divisions to his untenable front line rather than his fragile defences. He went to Udine in person, but again failed to persuade Cadorna that the situation in Trentino was unusual. Then a Czech officer deserted with precise information about the impending attack. By mid-April, accurate estimates of the Austrian build-up (though not of the artillery) were appearing in the Italian and French press. Still unmoved, Cadorna added a further reason for scepticism: why would the Austrians attack on this front when the Russians were about to launch a major new offensive? What he did not know was that the Russians had just decided, on 24 April, to postpone their next offensive until June. Cadorna only learned of this decision on 14 May, the day before Conrad’s Trentino offensive began. Bad communications between the Allies reinforced Cadorna’s obstinacy.

Around this time, reportedly, an officer in the Alpini presented himself at the Supreme Command in Udine, with important information about the situation in Trentino. After a long wait, a captain on Cadorna’s staff emerged: ‘His Excellency the Supreme Commander of the Army has no need of advice from Lieutenant Battisti.’ The officer thus dismissed was Cesare Battisti, the legendary patriot from Trento, who knew every tree and rock in the threatened sector.

Cadorna was not truly so pig-headed as his communications with Brusati and his rudeness to Battisti suggested. Writing to Joffre on 26 April, he warned that an Austrian attack on the rear areas was probably imminent. He coolly asked for French artillery and other help – this, during the Battle of Verdun, perhaps the bloodiest confrontation of the entire war. Three days later, as if to show that he took the omens seriously, Cadorna visited the Trentino front. It was his first inspection since September, and he refused even to meet Brusati, a decision that only makes sense if – as Cadorna’s biographer suggests – he was setting the other man up as a scapegoat. Back in Udine, he brushed off Brusati’s strained assurances that he had always respected orders. On the contrary, both the lines and the batteries in Trentino were dangerously exposed, in violation of his directive that any offensive actions by the First Army must strengthen its defences. Brusati hit back: the First Army’s offensives had conformed to orders, and Cadorna had repeatedly expressed approval. To no avail. The critic of Roman intrigue was himself a merciless political operator. On 8 May 1916, he wrote to the King that Brusati should be replaced. Even though the general’s brother Ugo was aide to Victor Emanuel, Cadorna had his way. Brusati was replaced with an elderly general whom he, Cadorna, brought out of retirement and who repaid the kindness with total obedience.
2
Ugo Brusati asked why his brother had been sacked so soon after Cadorna’s assurance that he did not believe in an Austrian offensive. The Supreme Commander replied that he had not changed his mind on that point; General Brusati had to go, not because he had neglected the defences but because he had shown ‘too little serenity’.

At dawn the next day (15 May), Conrad’s guns began to roar. An Austrian journalist gave the offensive a name that stuck: the
Straf-
expedition
, or ‘punishment expedition’. Punishment was an important concept in the propaganda of the Central Powers. Austria had started the war in order to punish Serbia. A phrase coined by a nationalist poet, ‘
Gott strafe England
!’, meaning ‘May God punish England!’, entered the language as a cap-badge slogan, a military salute, a drinking toast. The Italian traitors’ chastisement was under way.

In early May, the Germans had asked their Austrian allies to call off the offensive. The delay due to bad weather had, they said, removed the vital element of surprise. For once, the Germans overrated the Supreme Command; Cadorna’s cussedness meant that an element of surprise was, against all odds, retained. The Austrians quickly overran the Italian lines on a 20-kilometre front, west of the Asiago plateau, involving the conquest of deep valleys and jagged summits. The Italians fought bravely but in vain; their gunners, withdrawing the batteries prematurely, left the infantry in the lurch.

Rising at last to Conrad’s challenge, Cadorna transferred all available units from the Isonzo. Within a fortnight he had formed a new army of 180,000 men in the Trentino. The Fifth Army would guard the valley mouths, where they opened onto the plains of the Veneto. Several new divisions were mustered from new conscript classes. Additionally, he recalled two divisions that Sonnino had sent to Albania – a snub to the foreign minister. By mid-June, more than 300,000 men were deployed on the Trentino sector.

The shock of the attack – the brilliance at the heart of Conrad’s scheme – was attested by Giani Stuparich, now a lieutenant in the Sardinian Grenadiers. Transferred to the Trentino in the first wave of reinforcements, he had the usual reaction of infantry when they moved from the lower Isonzo to the mountains. ‘How far we are from the convulsed and menacing Carso!’ The very sky seems ‘carefree’. Can the Austrians really be attacking? His disbelief vanished when a wounded infantryman told him that his unit was wiped out. ‘They’re up there.’ Stuparich squints at a tiny peak, swirling with cloud. ‘Up there? That’s insane!’ But it was true. The infantry struggled uphill against a current of old men, women and children on mules, pushing their belongings on carts, with cows and pigs trailing behind.

On 20 May, Conrad extended the operation eastwards to the Sugana valley. In this second phase, the Austrians swept onto the Asiago plateau. Their forces were still storming ahead, but their chances of reaching the sea shrank with every extra lateral kilometre. Their supply lines were weak, munitions were running low, and the men were exhausted. The Italians fell back to their third defensive line, but could not hold it. Cadorna formed a new corps to defend Asiago. On 27 May, the Austrians captured the town of Arsiero, only a few kilometres from the plains. No defensive line had been prepared, despite the town’s strategic importance. The next day, Asiago fell. Cadorna shocked the government by warning that, unless the enemy pressure relented, he would order a full-scale withdrawal behind the River Piave, less than 30 kilometres from Venice. The only good news at the end of May was the Austrians’ failure to break out of Vallarsa onto the lowlands.