The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (26 page)

The water is fast but not very deep; Baruzzi uses the flagpole as a staff to steady himself. Other men are swept downstream, but a hundred or so make it across, clear the trench and seize the bridge. The railway station is visible a few hundred yards away, across a field. Baruzzi knows what to do: ‘I
must
cross that field. I have sworn to my flag that it will fly over the houses of Gorizia. Now the flag helps me for the second time. I unfurl it and shake it open. Our gunners see it and lengthen their fire. We run across the field to the station.’ The station is protected by wire, but Baruzzi finds a breach and races up the staircase. ‘Moments later, the flag is flying from the highest roof-beam under the hot August sun.’

By the afternoon, Gorizia was in Italian hands. The latest bombardment had caused huge damage. All the churches were hit, some several times over. Rubble and shattered trees lay everywhere. The streets were barricaded with barbed wire and heaps of furniture. Some buildings were mined. A last-minute evacuation left only 1,500 civilians, risking everything to save their property.

Grasping the scale of the breakthrough, Capello alerted the Duke of Aosta, who advised Cadorna to chase the Austrians back to their second line and attack the chain of hills behind the city. Cadorna agreed, and brought the Second Army into play, attacking the Plava bridgehead. Everything went well that day; the Italians were unstoppable. Seen from the rear areas, the horizon from San Michele to Podgora was ‘wrapped in fire and steel’, roaring under a cover of reddish cloud.

On San Michele, the Italians secured the summit and attacked the Austrian second line on the rearward slopes. Here they were stopped for the first time – another testament to Austrian defences. The loss of Gorizia removed the point of sacrificing more Austrian lives for San Michele. If the Italians maintained their impetus, they might cut off the Austrians’ routes back to their second line. Boroević transferred his artillery to new positions several kilometres further east, on the far side of a valley that scored a north–south line across the Carso. This was the Vallone, like a giant trench one or two kilometres wide and 200 metres deep. On 9 August, the troops followed.

The withdrawal from the western Carso – abandoning Mount Sei Busi, Cosich and other battlefields as well as San Michele itself – was perfectly executed. After contesting every pebble and root for 14 months, the Austrians flitted away like shadows. Next morning, the officers on San Michele scoffed at reports that the enemy positions were empty. By nightfall, the Austrian trenches were crowded with incredulous Italians, picking through the detritus for souvenirs. The Supreme Command ordered an immediate attack across the Vallone, but the artillery lagged behind (being too heavy for the pontoons over the river), the men were weary, the Austrian gunners were ready behind their wire, and Boroević’s reinforcements had finally arrived. Successive waves were beaten back in a reversion to the old futile pattern, until Cadorna called a halt on 17 August. The Austrians had lost 50,000 men since 6 August, the Italians at least twice as many.

On 9 August, the church bells of Friuli rang out for the first time since 24 May 1915. Patriots declared that a wholly Italian army had defeated a great foreign army for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. Italy’s allies agreed that the capture of Gorizia was a mighty feat of arms. The enemy had been driven back four to six kilometres, along a 24-kilometre front. It was by far the biggest advance to date.

Coming so soon after the much-trumpeted defeat of the Punishment Expedition, this made Cadorna’s position unassailable. He had proved that he could carry out a successful offensive. As Italian morale surged, the Austrian army’s slumped. Successful resistance on the Isonzo had created a unique
esprit de corps
. This spirit was potent but highly vulnerable; the first substantial reverse might burst the illusion that the empire could defy all odds, indefinitely. Were this to happen, Habsburg morale could be expected to fray at exponential speed. The Sixth Battle did not deliver this defeat, but it came near.

Cadorna’s finest hour confirmed his limitations. Far from exploiting the breakthrough, he clung to his original plan. By the time he awoke to the opportunity, fresh troops, cavalry and munitions could not be brought up in sufficient strength to attack the second line before it was reinforced by Zeidler’s retreating battalions and fresh reserves. On 10 August, realising that a golden chance had slipped beyond reach, he censured Capello for his ‘slowness’ in attacking the high ground behind Gorizia, in line with the ‘objectives’ that had been assigned to VI Corps. This was disingenuous, for Cadorna had never anticipated capturing the city, let alone any ground beyond it. Capello, for all his show of audacity, was hardly better. Astonishingly, no one seemed to realise that the Vipacco valley, leading to the Slovenian hinterland, lay wide open. The enemy’s second line was still weak here, with shallow trenches and wire fixed loosely to the soil.

The Italians had shifted their problems several kilometres eastwards. The challenge ahead was all too familiar: attacking uphill against well- built positions defended to the death by battle-hardened troops. They had spent more than a year besieging San Michele and Podgora. In the next phase, they would hurl themselves at Monte Santo, San Gabriele, Fajti hrib and other obscure heights across the Vallone that soon became household names in Italy.

Source Notes
FIFTEEN
Victory’s Peak

1
Fearful with reason
: Weber, 199.

2
brass stars on their uniforms and the metal of their rifles
: Faldella, 45–6.

3
‘
white and soft, wriggling towards
’: Longo.

4
‘
wrapped in fire and steel
’: Frescura, 114.

5
a wholly Italian army had defeated
: Pieri [1965], 117.

1 
Coincidentally, Cadorna had suggested on 26 June that poison gas should be used to make Podgora ‘uninhabitable’. This proved impossible, because the Italians still lacked reliable cylinders.

SIXTEEN

Starlight from Violence

Poetry in the War Zone

As the Sixth Battle peters out, a soldier on Mount San Michele makes his way over boulders, through foliage and insect-buzz down to the turquoise river. Off comes his woollen tunic, lousy, rank with sweat; he unwinds his puttees, unlaces his heavy boots. That night, back in his trench above the valley, he shelters near a tree stump. Moonlight on the river: silver in the distance. The artillery has thumped all day, somewhere to the east. The sector is quiet and his body, relaxing, remembers its sensations in the water. He finds a pencil, tears the corner off a cartridge box and scribbles on it:
1

This morning I lay back
in an urn of water
and like a relic
took my rest

The Isonzo’s flow
smoothed me
like a stone of its own

I hauled myself, this
bonebag, up
and off I went
like an acrobat
on water …

The writer was Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), a private in the 19th Infantry, Brescia Brigade. A dozen of his poems are still the best- known Italian literature of the Great War. They broke the mould of poetry in his language, freeing it from late romantic rhetoric.

This poem, called ‘The Rivers’ and dated 16 August 1916, has been an anthology piece for decades. After setting the scene, the poet tells how the water of the Isonzo restores him to himself, bearing him back to other rivers in his life. He names the Serchio, a Tuscan river that watered the farmland where his ancestors lived. Then the Nile, from his birthplace in Egypt, and lastly the Seine, for it was Paris that awoke his vocation.

These are my rivers

summed up in the Isonzo.

The mood is blissful, almost anthemic. Rivers are ancient symbols of life, and Ungaretti feels his existence being affirmed. The rocks in the riverbed are no harder than his bones. His life is a river, the war is not strong enough to stop it. Why, he can walk on water.

This is the Isonzo
and here I best
recognise myself:
a yielding fibre
of the universe

My torment’s
when I
don’t believe myself
in harmony

But those hidden
hands
that soak and blend me
regale me with
rare
happiness

Finally the poem circles back to the hillside, alights like a barn-owl on that ‘mutilated tree’, folds its wings and gazes at us:

now that it’s night
and my life looks to me
a corolla
of darkness

Soldiers stripping off to bathe recur in English-language poetry of the Great War. The men’s pleasure moves the watching officer to pity, sometimes flushed with yearning. Ungaretti’s poem evokes a little of this pathos, but with a difference: he is his own spectator. The poet’s participation is complete, like his body’s immersion in the river.

In a British front-line poet, this focus on himself would seem strange. It cuts against the idea that good poetry from the Great War bore witness to monstrous inhumanity, the epic betrayal of civilised ideals. The scholar Jon Stallworthy has said that well-made poems from the Great War ‘move us (as Aristotle said) to pity and terror; also, I suggest, to a measure of fury’. While this is true of Sassoon’s and Owen’s work, it is much less true of the good poems in Italian. By any standard that emphasises dissent or indignation, Ungaretti’s work hardly counts as war poetry at all. For the war is largely the backdrop in a drama about identity and endurance. One of his first critics drew this distinction by observing that Ungaretti had written not
war
poems but a
soldier’s
poems. In the Italian context, poetic self-absorption need not be an escape from the reality of war. In Ungaretti’s case, it opens a private vista onto a wider truth. For identity was at the heart of Italy’s war. The nation was taken to war in the name of political claims that flowed from Italy’s history and values, beyond mere politics. The more cynical motives stayed in the shadow, behind the patriotic rhetoric. The interventionists appealed to a highly coloured version of Italy’s recent past and its immemorial ‘Latin’ culture.

The Italians were told by their leaders in spring 1915 that they should not be happy in their own skin – the skin formed by the shape of their country on the map. They were told that it was right to seethe within those unjust confines, and burst through them with weapons. When Ungaretti avowed his happiness in his own skin as a soldier, massaged by the Isonzo, he was speaking about Italian identity as well as his own. If he was where he ought to be, then the Isonzo was the right place for other Italian soldiers. And if this was their proper place, the arguments that triggered their invasion were valid. There is no suggestion that ‘The Rivers’ points to an alternative way of being, a realm of nature that exposes the futility of war. If anything, the water refreshes the soldier for the struggle.

There had been a vogue for incendiary verse since D’Annunzio published his ‘Laus vitae’ in 1903, a lurid vision of battle that champions the victors’ right to slaughter their foe, lay waste his cities and rape his women. ‘We shall ransack the mothers’ wombs with fire …’ Italy’s attack on Libya in 1911 inspired Italy’s unofficial laureate to pen odes to bloody Victory:

You smile upon the land that is your prey.
Italy! From the passion that devours me
a song arises fresher than the morn …

The start of war in 1914 and 1915 released a wave of patriotic poetry across Europe. In Italy, anthologies with titles like
Songs of the
Fatherland
poured off the press. Among hundreds of examples, consider Corrado Govoni’s long poem, called simply ‘War!’ The entire world is turning into ‘a long cemetery of trenches’. How lovely to fertilise earth’s old carcass with guns! Let savage instinct be our only master! Disorder is order, destruction is being constructed. Half a dozen breathless pages of necrophile ranting lead to a final demented exhortation:

Burn, burn,
set fire to this world till it becomes a sun.
Devastate smash destroy,
Go forth, go forth, oh lovely human flail,
be plague earthquake and hurricane.
Make a red spring
of blood and martyrdom
bloom from this old earth,
and life be like a flame.
Long live war!

A more intellectual version came from Giulio Barni, a volunteer from Trieste, in verses written in 1914:

Liberty, liberty,
if you’re a woman
come, come to me:
come and sleep with me
for I want to kill
peace and lies for you

‘Peace and lies’: that angry pairing says everything about nationalist feeling – and thinking – as Italy geared up for war.

The vein of ecstatic belligerence did not dry up on contact with real horror. Again, examples are legion. A bersagliere called Luigi Granturco published a collection called
Songs of the Bayonet
in 1917.

O land of Italy, O first among all the lands on the globe,
here, I see you: the envy of the world …
It is the race created for mastery.

Such stuff was easier to write than to read – which explains why the copy in Oxford’s Bodleian Library was still uncut after 90 years. Sometimes the belligerence took a mystical colouring; Vittorio Locchi’s best-selling
Sabbath of Holy Gorizia
invoked the sacred mountains as witnesses at a festival of blood and song. Religious motifs were drafted to induce awe and deference:

all the bayonets
yield like ensigns
on the altars of the mountains,
on the sacred carnage of our dead.

British patriotic poetry was muted beside the Italian kind. On war as escape from tawdry peace, Britain had Rupert Brooke (‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world turned old and cold and weary’). On the war in the air, Yeats imagined a pilot following a ‘lonely impulse of delight’ to ‘this tumult in the clouds’; for the Futurist poet Soffici, on the other hand, the firmament in battle reeked of thighs and armpits. Aloft, he could ‘kiss the noiseless vulva of the sky’. On war as renewal, there was Charles Hamilton Sorley (‘there has come upon the land / The curse of Inactivity’). On the intoxication of battle, Britain had Julian Grenfell (‘joy of battle takes / Him by the throat, and makes him blind’). Even these last lines seem reflective, partly regretful, beside the mad euphoria of the Italians. Squibs about hating the Boche are one thing, D’Annunzio’s hymning of bloodlust is quite another.

What Wilfred Owen called the pity of war is not much present in Italian war poetry. Perhaps it is the difference between belligerence welcomed as a vocation and martial courage felt as a duty. Yet there were Italian poets ready to record the worst that the war could show. After a long education, Clemente Rebora (1885–1957) had cast around for a direction in life and failed to find one. A religious vocation was stirring; he would eventually enter the Catholic Church and, twenty years after the war, be ordained as a priest. When war came, he was drafted and sent to the Isonzo. He likened military service to a ‘mission’, like pastoral care, and praised the soldiers’ ‘patient sweet humanity’. As a soldier and poet, he was determined to spare himself nothing amid the ‘seas of mud and freezing bora, and putrefaction’. He was tormented at having to send his men – who ‘
love
me (that’s the right word!)’ – to almost certain death. ‘What a stench from our unburied dead, while
our own
artillery kills us off by mistake!’ he exclaimed, in a letter that slipped past the censor.

On 1 December 1915, shortly before he was invalided away from the front, Rebora wrote to his mother: ‘It is a blessing for your peace of mind and comfort that you know nothing about the moral mire, the pity and horror of what’s happening; and only know the news through the yellow press that deceives the fatherland – and you mothers!’ The physical suffering was awful, but the inward torment was much worse. His poetry excelled at conveying both kinds. One of his best-known poems relates an episode about a wounded comrade screaming for help from no-man’s land. Its title is ‘Viaticum’, the Catholic Eucharist for the dying.

Oh wounded man down there in the valley,
pleading so loud
that three comrades, no less,
perished for you who almost aren't there,
a legless trunk
between mire and blood,
and now the wailing again,
the pity stirred in us, lingering still
to breathe our last, and the moment won't end,
quicken your agony,
finish it – you can,
take solace
in the insanity that can’t go mad,
while time stops,
sleep shroud your brain,
leave us in silence – 

Thank you, brother.

The space before the last line measures the man’s death, freeing the poet to mutter his gratitude for not causing more soldiers to lose their lives. Nothing in Ungaretti matches this agonised submission to the truth of

other men’s suffering. Nor does anything by Ungaretti resemble the extraordinary poem by Fausto Maria Martini, called ‘Why I didn’t kill you’, which describes the poet’s decision not to kill an Austrian soldier, a terrified boy cowering under his (Martini’s) bayonet. The reason was not cowardice; rather, the ‘unknown blond enemy’s face’ reminded him of his own ‘leaner, older’ face.

It was not, then, for fear

that I didn’t kill you: it was – not to die myself!

Not to die in you: you were my twin,

or seemed so in the twinned trench

Too prosy to be high art, the poem is deeply affecting, and may be unique in the language. Like Wilfred Owen’s great line, ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’, this recognition of self in the other dissolves the political arguments for organised murder.

Ungaretti’s route to the Isonzo was long and meandering. He was born in Alexandria, where his Tuscan parents had emigrated so his father could work on the Suez Canal. After his father’s death when he was only two, his pious mother raised Giuseppe in poverty. They visited his father’s grave every day. After school, he took menial jobs in Cairo. At 24, he left Africa, intending to study in Paris. He gravitated to avant-garde circles, befriending the poet Apollinaire and eating in the same bistro as Modigliani. Contemporaries recalled a warm, shambling loner with no particular direction; round-shouldered, tousled, with blue eyes half-closed and hardly visible when his face creased in an enormous grin; speaking expressive Italian larded with French. He went to Italy in 1914, perhaps influenced by meeting Italian writers at a Futurist event in Paris, who included some of the most radical propagandists for war. Settling in Turin, he trained as a schoolteacher of French, but soon plunged into the pro-war campaign, more from a sense of cultural solidarity with Paris, ‘
città santa dell’uomo moderno
’, ‘the holy city of modern man’, than for Trento and Trieste. Never a cautious man, he was arrested at one of the rallies where interventionists and neutralists clashed, and briefly jailed. ‘I don’t like war,’ he said much later, ‘and I did not like it then, but it seemed to us that
that
war was necessary. We thought Germany was completely to blame.’