The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (3 page)

The 1870s bore hard on irredentist ideals. When the Emperor Franz Josef visited Venice in 1875, Victor Emanuel assured him that irredentist claims would be dropped, and that Italy’s intentions were entirely peaceful. The next year, the King praised the ‘cordial friendship and sympathy’ between Italians and Austrians. The Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1878, sent shock waves through the Italians of Dalmatia, who were already hugely outnumbered by Croats and now feared they would be swamped by a million and a half more Slavs, pressing at their backs. Anti-Slav prejudice spread up the Adriatic shore to Trieste, but Rome lent no moral or practical support.

This was nothing beside the hammer blows that came in 1882, the
annus horrendus
for nationalists. In May, Italy signed a treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary. This was the Triple Alliance, which would endure until May 1915, the eve of war. Alliance with the old enemy was so controversial that successive governments denied its existence. (The text was not published until 1915.) Under its provisions, Italy was guaranteed support if France attacked. It also gained security along its border with Austria, good relations with Germany, and the international respectability that went with membership in a defensive great-power alliance. The most significant clause dealt with the Balkans: 

Austria-Hungary and Italy undertake to use their influence to prevent all territorial changes which might be disadvantageous to one or the other signatory power. To this end they agree to interchange all information throwing light on their intentions. If, however, Austria-Hungary or Italy should be compelled to alter the status quo in the Balkans, whether by a temporary or by a permanent occupation, such occupation shall not take place without previous agreement between the two powers based on the principle of reciprocal compensation for every advantage, territorial or otherwise. 

Any Austrian moves in the Balkans could in principle be leveraged to deliver Trentino and/or Trieste as ‘compensation’. Indeed, Italy might even encourage Austrian expansion, for that ulterior purpose.

As well as full recognition of their own borders, Italy’s allies got guarantees of mutual and Italian support if France or Russia attacked either of them. Military protocols, added in 1888, specified the Italian support that would be sent to Germany if France attacked. In military terms, Italy’s benefit was doubtful, as France was more likely to attack Germany. Politically, it was curious to swap the public renunciation of claims to Tyrol and Trieste (inviting domestic accusations of betrayal) for a conditional clause about compensation. On the other hand, Italy stayed in the alliance for so long because it married realist foreign policy goals with the officer corps’ admiration for the Prussian army. Ties with Austria were a price worth paying.

The chief drawback was not obvious in 1882. For it turned out that the alliance removed Italy’s freedom to shift as occasion suited between France, Germany and Austria, and hence to punch above its weight. Intended to raise the country’s international standing, the Triple Alliance narrowed its scope of action. If Italy was to build an overseas role, it needed significant allies. This is why a Catholic liberal politician, Stefano Jacini, criticised Italy’s real motive for entering the Triple Alliance as a ‘mania for expansion’, which led the country to take on ‘an enormous armament quite disproportionate to our resources’.

Out of France’s long shadow at last, Italy chased colonial power in the Horn of Africa. In 1885, it occupied a dusty port on the Red Sea, ‘where not even the standard of a Roman legion could be re-discovered’; from this seed, the colony of Eritrea would sprout. Further south, the colony of Somaliland took shape over the 1890s. The third profitless prize in the region was Ethiopia; when the Emperor Menelik denounced Italy’s protectorate, Italy slid down a path of threats to the exquisite humiliation of Adua, where Ethiopian forces killed 6,000 Italians in a single day in 1896. This did not cure the mania, which eventually led to the attack on Libya, a gambit that would have driven Mazzini and Garibaldi to despair. In September 1911, Rome informed Ottoman Turkey that the ‘general exigencies of civilisation’ obliged Italy to occupy Libya. Having accomplished this, Italy declared war on Turkey itself. Although the war ended formally in October 1912, when the Ottoman state ceded Libya and let Italy occupy Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands, local resistance could not be quelled. Unable to assess or affect the attitudes of hostile Libyan tribes, the army clung to the coast, within range of the naval guns. Some 35,000 men had embarked in 1911. By 1914, the commitment had grown to 55,000 men with no victory in sight.

This was all instigated by Giovanni Giolitti, the greatest reforming politician that Italy has ever produced. He wanted to outflank his nationalist critics with a spectacular invasion, and thought Libya would be a stroll. Instead it became a quicksand. Giolitti lied about the costs of the campaign and conjured up imaginary victories. He drew cautionary lessons about plunging the country into war, ill-prepared, but kept them to himself. The ultimate legacy of his cynical adventure was the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.

Libya confirmed that the Italian army was incapable of waging effective colonial campaigns. After a flurry of reforms in the 1870s, including universal conscription and the reorganisation of the general staff, successive initiatives to overhaul the military had suffocated in red tape and party-political wrangling. Unhealthy closeness to the royal court undermined professionalism in the officer corps. Measured against Italy’s geostrategic vulnerability and colonial ambitions, the reforms were half-baked and the army was still much too small. Bismarck’s quip was still true: Italy had ‘a large appetite and very poor teeth’.

The second blow to the irredentists in 1882 was the death of Garibaldi on 2 June. In his last years, the great hero kept exhorting the Italians of Tyrol and Trieste not to lose heart. His passing left many of his compatriots feeling bleakly that their country’s best days were already behind it. The towering figure that had encouraged and sometimes berated them for almost forty years was gone, and nobody could take his place.

The third blow was another death: the execution of a young man in Trieste, one Guglielmo Oberdan (originally Wilhelm Oberdank: like many nationalist fanatics, his own national identity was ambiguous). Along with other draft-age Habsburg Italians, he fled to Italy in 1878 to avoid being sent to the new Austrian garrisons in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 1882 happened to be the 500th anniversary of Trieste’s submission to Habsburg power. The celebrations were scheduled for September, and Franz Josef would be there. Oberdan decided to assassinate the Emperor. Acting either alone or as part of a shadowy network, he re-entered Austria. Arrested near the border with bombs in his baggage, he confessed. The Emperor rejected pleas for clemency, and Oberdan was hanged in a barracks cell on 20 December after refusing religious rites. As he mounted the gallows he cried ‘Long live Italy! Long live free Trieste! Out with the foreigners!’ He became the only full-blown Italian martyr of Austro-Hungarian brutality. While it failed to derail the Triple Alliance, his act put Trieste on the map. Local patriots sang a rapidly composed ‘Hymn to Oberdan’. Within five years, there were 49 ‘Oberdan societies’ in Italy and Austria, defying repression in order to nurse irredentist dreams.

These societies got scant encouragement in the kingdom. Hardest on them was the government of Francesco Crispi, a Sicilian lawyer turned politician with the aura that all Garibaldi’s former comrades possessed. As prime minister from 1887 to 1891, Crispi believed Italy had an imperial destiny much larger than the unredeemed lands. The Triple Alliance should be a platform for these endeavours. But he was a realist, too, who knew there was no international support for seizing the southern Tyrol and Trieste. He spent heavily on the military and talked a lot about ‘Italian rights in the Mediterranean’ while quietly instructing Italian leaders in Trieste to clamp down on their irredentists. As a reformed freedom-fighter, Crispi disliked the new generation of militant idealists and their cause.

Based on the votes of 2 per cent of the population and royal approval, Italian governments were highly unstable. Their make-up was not determined by parties or party loyalties; every cabinet included moderates from Right and Left, dominated by an outsized personality. After Cavour and Crispi, the next such personality was Giovanni Giolitti, prime minister five times between 1892 and 1921. The decade and a half before the Great War is known as the
era giolittiana
, the era of Giolitti. He won and kept power by winning over moderate leftists and Catholic conservatives and by manipulating elections. Rather than working solely to benefit his own class, the Piedmontese élite, however, he was an enlightened conservative with liberal tendencies, pioneering redistributive taxation, improvement of labour conditions, social change through public spending, and electoral reform.

Amid the colourful monomaniacs and profiteers of the day, Giolitti was prosaic on a grand scale. He was a wily calculator, an artist of the possible, a patrician seeking ‘to reconcile stability with liberty and progress’. To his detractors, he became the emblem of a political order that was practical but petty, humdrum and sometimes corrupt, ‘unworthy’ of Italy’s achievements and ideals. The nationalists detested him. His project, they said witheringly, was
Italietta
, ‘little Italy’, shorn of splendour, preoccupied with trivial problems – like the balance of trade deficit, agricultural tariffs, tax collecting, the unruly banking sector, the plight of peasant farmers, the tyranny of absentee landlords, rural emigration, and the use of martial law against strikers in Italy’s giddily expanding cities.

Many things improved under Giolitti. Italy ended the tariff war with France, doubled its industrial output over the decade to 1910, and narrowed the trade deficit. Measured by the growth of railways, the navy, education, merchant shipping, electricity consumption and land reclamation, the country was developing at a phenomenal rate. Yet it was still firmly the least of the great powers, and poor by comparison. With 35 million inhabitants, it was Europe’s sixth most populous state. (Russia had nearly 170 million, Germany 68 million, Austria-Hungary nearly 52 million, Britain 46 million, and France, 40 million people.) The middle class was very small: only 5 per cent of the population. Some 40 per cent worked on the land (there were 9 million farm labourers with their dependents, living at subsistence level), and 18 per cent were artisans or industrial workers. Health indicators were at preindustrial levels. The economy was primarily agricultural, with low productivity because farming was unmodernised except in the north. Hence the country was not self-sufficient in staples, importing three times more wheat than it produced. Lacking coal or iron reserves, Italy had little heavy industry; iron and steel, chemicals and engineering were getting under way, but textiles and foodstuffs were still the mainstays of a sector that was also limited by low investment and poor working conditions – though thanks to militant trades unions, industrial salaries had increased steadily since 1890. Even with this recent growth, Italy was not catching up with France, Germany or the United States. Businesses were small or very small: 80 per cent were completely unmechanised and employed two to five people. Most Italians had only the vaguest notion of the state; their lives were local and regional by dialect, custom, labour and experience.

Despite his modernising achievements, the Socialists also often sided with nationalists and democrats against Giolitti, scorning his devotion to ‘empirical politics’. Guilty as charged, said Giolitti, ‘
if
by empiricism you mean taking account of the facts, the real conditions of the country, and the population … The experimental method, which involves taking account of the facts and proceeding as best one can, without grave danger … is the safest and even the only possible method.’ Antonio Salandra, Giolitti’s successor in 1914, would shred this liberal credo when he took the country to war against its nominal allies, Austria and Germany.

Source Notes
ONE
A Mania for Expansion

1
‘
the most threatening salient
’: Martel.

2
‘
a policy of expedients
’: Mack Smith [1997], 222

3
more spirit than man
: Bobbio, 71–2.

4
Dante had ordained it: Inferno, IX, 113.

5
‘mania for expansion’: Mack Smith [1997], 149.

6
‘
where not even the standard
’: Bosworth [1979], 11.

7
the colony of Eritrea
: By 1913, Eritrea had only 61 permanent Italian colonists. Bosworth [1983], 52.

8
‘
a large appetite
’: Bosworth [2007], 163.

9
by manipulating elections
: Salvemini [1973], 52.

10
least of the great powers
: Bosworth [1979]. The information in the rest of this paragraph is from Zamagni  Bosworth [2006], and [2007]; Salvemini [1973]; Giuliano Procacci; Forsyth, 27.

11
‘
empirical politics … possible method
’: Gentile [2000].