Read The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 Online

Authors: Mark Thompson

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The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (31 page)

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The central figure in this consensus was Luigi Albertini, editor of
Corriere della Sera
, mouthpiece of Milanese business and industrial interests, the only newspaper that could aspire to the grand manner of
The Times
of London, where Albertini himself had trained. He was Italy’s nearest equivalent to Lord Northcliffe, the British newspaper tycoon, though the differences are more revealing than the parallels. Northcliffe told Haig to drop him a line if
The Times
printed anything he disliked. Albertini would have done the same for Cadorna, but he did not confront the established authorities as Northcliffe famously did with his campaigns against Kitchener and Asquith and over the production of shells. His intimacy with ministers was much more deferential than Northcliffe’s; he rarely tested his power to challenge the government, and when he did so, could easily be tamed again, as we shall see in a later chapter. He wanted his paper to be ‘not only the mirror but the soul and stimulus of a young nation, searching for its identity and for modernity’. As a free-trade conservative with a social outlook that combined populism with paternalism, he opposed Giolitti (except over Libya) and favoured his successor, Salandra. In 1914, sharing Salandra’s view that ‘sacred egoism’ should steer Italy in the European crisis, he shadowed the prime minister’s evolution from neutralism to interventionism and later boasted of being one of the people most responsible for getting Italy into the war. The government showed its appreciation by making him a senator.

During the war, the three-way links between
Corriere
, the government and the Supreme Command were astonishingly close. In all but name, the national newspaper of record – now selling 600,000 copies daily – became a parallel ministry of information, propaganda and intelligence. It saw itself, and was seen by the government and the Supreme Command, as part and parcel of the war effort. Albertini’s mission was to nurture patriotism, support the men at the front, and expose profiteers. His correspondents in Europe and Africa sometimes served as a parallel intelligence network, even a parallel diplomatic service, more efficient than the real thing. Favoured papers were exempt from the Supreme Command’s rule that newspapers could not accredit more than two correspondents;
Corriere della Sera
had some 20 correspondents along the front. Colonel Gatti, who ran the Historical Office at the Supreme Command, was one of the paper’s military advisors.
Corriere
journalists drafted Cadorna’s florid bulletins. Another staffer, Giuseppe Borgese, left the paper after Caporetto to organise Italian propaganda in Allied countries. And a
Corriere
man drafted General Diaz’s famous Victory Bulletin at the war’s end.

At the start of the war Cadorna was blind to public opinion and let his deputy deal with journalists. Addressing correspondents in Trentino, General Porro urged them to see their reports as supplements to the daily bulletins issued by the Supreme Command. For no army can march willingly to victory unless it has a united, enthusiastic nation at its back. ‘Our mission’, he intoned, ‘is
to forge victory
. Keep that well fixed in your minds.’ The journalists did as they were asked, with little prompting by the military. Until the end of 1915, the only official source of information was the daily bulletin, which was usually too rhetorical and phoney to be much use; even Sonnino, who had no time for journalists, thought they reflected badly on Italy’s cause, but Cadorna disliked the foreign minister and rejected his plea to make the bulletins more credible. If the press found them unappetising, that was their problem.
2

Only in December, facing political rumbles in Rome and disillusion around the country, did he accept that the Supreme Command needed a press office. The man chosen to design this new unit was a professional writer, Ugo Ojetti. As a middle-aged volunteer in the Territorial Militia, Ojetti had pulled strings to get sent to the Supreme Command, and was waiting for just this opportunity. ‘In Rome, Cadorna felt troubled – at last! – about public opinion,’ Ojetti explained to his wife, referring to the generalissimo’s difficult sojourn in the capital over Christmas. ‘For the first time since the start of the war he found himself – just a little – in contact with “public opinion”. Now he wants the press to tackle this peril resolutely.’ Ojetti formulated a strategy to provide the press with material that would be ‘more moral and social than practical and military’, and tailored to the city or region for which it was intended. At the same time, the output should be more informative about the operations at the front, covering ‘the difficulties overcome, those that still have to be overcome, the purpose of particular actions’. This was too sophisticated for Cadorna, who simply wanted a more efficient way to get official statements disseminated by obedient reporters. Ojetti was replaced by a colonel on Cadorna’s staff and put in charge of the photograph library.

If Cadorna was reluctant to accept the importance of the media, he flatly refused to see why the soldiers should need an information service of their own. Asked why no trench newspapers were produced for the infantry, he said there was no money. His conception of soldiering was too abstract and inhumane to accommodate the idea that his men would be better soldiers if they understood why they had to risk death for their country. Soldiers must obey and criticism must be punished harshly.

By today’s standards, what most war correspondents filed in the First World War was hardly journalism at all. The combination of flattery, coercion and patriotism was fatal to free inquiry, as it often still is. Reporters now tend to take a more modest view of their role; they should take care of reporting, and leave the mustering of support for war to politicians, or at least to the leader writers. This distinction hardly existed during the Great War. There was no conception that the journalists’ first duty is to report what they see truthfully and honestly.

Journalists who believed nothing was more important than winning the war, and that truthful reporting might discourage the public, easily persuaded themselves that they should serve the ‘higher truth’ of Italy’s national mission. They expressed few misgivings about this price. Prezzolini noted privately in December 1915 that soldiers on home leave were spreading anti-war propaganda among the masses, while the officers did the same among the middle classes. ‘I too inevitably make propaganda against the war if I tell the truth,’ he added, ‘given all the reasons we have to be dissatisfied with how it is being waged.’ When truth and defeatism looked identical, patriotic journalists made decisions which posterity judges with a severity that would have bewildered them.

The Supreme Command’s conduct of the war from 1915 to 1917 was a classic example of what can go wrong without the scrutiny of a sceptical press. Servile journalists relayed the lies and misjudgements of the Supreme Command, which welcomed their reports as evidence of its wisdom. This closed loop encouraged the Command’s arrogance, hatred of criticism, brutal treatment of the troops, and a zero-sum attitude to its relations with government. The commission of inquiry after Caporetto found that hospitality and access had been repaid with friendly coverage; as a result, ‘the public at large was given a false and exaggerated opinion about our successes … Not a few soldiers have brought to our attention the damage done to the morale of officers and men by the inaccuracies and exaggerations of the war correspondents.’

This was true, but incomplete. The Socialist leader Turati was closer to the mark when he told parliament that censorship (not flattery) had produced Caporetto. The commission also failed to mention that the Supreme Command was not the sole responsible party. For the government had outlawed criticism, and the journalists
wanted
to conspire against what is now called the public’s right to know. They believed they were acting for the best, and would have been baffled by the principle – generally acknowledged if not always honoured – that ‘there are certain rules of hygiene in the relationship between a newspaper correspondent and high officials, people in authority … Newspapermen cannot be cronies of great men.’

One of the first to grapple with the political implications of public opinion was Giulio Douhet, Italy’s most innovative military thinker since Machiavelli. He argued that the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 had confirmed the power of public opinion. This aspect of modern war was, he warned, particularly dangerous in Italy, where people’s ‘emotional sensitivity’ made them vulnerable to the ‘exaggerated motions of the childish soul of crowds’. Easily swayed, the Italians should be protected from harmful influences. The Supreme Command took the same view of the average citizen’s unfitness to be treated as an adult. The corollary of paternalism is infantilisation. What bound journalists, ministers and staff officers was a deep conservative assumption that ordinary people – unlike themselves – were incapable of grasping their true interests.

Source Notes
EIGHTEEN
Forging Victory

1
‘
up here the soul of Italy is as pure
’: Fabio Todero [1999], 68.

2
sell 350,000 copies a day
: Bosworth [2007], 175.

3
‘
tragic and sublime battle
’: Barzini [1913].

4
‘
a sort of institution
’: Price, 64.

5
the ‘
soul of the country
’: Bricchetto, 170–1.

6
the censors were
‘
very polite
’: Ojetti, 100.

7
‘
Reaching the hut, we found ourselves
’: Fabio Todero [1999], 77.

8
‘
hunters of men
’: Bricchetto, 172.

9
‘
It is much easier to attack uphill
’: Bricchetto, 172.

10
‘
Armed with an indefinable new strength
’: Isnenghi [2005], 191.

11
‘
held by a miracle, or because
’: Bricchetto, 174.