The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (40 page)

20
800
officers
and men of the Puglie Brigade
: Gatti [1997], 44.

21
‘
They did not rebel
’: Gatti [1997], 48.

22
It might carry on like this for months
: Gatti [1997], 48

23
‘
He is perfectly calm, serene
’: Gatti [1997], 76.

24
The Supreme Command blurred the scale
: De Simone, 178.

25
‘
proper fiasco
’: Cadorna [1967], 207. 

26
The infantry, he complained, did not attack
: Gatti [1997]; ‘
slancio
’ is from Cadorna [1967], 206.

27
a new anti-war song
: ‘
Mio nonno parti per l’Ortigara, / Dicianovenne, vestito da Alpino
’, by Chiara Riondino. Text available at http://www.obiezione.it/antiwarsongs.html, accessed in May 2007.

1 
Explaining this harsh judgement, Robertson added: ‘For two years past he [Lloyd George] had repeatedly shown that he regarded British methods of making war as commonplace, costly, and ineffective.’ Perhaps it took a field marshal to overlook so grandly the chance that readers might share Lloyd George’s opinion. 

2 
Given the pitch and roll of the gradients, the name ‘plateau’ is misleading (as it is for the ‘Asiago plateau’). Mountainous by British standards, the Bainsizza was almost a trackless wilderness – there were no proper roads and very few paths. And it was almost waterless. 

3 
A full account of these surrenders did not appear until 1938. Even after their line was broken and they were encircled from the rear, the Italians had ‘fought well until their generals were killed and they were completely cut off’.

4 
Among the documented cases of a corps firing on its own men, the most notorious involved a company of the Salerno Brigade. On 1 July 1916, this company was caught in no-man’s land after repulsing an Austrian attack above the Isonzo. Pinned down by machine guns, more than 200 men were unable to move or be helped, even at night. After a couple of days, voices in the Italian front line shouted that the men should surrender to save themselves. When some of the survivors crawled towards enemy lines, the corps commander carried out to the letter Cadorna’s directive of September 1915, ordering machine-gun and artillery fire against the deserters. 

TWENTY-TWO

Mystical Sadism

The power of punishment is to silence, not to
confute
.

S
AMUEL
J
OHNSON
(1709–84)

Summary Justice in Cadorna’s Army

By July 1917, the Catanzaro Brigade was brittle with exhaustion. The southern peasants who made up the 141st and 142nd Infantry had fought on the Carso and the Asiago plateau for two years, taking heavy casualties. Many men had not received a fortnight’s leave since the winter of 1915–16. Rations were bad and scanty. Bloody losses on Mount Hermada at the end of the Tenth Battle left the survivors depressed and desperate for rest.

After more than forty days at the front, the brigade was relieved and sent to the village of Santa Maria la Longa, a logistics base of the Third Army. Word had it that the Catanzaro would be sent to Carnia or the Dolomites – mountain sectors, relatively quiet after the Carso. Instead, it was ordered back to Hermada after a few days. Furious muttering in the barracks tipped into open revolt, involving both regiments but centred on 6th Company of the 142nd Infantry. Shots were fired. The mutiny was contained with cavalry, armoured cars and light field artillery, despatched by Third Army headquarters. Even so, eleven men died, including two officers. A third officer had a lucky escape, for, according to one version of events, a band of rebels went to a nearby villa where they thought Gabriele D’Annunzio was staying, crying ‘Death to D’Annunzio!’ Luckily for himself, the poet was staying at a nearby airfield, preparing a bombing raid over Istria.

Next day, 28 men were charged with rebellion and executed on the spot. Of these, 12 were chosen by lot from 6th Company. Another 123 were sent for court martial. It was not the brigade’s first clash with military justice, but it was by far the worst. Historians describe the episode at Santa Maria as the only real mutiny in the Italian army through out the war. D’Annunzio hurried back to witness the executions. The men were lined against a cemetery wall beside a field of maize, chanting a hymn or prayer. Nettles grew by the wall. ‘Sultry heat. Skylarks singing.’ Short, dark-skinned, the men come from Campania, Calabria, Puglia and Sicily. The poet looks away as their bodies slump to the ground. His notes include no emotional response, merely details after the event: ‘helmets, shreds of brain swarming with flies, and dried rivulets of blood’. Writing up the experience later, he addresses the dead men: ‘You are peasants. I know you by your hands. I know you by your way of planting your feet on the earth. I do not want to know if you were innocent or guilty. I know you were valiant, I know you were true.’ Like Major Randaccio, they are sublimated by extinction.

D’Annunzio’s indifference to the men’s innocence or guilt was in Cadorna’s own spirit. What mattered was the deterrent effect. Other commanders-in-chief during the First World War shared this instrumental view of military justice. They, too, were angry when the penal code hindered the swift application of extreme measures, especially against deserters. What set Cadorna apart was his assumption that he was entitled to adapt the justice system to his convenience.

The Supreme Command’s directives on discipline passed from severity to depravity. Cadorna’s first directive to the army, on 19 May 1915, was wholly concerned with discipline. Order, authority and obedience would be maintained with indestructible firmness. Unit commanders would be held responsible if they hesitated to apply ‘extreme measures of coercion and repression’. The implied threat of summary execution became explicit in a September directive. ‘The summary justice of the bullet’ awaited anyone who tried to surrender or retreat, instead of ‘taking the way of honour that leads to victory or death’. Whoever escaped this ‘salutary justice’ would face court martial, then execution in front of their comrades.

Within a few months, Cadorna had the court-martial system in his sights. He openly deplored the courts’ reluctance to pass capital sentences, and called for maximum severity. The Justice Department at the Supreme Command followed up with a statement that proper courts martial should only be convened if they were sure to pass severe sentences. Otherwise, improvised tribunals in the field would suffice, with no requirement for a military magistrate to take part, and sentences that could not be appealed

The crisis caused by Conrad’s attack in spring 1916 hardened Cadorna’s views still further. On 26 May, as the Austrians poured across the Asiago plateau, an infantry regiment was routed. When several hundred men failed to regroup, Cadorna urged the immediate execution of any soldier whose actions were ‘unworthy of an army that upholds the cult of military honour’, regardless of rank. The letter was given the widest circulation. When the missing men crept back to their position next day, the colonel commanding the regiment chose 12 members of the company by lot and had them shot for desertion. For this achievement he was mentioned in the daily bulletin – the first officer singled out for this honour. It was the first documented case of
decimation
, a punishment that became the dreadful emblem of Italian military justice. Historically, decimation was the Roman practice of killing every tenth member of a mutinous legion. When Cadorna revived the ancient term, he did not insist on this ratio. What mattered was the procedure of pulling names out of a helmet or knapsack, practically guaranteeing that innocent men would die. This, the most unacceptable element of decimation, was the one that Cadorna most prized. When the soldiers realised that they could be murdered randomly, regardless of their individual actions, if their unit offended their commanding officer, they would be terrified into complete obedience.

This was Cadorna’s theory, presented with his usual candour in a letter to Salandra in January 1916, regretting that the military penal code did not authorise decimation to punish serious collective offences. After the mass desertions at the end of the Tenth Battle, he complained to Boselli that this punishment had been ‘irresponsibly’ deleted from the penal code. In fact, decimation had never been mentioned in the code. He took it on himself to authorise this ‘supreme act of repression’: a November 1916 directive stated that commanding officers had the duty to decimate guilty units. This caused a commotion that rippled as far as Rome; Cadorna wrote to Boselli on 20 November, protesting that all armies practised decimation. This was false. While the drawing of straws was not unknown in the French army, especially in putting down the 1917 mutinies, and may well have occurred in other armies as well, only in Italy did the commander-in-chief
urge
this punishment.

1917 was the year of decimation. In March, nine men of the Ravenna Brigade were chosen for execution after their regiment protested over the cancellation of leave. More is known about this atrocity than most others because the brigade commander’s aide de camp (ADC) gave a statement to the commission of inquiry set up after Caporetto. Deployed on a notorious sector of the Carso, the brigade’s two regiments alternated their front-line tours with fatigue and labour duties in the rear. To keep up their spirits, the men were promised perks in the form of extra leave, which never materialised. When one of the regiments was ordered to relieve another unit elsewhere on the Carso, ‘there was a moment of discontent’ in one battalion, whose men had been drinking. The battalion commander informed the brigade headquarters ‘as a matter of duty, but more to offload the responsibility’. The general commanding the Ravenna Brigade hurried to the battalion barracks. ‘We found the men a bit annoyed, tired, and almost all in dreadful physical condition, officers included.’

The CO and his ADC let the men air their grievances. For the most part they were amenable to reason, but a few shots were fired in the air. This prompted the ADC to telephone division HQ, which despatched ‘lots of carabinieri’. While the men calmed down and set off for their new posting, Division HQ sent staff officers to the spot and informed the corps commander, who telephoned the brigade ADC and thundered that the barracks should be burned to the ground and the offenders shot. The ADC tried to assure him that order had already been restored.

The divisional CO now got involved, presumably to cover himself vis- à-vis the corps commander. By the time he reached the barracks, they were empty; it was late at night and raining hard. The brigade CO reported that everything was in order and the troops were on their way to their new posting. ‘How many did you shoot?’ asked the divisional CO. ‘None,’ came the answer. ‘That’s bad, very bad!’ exclaimed the divisional CO. Then the carabinieri found two soldiers asleep in the barracks. They had no idea that their company had left, nobody had woken them. The brigade CO told the carabinieri to put the men up against a wall and shoot them. One of the soldiers howled so desperately (‘What have I done to make you shoot me? I’ve got seven children!’) that the carabinieri hesitated. The divisional CO spoke up: ‘Let us be done with this jabbering. Shoot them at once. Orders are orders.’

The brigade CO was relieved the following day. The corps commander ordered 20 soldiers to be picked by lot from the most rebellious company. Five of these men were selected for execution. This process presumably doubled the agony of those compelled to take part, and therefore also – in the corps commander’s view – the salutary deterrent effect. The firing squad shook so badly that six volleys were needed to finish the job. The ADC told the incoming brigade CO that the measures taken ‘seemed a little exaggerated’, and had shattered the men’s morale. ‘The soldiers trembled at the mere sight of me.’

A fortnight later the Ravenna Brigade was transferred to the middle Isonzo, near Gorizia. To his astonishment, the ADC was called in to divisional HQ along with his new CO and told that he would be a member in a court martial of nine men involved in the rebellion. (‘What!, I thought, won’t you let it drop?’) Before the court martial convened, the corps commander urged severity. The brigade commander’s reaction was terse: ‘That’s easily said. We each of us have a conscience.’ Charged with reluctance (not refusal) to take up their new position, the men could not defend themselves because the court martial required no proof either way. According to the ADC, ‘nothing was established’. The prosecution called no witnesses. One defendant was a corporal who had fought in Libya, volunteered in 1915, and already been acquitted on similar charges over a different episode. His bearing impressed the court, which nonetheless sentenced him to death along with three infantrymen. The others were given ten years in prison. Refusing a blindfold, the corporal urged the firing squad to ‘Aim at the breast, and always serve your country. Long live Italy!’ The brigade commander muttered in distress that he should have been promoted to colonel, not shot as a criminal.

The bloodletting was not over. The corps commander now ruled that all those men who had received capital sentences for desertion – due to returning late from leave – should be executed, as it would be wrong to show clemency when the brigade was ‘disturbed’. Consequently another 18 men were shot. The brigade commander reported that the entire brigade felt terrorised; it should be sent out of the line for a spell. The corps commander refused; if the measures taken did not restore discipline, he would take others. The brigade commander – ‘perhaps more concerned for his career than anything else’, as the ADC boldly remarked to the commission – raised no further objection.

A total of 29 men died to punish a minor rebellion in one battalion that lasted a few hours, causing no casualties. To put this in perspective, consider the French reaction to the widespread mutinies in spring 1917, following the Nivelle Offensive. More than 30,000 soldiers were caught up in the mutinies, which were for the most part peaceful protests, with unarmed soldiers chanting their refusal to return to the trenches. Even in the most mutinous division, the 5th, officers were ‘almost universally treated with respect (probably because they returned the compliment)’. The contrast with the Italian case could not be clearer. Nivelle blamed pacifist propaganda, just as Cadorna had done in Italy, and with as little basis. The French reaction did not, however, involve a ruthless crackdown. While the ringleaders were court-martialled, careful efforts were made to rebuild the relationship between officers and men. In this way, discipline was restored before the capital sentences were carried out. Courts martial sentenced 554 mutineers to death, of whom 49 were executed. Records indicate that only three summary executions occurred during the turbulence – an official figure that is not much disputed. Given that fully half the French divisions were affected, this was an impressively low number. The Italians, on the other hand, shot 54 men in May 1917 alone, not counting ‘numerous’ summary executions, for infractions that were almost certainly less grave.

The monstrous treatment of the Ravenna Brigade says much about military justice in the ‘war zone’, a jurisdiction which eventually included most of northern Italy and much of central and southern Italy too, where the army had legislative as well as judicial power. From battalion to brigade, then up to division and corps, the commanding officers were governed by fear of seeming lenient. Otherwise the matter would have rested with the battalion commander or, at most, the general commanding the brigade. In a hierarchy that respected its own penal code, few if any of the 29 victims would have been put to death. At no point did the officers responsible for the executions argue that capital punishments were needed to re-establish order. These punishments were exemplary in a different sense; they were intended to demonstrate unflinching rigour to these officers’ peers and seniors, especially in the Supreme Command.

Other decimations followed. On 15 August, in a trench above Caporetto occupied by two companies of IV Corps, a piece of doggerel was scrawled on a piece of cardboard. The gist was that the soldiers would surrender to the enemy unless their unit was relieved. (Their tour had been extended by 20 days, so their mood was not surprising.) This came to the notice of the corps commander, General Cavaciocchi, who ordered an investigation. When no culprits could be traced, he ordered four men to be chosen by lot and shot without ado. In September, the 3rd Battalion of the 58th Infantry (Abruzzi Brigade) was deployed on Mount San Gabriele, east of Gorizia. One night, a five-man patrol moved around no-man’s land, hoping to take prisoners who would spill details about the Austrians’ rumoured offensive. When the patrol returned empty-handed, the battalion commander tore into them: so they thought they could save their skins by hiding in a crater, did they? Ignoring the men’s protest that they simply had not met any enemy patrols, the major ordered two of them to be shot at once. Other men were present, and someone shot the major. The divisional commander moved the regiment several kilometres behind the lines where 14 men were chosen by lot from the 3rd Battalion, and executed.