The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (41 page)

The Justice Department at the Supreme Command, which should have defended the penal code, supported Cadorna’s illegal directives. As for the staff officers who could have tried to oppose the butchery, their attitude was perhaps illustrated by Ugo Ojetti’s comment to his wife after the Catanzaro Brigade’s first decimation, in May 1916. ‘If they do not noisily shoot ten or twelve cowards and runaways, they cannot restore stability. The soldiers are like horses: they know when a rider says “forward” but thinks “back”: and they won’t jump.’

Under Cadorna, discipline was corrupted by arrogance. In some brigades, minor offences were punished by tying up the miscreant in view of enemy positions – ‘saving bullets’, as General Carignani, commanding VII Corps, put it. Officers were encouraged to treat the men brutally. If they refused to send their men to pointless slaughter or criticised the conditions and equipment, they could be court-martialled themselves, or even shot summarily. Notorious sadists included General Saporiti of the Second Army, so incensed by the sight of a soup tureen overturned in a trench that seven men were court-martialled for ‘causing harm to equipment of the Royal Army and insufficient concern for the cleanliness of the trench’. (The trench was littered with corpses, torn sandbags and broken planks.) Ignoring an explicit request for harsh sentences, the court martial bravely acquitted the men. Saporiti then sacked the colonel who had presided over the court.

The worst was General Andrea Graziani, who beat a soldier so savagely for dropping his rifle while entraining that the man lost the use of his hand. A court martial dismissed Graziani’s grotesque accusation of attempted mutiny. When the presiding officer reproached him for maiming an innocent man, the general replied that he could not care less. ‘The minister of war has assured me in writing that a commendation has been entered in my record.’ On 2 November 1917, five months after the incident in Bologna, Cadorna made Graziani responsible for restoring discipline among the troops retreating from Caporetto. The wolf was now in charge of the sheep; he had 19 men shot in the back for sundry offences on the morning of 16 November alone; another man was shot for saluting without taking his pipe out of his mouth
1
and two more for hiding a couple of kilos of flour in their knapsacks. The total number of summary executions in the weeks after Caporetto can only be guessed at.

Despite these examples of courts martial showing independence, there were few acquittals for other ranks. Cases were often heard collectively, with as many as 40 men herded before a court martial, giving little opportunity for details to be discussed. Life sentences were frequent, and sentences of 15–25 years were common. In British and French courts martial, the presumption of innocence was often weaker than it should have been, and was occasionally discarded altogether. In Italy, this presumption was turned on its head; the accused were guilty because they had been charged. As in other armies, officers were much more likely to avoid severe sentences. Before 1917, the courts martial sometimes even criticised the conduct of the war, as mitigating the offences committed by junior or reserve officers.

As the government was too cowed and the press too patriotic to challenge the use of decimation, parliament was the only source of potential pressure on Cadorna to stop killing quantities of innocent men. Opposition deputies occasionally raised their voice, in vain. In June 1917, a Socialist deputy told the chamber that Cadorna was ‘a century behind the times, also in his manner of maintaining military discipline – with terror and shootings by lot and decimation’. There was no reaction; the government did not even pretend to have oversight of Cadorna’s regime. In December, after Caporetto, another Socialist deputy asked the government to investigate the decimations, given their importance in sapping the army’s morale, ‘rather than the alleged Socialist propaganda’. The government was reluctant, and there was no investigation until after the war. The result was a whitewash: the investigators concluded that some 140 summary executions were carried out from October 1915 to November 1917 – fewer even than the executions that were officially reported in this period. While the commission of inquiry did not offer a number, at least its language was honourable: decimation was a ‘savage measure that nothing can justify’.

The military penal code did permit ‘summary justice’, bypassing courts martial, in specified circumstances. Acts of ‘cowardice’ or ‘revolt’ could be punished summarily when they posed ‘grave and imminent danger’ to the army in whole or part. Crucially, such offences had to be ‘flagrant’ – conspicuous, egregious, and ongoing. Hence the punishment must be carried out on the spot. Any delay would delegitimate the execution. Even so, the code also stated that every act of summary justice must be preceded by ‘a conscientious, albeit rapid, assessment of responsibilities’. Of the summary executions that were reported in sufficient detail, very few met these narrow conditions. Cadorna did not worry, informing the prime minister in June 1917 that summary executions had been carried out ‘on a vast scale’, without regard for legal niceties, in order to cut out the evil of indiscipline at the roots. He added that if the contagion spread, he would be forced to resort to decimation – a step he had taken the previous November. This murderous policy had no equivalent in other countries. Summary executions in the French army were rare: around a dozen for the whole war according to the evidence, which is incomplete. In the British army, summary punishments could not exceed imprisonment or field punishment for 28 days.

As in other armies, the majority of capital sentences were given for desertion, the form of indiscipline that most worried all commanders. Punishment was harsher than in Britain, France or Germany. The military penal code defined the offence very widely, to encompass evasion of the draft. Of 189,000 soldiers charged with desertion, only 7.4 per cent were accused of desertion in the face of the enemy. Most charges were factitious, concerned with late return from home leave and such like. The code was also exceptional in disallowing a defence in terms of intention (which British military law, for example, permitted). A prosecutor had only to demonstrate the defendant’s absence from his unit.

The scope for imposing the death sentence for desertion was widened during the war. Again, 1917 was the nadir. Early that year, capital sentences became mandatory for third-time deserters. In April 1917, disregarding the military penal code, under which a capital sentence could be passed after five days’ unauthorised absence, the death penalty was decreed for any soldier who was more than three days late returning from leave. From June, state assistance could be denied to the families of deserters. In August, the Supreme Command slashed the period of grace to 24 hours.

Terrible as the burden was of knowing that a day’s delay in returning from leave could be fatal, the non-capital offences may have caused more misery. Charges of insubordination could be laid for so trivial a ‘lack of deference, of civil and military education’ as a shrug or an irreverent tone of voice, picked up by an irritable officer.

Consider, too, the censorship of private letters. On 28 July 1915, Cadorna made it a military crime to denigrate war operations, scorn or vilify the army, mention news ‘other than that which had been made public’, or write anything at all which might ‘disturb public tranquillity and lower public spirits’. It was not enough to omit details that might be considered sensitive, because the military censors did not distinguish between opinions and information, as British and French censorship tried to do. This latitude was used to suppress any kind of criticism. The government wanted to examine all private correspondence. When this proved impossible, censorship was limited to correspondence to and from the front, and abroad. This, too, was far beyond their resources; by summer 1917, soldiers were sending nearly three million letters and cards daily from the front. Still, the censors’ net had mesh fine enough to land many soldiers in prison for long terms. Military censors in other countries used soldiers’ letters to gauge the mood at the front. In Italy, the sole purpose was repression.

The more thoughtful the criticism, the graver the consequences. Simple complaints about officers or rations could lead to six months or a year in prison. A 25-year-old private got four years for writing that newspaper stories about the valiant troops were full of lies. ‘They don’t fight with pride, no, nor with ardour. They go to the slaughter because they are led to it, and are frightened of being shot.’ A 21-year-old gunner from Viterbo got 22 months for urging his father to tell people the war was unjust ‘because [only] a minority wanted it … It is the people who make this war, the workers, the men with callused hands, and they are the ones who do the dying.’ The court martial found that the defendant put himself beyond clemency by calling the war unjust when ‘by universal consent the whole nation wanted it’. Although every democracy in the world wanted to overthrow German imperialism, the defendant – who claims to champion the working class – opposes this aim!

By August 1917, when this sentence was handed down, the Supreme Command had convinced itself that sole responsibility for sinking morale at the front lay with Socialists, pacifists and others who wanted Italy to lose the war, and with the government that tolerated them. These defeatists infiltrated the front with propaganda and corroded the resolve of soldiers on leave. ‘Internal enemy’ was one of Cadorna’s stock antiaircraft phrases, a catch-all for civilians who questioned or criticised the war. In June and August, he sent a series of astonishing letters to the Prime Minister, accusing him of letting Italy’s internal enemies go about their evil business with impunity, urging him to match the ‘inexorable severity’ of the military penal regime in the rest of the country.

Boselli chose not to reply. The attacks were unjustified, for Italy had functioned as a police or martial state since 1915. Military encroachment on civil jurisdiction peaked in March 1917, when the Supreme Command announced that civilians living
outside
the war zone could be tried by courts martial. Socialist deputies tried vainly to muster resistance in parliament.

Besides, Cadorna’s thesis about defeatist propaganda does not stand examination. Salandra, the prime minister when Italy intervened, wrote in 1917 that ‘only children believe the newspapers’ when they blame ‘pacifist tendencies’ on Socialists and followers of Giolitti. The Italian front was no more saturated with Socialist leaflets than other fronts. The difference is that Italy was divided over the war, as it had been from the beginning. The carnage had deepened the divisions, and stained them with class hatred. It was indeed the people who made this war, the horny-handed workers, and they were indeed, overwhelmingly, the ones who did the dying; no fewer than 65 per cent of war orphans were the children of peasants. This situation was a gift to Socialist agitators, especially in Turin, the country’s only proletarian city. Discontent was ably exploited by Marxists at the newspaper
New Order
. In August 1917, soldiers put down a protest against food shortages that turned antiaircraft into a riot. Around 40 people died. The unrest was more ominous because it was not simply about wages or shortages; these complaints focused a more political discontent and a smouldering sense of injustice over who was making the greatest sacrifice in the war. Workers in different industries organised joint stoppages, as when the iron, steel, metal and engineering workers demanded a single contract. Workers’ councils were set up in some factories, as embryonic structures of self- government. This went on even though war-related industries came under military direction; by summer 1918, some 900,000 workers were in this position.

To Italy’s nervous élite, especially the entrepreneurs who flourished thanks to war contracts, this solidarity portended a revolution that might forge an alliance between the ‘reds’ and ‘blacks’ – Socialists and clerical Catholics. For the Pope had dropped a bombshell of his own. In a note to the warring powers, released on 9 August after consultation with Vienna, Benedict XV mooted the conditions for ending a war that ‘looks more like useless slaughter every day’. Cadorna was aghast; the Vatican was punishing him again for his father’s part in liberating Rome! The Supreme Command tried to prevent the statement reaching the front, in vain. If this was the last gasp of Emperor Karl’s diffident peace initiative, it was much the most effective. Amid the gloom after the Tenth Battle, the damning phrase ‘useless slaughter’ struck a chord.

Cadorna’s network of military police and civilian agents kept tabs on public figures who were suspected of undermining the war effort. Presumably this network helped to organise the rallies in Milan and elsewhere over the summer, supporting the war and calling for Cadorna to be made dictator. The generalissimo’s relish of this acclaim fed suspicions that he was involved in a plot to carry out a military coup. (Allegations were made over the summer by a pro-Giolitti deputy.) The target would be the Minister of the Interior, Vittorio Orlando, viewed in some quarters as dangerously liberal and cunning with it. A coup would oust him, opening the way to a clamp-down on Cadorna’s critics in parliament, striking workers in northern cities, families of deserters and other malcontents. If Boselli resisted, he too would be removed. General Giardino, the minister of war, was also suspected by some of toying with scenarios for a coup, putting Orlando under arrest and installing a military dictatorship.

Given Cadorna’s record since 1915, these jitters were not surprising, yet there is no definite evidence against him. He bullied, ignored, manipulated and harangued the government, usually with eye-watering bluntness, and would have rejoiced at Orlando’s downfall. After the war, he blandly denied having ever wanted a ‘reign of terror’. On the contrary, order could have been ensured by rounding up a few hundred ringleaders and propagandists and transporting them to Eritrea or Somalia, as well as suppressing the newspapers that the government allowed to whinge the length and breadth of the country. How a regime of arbitrary arrests, banishment and increased censorship could have been instituted without a coup, he did not say.