The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (51 page)

2 
Badoglio’s promotion less than a fortnight after abandoning his command and his corps disintegrated, leading to the suicide of two generals, has never been fully explained. The records of XXVII Corps were lost in the retreat and, uniquely among senior commanders, he never publicly discussed his role. Criticism at his expense was dropped from the report of the official commission of inquiry into the causes of Caporetto, published in 1919; this was General Diaz’s reward for Badoglio’s efficient performance as his deputy in 1918. The deleted chapter has not been recovered; presumably it was mislaid during Badoglio’s long tenure as chief of the general staff (1924–40). Badoglio, limitlessly vain, was also a Marshal of Italy, the Marquis of Sabotino, the first Viceroy of Ethiopia and Duke of Addis Ababa, and Prime Minister (1943–44).

3 
Cadorna spent his retirement writing mendacious memoirs, a biography of his father, and sparring with his critics in print. He died in 1928, a month after the tenth anniversary of Italy’s victory, when ‘almost nobody remembered that I’m still alive … I am supremely indifferent,’ he wrote, self-deceiving to the last.

TWENTY-SIX

Resurrection

Troops are never in better spirits for fighting
than when they have to wipe out a stain

C
ARL VON
C
LAUSEWITZ

The new lines had settled by the end of the year. From the Swiss border to the Asiago plateau, the front was unchanged. From Asiago to the sea, it now ran east to Mount Grappa, then swung south-eastwards for 130 kilometres along the River Piave. Fortunately for Diaz, defeat had cropped 170 kilometres from the front: otherwise his much-reduced army might not have blocked the last Austro-German thrusts at the Piave line.

The German guns were transferred to the Western Front during November, followed in mid-December by the troops. The Austrians were on their own again. Not so the Italians, who benefited from several Allied divisions and their batteries: 130,000 French and 110,000 British troops by the end of the year, deployed as a strategic reserve. Other Allied support in the form of munitions, shipping and extra loans ensured that coal and food shortages did not become acute.

Arriving from France and Flanders, the British soldiers were touched by their warm welcome. Battalions of the Royal Fusiliers were greeted at Ventimiglia with ‘extravagant fervour’, ‘showered with carnations, and barrels of wine stood waiting for them at the official welcoming ceremony’. After the dull tones of Flanders, the Britons were captivated by the scenery. Moving along the Riviera to Genoa, Gunner James Blackburn (197th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery) gazed at the ‘red tiled roofs, pale pink and pale green buildings, the blue sky, green fields, greener trees and hedgerows’. The longest-lived British veteran to serve in Italy was Gunner Alfred Finnigan, who in 2005 still remembered the ‘absolute joy’ of seeing the Mediterranean and the sun in December. The Italians, too, were fascinating: the carabinieri on Monte Carlo station who conjured oranges from under their capes, and the shopkeeper in Genoa who ‘danced with delight’ when she saw the Tommies and, having nothing else, gave away straw hats.

Some, like Captain L. Ferguson (1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment), felt embarrassed by the largesse – ‘we found the troops getting pelted with oranges and figs’ – and distributed corned beef and biscuits to the children around the train. After the dismal sight of Italian soldiers begging for bread at Verona station, he was cheered to meet some alpini who spoke enough English to blame southerners for Caporetto and to promise that ‘the armies now have no idea of retreating an inch more’.

To Major Arthur Acland (Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry), the land up to the Piave was ‘flatter than you would think it possible for any country to be’. South of Mount Grappa, where the Piave emerged onto the plains, the river flowed to the sea in tresses or braids along a wide stony course, around low islets of shingle and boulders, sometimes topped with scrubby vegetation. In spate, the Piave was several kilometres wide in some places, ‘a mighty expanse of water’. In summer, it could safely be waded. A river that rose and fell by a metre or more in a day was a tricky proposition for bridging engineers.

The soft muddy banks of the Piave presented other problems after Carso limestone. Water constantly seeped into the trenches, which collapsed without constant revetting. The men appreciated the distance between the front lines, but keeping healthy was another challenge; it was almost impossible to stay dry, and the swamps on the lower Piave were malarial. Things were easier further from the sea. Acland’s division was deployed on a whaleback hill called the Montello, ‘some seven miles long, broadening to four miles at its widest and rising to about 800 feet, a pleasant hill, covered with vineyards and cultivated fields, interspersed with small woods … The northern slopes fell steeply to the river bank, above which they towered like cliffs.’ This was the last Alpine ripple before the maritime plain, and it gave good observation of the enemy lines. The Tommies liked the posting; by day, they strengthened the communications and defences on the hill; by night, they ‘played in the waters of the Piave’. The Indian summer days were hot, the nights bitingly clear, and there was ample wood to burn. Christmas Day was so warm that ‘we could sit around with our shirts off to deal with our vermin’. The rear lines were of poor quality, but it hardly seemed to matter: the enemy showed no intention of attacking again, and Allied planes controlled the sky. All in all, ‘it was such a gorgeous rest after Flanders’. Until Haig recalled two of the five British divisions at the end of February, the main challenge, much of the time, was to keep the men busy.

The British troops only knew the Italians had taken a hard knock, not how close they had come to collapse or the scale of the task facing Diaz, who had to consolidate the new line with only 33 intact divisions, half the number before Caporetto. His priorities were to restore discipline, rebuild disintegrated units, then raise morale. The first task was unexpectedly straightforward. The fear early in November that the army might unravel had passed by the end of the month. After the front settled in December, Diaz rounded up the soldiers who had dispersed, resurrecting 25 infantry divisions and more than 30 artillery regiments by the end of February 1918. Some of the men who were judged less reliable were sent to serve in labour units in France. He restructured his forces into six armies, none of them unmanageably huge as Capello’s Second Army had been. He reinstated the organic connection between divisional infantry and their artillery. Taking a leaf out of the German book, he devolved more operational decision-making authority to lower levels. Training and equipment were improved.

At the Supreme Command, Diaz restored responsibility to the competent offices, decentralising the authority that Cadorna had gathered in his fist. The Operations Office could play its proper part for the first time. A network of liaison officers ensured a flow of information between the Supreme Command and the front-line units. Badoglio became a trusted and effective deputy, not a stuffed shirt as General Porro had been. Although he had never been interested in politics, or perhaps because of this, Diaz’s attitude to the state authorities was co-operative without being submissive. He lunched with the King twice a week and met the Prime Minister several times a month. He had no objection to the formation of a war committee inside the cabinet, and was always ready to brief politicians.

Diaz’s strategic priority was purely defensive, so he did not need to devise offensive tactics. On the other hand, he could not yield any ground: if the Piave line broke, the Italians would probably lose Venice, Padua and Vicenza – the whole of the Veneto, maybe more. Also, he faced an imminent shortage of manpower; after the class of 1899 was drafted at the end of 1917, he had only the 260,000-strong class of 1900 (called up in February) as a reserve for the following year. Diaz knew that his overall strength would probably decline over the coming months, and that substantial losses could not be made good.

In the first months of 1918, while the rear defences were prepared behind Venice, Diaz tested his army by launching limited operations to strengthen the crucial sector between the Asiago plateau and Mount Grappa. Involving the specialist assault teams called
arditi
, these operations succeeded well enough to raise the army’s self-confidence. Otherwise, he would not be drawn into offensive action before he was ready. When General Foch, as Allied Supreme Commander, hard-pressed by the German spring offensives, implored Diaz to launch a diversionary action in May, he refused.

Diaz took steps to reform the conditions and treatment of his men. In December 1917, the rations were increased and made more varied. Pay was increased. Canteens were placed near the front, selling food and useful goods at discounted prices. Annual leave was raised from 15 to 25 days, and older draft classes were granted extra leave to work their land. All soldiers were provided with free insurance policies, and death benefits were paid to the families without delay. From May 1918, soldiers’ families in hardship could apply for emergency relief. As for discipline, Diaz did not repeal Cadorna’s rulings; he simply forbore to use his most savage methods. There would be no more decimations.

He took a rational approach to military morale. Although morale was seen as the key to victory, the men had been expected to supply their own. Under Diaz, the soldiers’ attitude to the war – hitherto a vast neglected hinterland – became a bright arena, crowded with officers taking notes. An internal report in November and December 1917 found that the men were physically inert and morally apathetic; their letters home proved that they did not identify with the war and its aims; while there was no organised anti-war propaganda, passivity and resignation were widespread. Many of them believed rumours that the government would sue for peace before the year was out. There was no conviction that the war was necessary and must be won.

Against this alarming background, Diaz issued directives and guidelines on vigilance, propaganda and care for the troops. Propa ganda would be channelled through newspapers, posters and leaflets, theatre and cinema. Meetings should be organised to learn the men’s views and to impart ‘a healthy, fortifying word’. Each army should have its own newspaper, with a humorous angle on army life, written by the men themselves where possible. ‘Care’ referred to material and moral wellbeing, such as hygienic accommodation and palatable rations. ‘The best system for fighting anti-war propaganda’, Diaz stated, ‘is the elimination, as far as possible, of the causes of discontent.’ This approach was unthinkable before Caporetto.

A new structure called ‘P Service’ was set up to co-ordinate all this. Its task was to spread ‘the conviction of the absolute necessity of our war’ among the troops and bolster civilian morale. Its officers included many gifted and sometimes eccentric figures who took deep pride in their work. This, after all, was a time when, as one officer said, ‘the flower of the Italian intelligentsia [was] in a fervour of moral renewal’. These men were the commissars of national recovery.

Military and civilian surveillance were, at last, connected. The Information Service in each army was tasked to develop networks of informants from different social groups, starting with the police and extending to mayors, doctors, teachers and – naturally – journalists. ‘Every movement in civic life’ was to be turned towards a single goal: ‘the triumph of the aspirations and demands of the Fatherland’. Propaganda should be adapted to its audience; the days of all-purpose rhetoric were over. In some situations, the men would gain most from discussions with a ‘P’ officer; in others, a musical revue would be the best way to build faith in ‘our growing superiority over the enemy and our inevitable victory’. Photographs from the front were exhibited around the country, while films and plays toured the land. At the end of November, Diaz set new ground-rules for war corres pondents; from now on, they could file up to 500 words a day, ‘without rhetoric’. The Italian army became, of all things, a model of integrated information management.

Naturally, the authorities talked up the impact of these measures. Father Gemelli believed that the eight months after Caporetto saw ‘a profound transformation’ of soldiers’ ‘souls’, involving the growth of a ‘national soul’. Exalted claims of this kind set a tone that patriotic historians accepted without examination for decades.

The real story of morale after Caporetto is more complex. The governing class and the middle classes did experience a defining moment or apotheosis, and shelved their political quarrels to resist the threat as effectively as possible. For these groups, as the American ambassador noted, the scale of the disaster brought the remedy. ‘To be or not to be’: this was now Italy’s choice, as Orlando thundered in parliament, relishing the roar of cross-party acclaim. The historian Giovanna Procacci argues that Italy’s rulers and bourgeoisie were now united in dedication to a supreme purpose, something like the mood of other western European countries in August 1914. In the words of Francesco Nitti, Orlando’s minister of finance, a war of political adventure turned into a war of national defence. All manner of patriotic committees and ‘national associations for victory’ sprang up. Politically conservative, intensely motivated, these citizens’ groups were determined to root out defeatism in all its slippery forms. The Anti-German League, perhaps the most extreme group, offered cash rewards for denouncing ‘defeatists’ and spies. The government played the same game, promising rewards to state employees who sniffed uncertainty among their colleagues.

Vigilance easily warped into vigilantism. Citizens’ committees worked with the police to identify fainthearts or appeasers. The press bayed for strong government to crush the ‘enemy within’, with no quarter for the filthy neutralists, socialists and Giolittians. Down with them all! In Rome, 158 pro-war deputies formed a Parliamentary Group (
Fascio
) for National Defence. With an eye on this powerful bloc, the Prime Minister took on the colours of the radical nationalists who had been his sharpest critics over the summer. Still holding the home affairs portfolio, Orlando urged the judges to apply the Sacchi Decree with relentless severity. A woman in Bologna was jailed for six months for saying that the Germans were invincible and Britain was to blame for the war. In April 1918, a priest in Florence got four months for ‘not believing in Italian victory’. A man from Viterbo got three months for saying in a restaurant that Italians were cowards.

Food riots began again in February 1918, when wheat rationing was introduced. (The 1917 harvest was poor.) While labour unrest was muted compared to summer 1917, statistics on labour stoppages show there is little ground for arguing that a
union sacrée
was forged after Caporetto. Strikes increased during spring and summer, drawing in the more experienced, skilled workers (by contrast with 1917). Industrial action continued throughout June, showing no deference to the army during the Austrian offensive. The strikers had learned from the bloody clashes of 1917: these actions were better organised, often involving women, less violent, and often successful in wresting concessions. The workers understood their own importance to the war effort; it was harder to intimidate them. Ironically, they took encouragement from politicians like Orlando and Salandra who promised that a better world would rise from the ashes of war. Industrial troubles in the north were matched by unrest in the southern countryside. Soothing promises were made of granting land to the peasants after the war, a gesture that backfired by reducing the peasants’ age-old deference to landowners and awakening a sense of political rights.