The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (52 page)

This is why some historians see ‘repression of dissent, rather than the creation of consensus’ as the government’s priority after Caporetto. And there was plenty to repress, especially outside the cities. Diaz knew this already from other sources; on 24 November, he warned Orlando that the rural population of north-east Italy was broadly against the war. Women were especially outspoken, saying it would be better to be occupied by the Austrians because then the war would be over and ‘anyway everyone knows the Austrians treat people well’. At the end of October, a journalist reported that people around Milan were celebrating ‘the arrival of the Austrians in Italy – who had come, according to the peasants, to chop off the heads of the gentlemen who wanted the war, and then to help the poor’. Worrying reports also arrived from further south, indicating that many Italians were not at all distressed by the emergency. Tuscan farmers were seen carousing over the defeat, and Neapolitans were overheard grumbling that if the Germans were in charge, at least there would be bread in the shops.

High levels of disaffection were suggested by an incident at a primary school near Mantua. The teacher set her class an essay topic: ‘For Italy to win, we must resist to the end.’ Most of her pupils – farmers’ children – took issue with the title. One boy wrote that the officers (‘the ones who give orders’) were ‘not tired yet of killing the poor people who aren’t guilty of anything. To make it a just war, they should 1. send all those who want war to the front, because if they want it they should fight it. 2. send the rich people who give money for war bonds. 3. send the poor men home. Then it would be a just war!’ The scandalised teacher reported her pupils’ ‘subversive’ tendencies to the military police and the local magistrate.

The ‘military model’ that had encroached on Italian society since 1915 was now fully imposed, involving ‘submission, the demonstration of absolute loyalty, and the elimination of all criticism’. Far from healing divisions in society, this process may have deepened them. Especially in the south, the state was felt increasingly as an incubus, a predatory master, not much different from the Bourbon tyrants of old. Orlando and his ministers, for their part, were doing what they believed was necessary to reverse the effects of Caporetto. A key to success would be the arms industry. General Alfredo Dallolio, an effective Under-Secretary of Arms and Munitions since 1915, was promoted to Minister in June 1917 with a staff of 6,000. Even so, the Boselli government had not reversed the cautious conservative policy that it inherited from Salandra. Over the summer and autumn of 1917, Francesco Nitti, a deputy who had been Giolitti’s last minister for industry and trade, denounced Italy’s partial economic mobilisation. As Orlando’s minister of finance, subsidised by lavish credits from the USA, he loosened the government’s purse-strings and deluged the arms manufacturers with fresh orders. Military production restored the huge losses after Caporetto and supplied the army for the final battles.

It was a fine achievement, and by no means inevitable. Yet pricing policy was slack, the large companies practically wrote their own contracts, profits were exorbitant, and corruption flourished. The discovery of accounting irregularities at his ministry led to Dallolio’s resignation in May 1918. On the other hand, industries had incentives to plough back their profits into improving their plant and equipment. The northern engineering companies grew apace: Alfa-Romeo’s 200 workers became 4,000; Fiat’s 4,300 multiplied tenfold; Ansaldo’s workforce grew from 6,000 to 56,000. The aeronautical industry grew from scratch to employ 100,000 people by the war’s end. The great names of Italian engineering made their breakthroughs thanks to lavish state subventions and militarised management of the workforce.

Unfortunately for Orlando, no sooner had the political class stopped feuding over intervention and the conduct of the war than another source of contention opened up. This was the ever more delicate question of Italy’s aims on the farther shore of the Adriatic Sea. The rout in the Twelfth Battle had harmed the Italians’ prospects of getting their full dividend of territory after the war. Allied statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic ‘now looked upon Italian war aims with even less deference than before’. In a speech on war aims in early January, Lloyd George kept silent about Italy’s expansion across the Adriatic.

The European acclaim for Lloyd George’s speech irked President Woodrow Wilson, who was putting the final touches to a statement of his own. He need not have minded, for his speech on 8 January became the best-known blueprint for a just peace, the rallying cry for millions who dreamed of a new postwar order. After reiterating his calls for open diplomacy (no more ‘secret covenants’), free trade, a global reduction of arms to the lowest possible level and a ‘general association of nations’, Wilson called for the open-minded review of all colonial claims, taking equal account of ‘the interests of the populations concerned’: a warning to the Allies. Among their specific interests, absolute support was only given to Belgium, which ‘must be evacuated and restored’. For the rest, the conditional was used: France, Serbia and Montenegro should be evacuated, and so forth.

Dismayingly for Rome, the ninth of Wilson’s fourteen points was a shot across the bows: ‘A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.’ On this basis, Italy would have little claim to Istria, less to Dalmatia, and none to the Alto Adige or the Isonzo valley above Gorizia, let alone the Greek islands or Asia Minor. This affront to the Treaty of London was rammed home by Wilson’s tenth point: ‘The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.’ Publicly, Orlando and Sonnino ignored this call for the empire to become some sort of federation. Privately, Sonnino complained to the American ambassador that Wilson had ‘made no mention whatever of our aspirations, which are not at all imperialistic but simply defensive, for our security and independence, especially in the Adriatic’.

The background to Wilson’s speech was an inter-Allied meeting in Paris several weeks earlier, where President Wilson’s emissary – the diminutive Texan, Edward House – wanted the Allies to agree a new, liberal statement of their aims, pledging that they were ‘not waging war for the purpose of aggression or indemnity’. The idea was to neutralise the peace proposals emanating from Bolshevik Russia and undercut domestic propaganda in Germany. While the British and French dragged their feet, fearing bad publicity if they were seen as going soft, only Italy strongly resisted. House was left feeling that ‘it is perfectly hopeless trying to get Sonnino into anything progressive or constructive’. Sonnino’s problem was that the United States was not bound by the Treaty of London, which was one of those ‘secret covenants’ denounced in the Fourteen Points speech. Wilson’s only interest in the territorial issues turned on their implications for the postwar world. For he had overcome neutralist opinion in the United States by promising to fight for a new liberal international system, to eradicate many traditional causes of war. If Italy’s claims promoted instability, he was duty-bound to resist them.

Both parties were careful not to let latent disagreement get in the way of practical alliance. A few days after the unsatisfactory meeting in Paris, the United States declared war on Austria-Hungary. The empire had not attacked America, nor did Wilson intend to fight Habsburg troops. This step had been requested by Orlando’s government after Caporetto, and urged by the American ambassador in Rome. Wilson complied, both to aid Italian morale and to satisfy domestic critics who wanted the United States to show more grit. The declaration was muted, however, and reassured Vienna that the USA had no wish to ‘impair’ or ‘rearrange’ the empire.

Rome welcomed this signal of support. A month later, the Fourteen Points speech came as a cold shower. In truth, American opinion always had misgivings about Italy’s aims, which seemed typical of sneaky European statecraft, singing with the anti-imperialist chorus while pursuing a quasi-imperial role. The tone of misgiving was caught by journalist Walter Lippmann, a liberal interventionist and advisor to Wilson: ‘More and more the war has ceased to look like a clean-cut fight between right and wrong, between democracy and absolutism, between public faith and international lawlessness. Italy, Romania, Russia with their aggressive programs confuse the situation too much.’

Orlando tried to defuse the problem by denying there was one, blandly summarising Italy’s aims: ‘the completion of her national unity and the security of her borders on land and sea’. But he hurried to Britain for reassurance at the end of January, when both governments solemnly reaffirmed the Treaty of London. British liberal opinion was not convinced; the editor of
The Nation
queried the discrepancy between that ‘most cynical’ of all the secret treaties and the increasingly anti-imperialist flavour of Allied war aims. The treaty could only be implemented by cancelling the emergent aim of autonomy for the Habsburg nations. By forcing injustice onto non-Italians, this would have bad repercussions inside Italy: ‘By the acquisition of German, Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Albanian, Greek, Turkish and possibly Abyssinian subjects, Italy would become an Empire doomed to racial unrest and firm government.’

This sort of prophecy cut no ice with Allied policy-makers, who needed to defeat the Central Powers. The Italians were keeping 44 Austrian divisions away from the Western Front. Insofar as London and Paris could assuage Rome, they would do so. But they were still persuaded that the Habsburg empire should emerge more or less intact in any settlement. National aspirations were encouraged, within limits; ‘autonomy’ fell far short of self-determination. Apart from diplomatic caution, it made no sense to question the empire’s existence as long as there was a chance of tempting Emperor Karl to break with Germany.

The Allies’ attitude suited Rome very well. If the empire did not survive the war, Italy would have to compete for territory with at least one new national state on the eastern Adriatic. This explains why Sonnino, jealous father of the London Treaty, his ‘paltry masterpiece’, refused to sanction the use of propaganda to reassure Yugoslav soldiers on the Isonzo front that Italy supported their dream of independence. He also blocked the formation of a Czech and Slovak volunteer brigade in Italy, even though his government had no designs on Czech lands. In his view, the cohesion of the empire should not be weakened any more than necessary.

On 3 March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war on terms that strengthened Germany. Three weeks later, the Germans launched their spring offensive in the west, which made shattering progress for a couple of weeks. Then, in a political tit-for-tat with Vienna, Clemenceau revealed Karl’s peace initiative of March 1917, with its friendly reference to French claims on Alsace and Lorraine. German fury at this betrayal had large consequences. When the two emperors met a month later at Spa, in occupied Belgium, Wilhelm tested Karl’s loyalty with a double demand: the Central Powers should form a pan-Germanic political, economic and military union, and the Austrians should support the continuing German offensive by attacking Italy once more.

Germany was riding high. Apart from the accomplishment of Brest-Litovsk, Romania had been forced to accept humiliating terms for peace; it was hard to remember the last Allied triumph in Europe; Ludendorff’s spring offensives had not yet stalled. Wilhelm’s comments at Spa reveal an impossibly arrogant cast of mind, still bent on the mastery of Europe; the resemblance to Hitler’s mindset in 1944 is striking. Neither he nor Karl grasped that Germany’s recent successes veiled an imminent exhaustion. Unable to resist Wilhelm’s pressure, Karl pledged a two-pronged attack from Asiago in the north and across the River Piave towards Venice.

Karl’s consent more or less ended British and French hopes that Austria-Hungary could be split away from Germany, and the Allies became more willing to contemplate the dissolution of the empire, though not yet self-determination for the Slav nations. This turn in Allied thinking coincided with an influential new campaign of pro-Yugoslav propaganda. In February, the British government had set up a Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, under the brilliant press baron Lord Northcliffe, whose primary target was the Habsburg empire. With Northcliffe telling the government that self-determination was a powerful tool against the Austrians, the department embraced the idea that a Yugoslav state would be a viable successor to the empire between the middle Danube and the Adriatic Sea. Inevitably, this had an impact on Italian designs. British propaganda urged a policy that challenged the fundamental aims of a British ally.

The first practical outcome was a conference in Rome, in April. The Congress of the Oppressed Nationalities of Austria-Hungary was meant to demonstrate a harmonious commitment to self-determination for the Habsburg nations. Top-heavy with journalists and artists, it was a noisy event. The Italian government did not take part, but Orlando was discreetly supportive and persuaded Albertini to help organise and perhaps subsidise the congress through
Corriere della Sera
. Sonnino hoped the participants would fail to reach a common position. Instead they affirmed the right of each people (counting the Yugoslavs as one) to ‘set up a national State entity of its own’, and pledged respect for the rights of minorities. There was a tactful, circle-squaring paragraph on Italian–Yugoslav relations, committing both sides to ‘devote all their efforts’ to achieving Yugoslav unity and independence, and also ‘the completion of Italian unity’.