The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (54 page)

The morning went well; the Austrians moved 100,000 men across the river under heavy rain. Watching the infantry pour over the pontoons, Jan Triska and his gunners wondered if this time they would reach Venice. Enlarging the bridgeheads proved more difficult. Progress was made on the Montello, where the four divisions pushed forward several kilometres, and around San Donà, near the sea. Elsewhere, the attackers were pinned down near the river. Further north, Conrad’s divisions attacked from Asiago towards Mount Grappa. Slight initial gains could not be held; the Italians had learned how to use the ‘elastic defence’, absorbing enemy thrusts in a deep system of trenches, then counter-attacking. By the end of the day, Blašković realised, ‘our paper house had been blown down’. The Emperor sent Boroević a desperate telegram: ‘Hold your positions, I implore you in the name of the monarchy!’ The answer was curt: ‘We shall do our best.’

Progress on the second day was no easier. Conrad was in retreat; his batteries – more than a third of all the Habsburg guns in Italy – were out of the fight. Boroević ordered his commanders to hunker down while forces were transferred from the north. Meanwhile the Piave rose again, washing away many of the pontoons. Supplying the bridgeheads across the torrent became even more dangerous. The Austrians were too close to exhaustion and their supplies too uncertain for a sustained battle to run in their favour. By the first afternoon, Major Blašković realised that the Austrian artillery, laying down a rolling barrage for the assault troops, were already husbanding their shells. If the under-used Italian units further north were to be redeployed around Montello, the Habsburg goose would soon be cooked. Overhead, the Caproni aeroplanes chased away the Habsburg planes and British Sopwith Camels proved their worth, bombing along the river. (‘In aviation, too, morale is very important,’ Blašković remarked sadly, ‘but technology is even more so.’) The pontoons and columns of men on the riverbank, waiting to cross, offered easy targets. While the Austrians ran out of shells, the Allied artillery and air bombardment were unrelenting. The fate of Jan Triska’s battery on the Piave was indicative: over the week of battle, it lost 58 men, half its strength.

Conrad’s divisions were too hard pressed to transfer men to the Piave. In fact, the opposite happened: the Italians transferred forces from the mountains to the river. When these reinforcements arrived, on 19 June, the Italians counter-attacked along the Piave. They failed to crack the bridgeheads, but the Austrian position was untenable. Pontoons that had survived the bombing were damaged by high water and debris. Blašković’s regiment (the 3rd Bosnia & Herzegovina Infantry) ran out of shells and bullets; the men fought on with bayonets and hand-grenades until a Hungarian regiment managed to bring up a few crates of ammunition from the river.

Boroević told the Emperor that if the Montello could be secured, it should be the springboard for a new offensive. Securing it would need at least three more divisions, including artillery. If the high command did not intend to renew the offensive from the Montello, it was pointless to retain the bridgeheads; they should be abandoned and all efforts dedicated to strengthening the defences east of the river. As Karl wondered what to do, the German high command stepped in, ordering a cessation of hostilities so that the Austrians could despatch their six strongest divisions to the Western Front. For Ludendorff’s spring offensives were running out of steam and 250,000 American troops were arriving every month. Karl consulted his commanders in the field, who echoed Boroević’s stark choice: either reinforce or withdraw. Then he consulted his chief of the general staff, General Arz von Straussenberg. A new offensive within a few weeks was, they agreed, not a realistic prospect. Their reserves were almost used up; even if enough divisions could be transferred to the Piave from elsewhere – and none could safely be spared from Ukraine or the Balkans – the Italians would match them. It would not be possible to recapture the zest of 15 June without a lengthy recovery.

Late on the 20th, Karl ordered the right bank of the Piave to be abandoned. General Goiginger, commanding the corps that had performed so well on the Montello, refused to obey. They had taken 12,000 prisoners and 84 guns; how could they retreat? Eventually he submitted, and the withdrawal began. Both sides were exhausted, and the manoeuvre was completed without much fighting. The Bosnians and Hungarians on the Montello worked their way back to the river. The last Austrians crossed on 23 June, ending the Battle of the Solstice. The Italians had lost around 10,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and more than 40,000 prisoners, against 118,000 Habsburg dead, wounded, sick, captured and missing. Early in July, Third Army units capped the achievement by seizing the swampy delta at the mouth of the Piave which the Austrians had held since Caporetto.

The rejoicing was widespread and spontaneous. For many soldiers, the Battle of the Solstice cleansed the stain of Caporetto, and the name of the Piave has ever since evoked a glow of fulfilment, as smooth as the sound of its utterance, untouched by the horrors of the Isonzo front or the controversy that overshadowed Italy’s victory in November. Ferruccio Parri, a much-decorated veteran who became a leading antifascist, said at the end of his long life that the Battle of the Solstice was ‘the only proper
national battle
of which our country can truly be proud’.

For the Allies, two things were clear: the Italians were a fighting force again, and the Austro-Hungarian army was still dangerous: its morale had not collapsed and the soldiers were still loyal. The view inside Boroević’s army was different; to their eyes, the civilian system had let them down. They were still better soldiers than the Italians, but what could they do without food or munitions? The spectacle of his own men after the battle filled the genial Blašković with despair: ‘weary, dejected and starving, their tattered uniforms crusted with reddish dry clay. Their weapons alone gave them any likeness to soldiers, for otherwise they looked like beggars roaming from pillar to post.’ Gloom settled over the Austrian lines.

The failure of the Piave offensive made life even harder for the civilians under Austrian occupation.

Looking confidently ahead after Caporetto, the Habsburg high command had proposed that the postwar border between Austria and Italy should run along the River Tagliamento. Boroević mooted an even more vengeful settlement: the border should be pushed back to the line of the rivers Adige and Mincio, restoring
all
the Veneto to Austria, undoing the 1866 war of unification. By July 1918, these ambitions had gone up in smoke.

When Cadorna’s army retreated after Caporetto, most of the urban population packed its belongings: as many as 400,000 civilians fled across the Piave, including the state employees, landowners, lawyers and so forth. The exception was the clergy, for many priests were glad to see the return of Habsburg power. (Relations between the Vatican and the government in Rome, always difficult, had not recovered from the Pope’s condemnation of ‘useless slaughter’.) Beyond the Piave, these refugees were joined by a quarter of a million civilians from the new front-line areas – Venice, Padua, Treviso.

A much higher proportion of people in the villages and countryside stayed, and waited for the enemy. When the new front stabilised, the occupiers and the local civilians were roughly equal in number: about 800,000 of each. Except for 30,000 Slovenes around Gorizia and a few German-speaking pockets, the locals were Italian, while the occupiers came from all the lands of the Habsburg empire. The Central Powers were ill-prepared to take over the civil administration, and the territory came under military government led by Boroević, headquartered at Udine. The portion of territory under German control was ceded to the Austrians in March.

It was a martial regime. Railways, post and telegraph were subject to exclusive use by the military. Citizens needed a permit to move from one district to another. All Italian patriotic images were removed from public places and schools, and people were forced to celebrate the birthday of Empress Zita, charming emblem of Austrian–Italian unity. The military penal code was applied throughout the territory. There are no statistics for sentences passed by the courts martial; an Italian commission, set up after the war to investigate abuses under the occupation, concluded that death sentences were seldom passed. Exceptions included two civilians hanged for lighting lanterns at night. Their corpses were left on the gibbet for several days, to drive home the message that spies could expect no leniency.

Capital sentences were probably rare because the population was cooperative. Many people were not sorry to see the Austrians take control; they felt let down by the Italian army and tricked by the civilian authorities, which gave no warning or help in October 1917. Besides, communal memories of Habsburg rule before 1866 were not so bad. This attitude could not last. The first wave of plunder and pillage was followed by requisitions that stripped the population of almost everything edible. Livestock was confiscated in January. Vegetables, nuts, wine and oil were next to be seized, followed by the dry forage. All the manure was stolen. Despite these predations, and the benefit of a good local harvest, the occupiers could no longer feed themselves by February, when the requisitions extended to fabric, leather and other material. Household linen was taken in March; people could keep three sets of underwear, two pillow-slips, three sheets and three towels each. In at least one case, soldiers went from house to house, leaving people with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The loot was inventoried, in Habsburg style: the army took 95,000 sheets, 65,000 shirts, 39,000 items of underwear, 47,000 towels, 56,000 pillow-slips and 3,400 ‘unspecified items’.

The ‘Italian traitors’ were supposed to be left enough for their own needs. This did not happen, and by April severe malnutrition was common. Soldiers and civilians alike ate anything they lay their hands on – mice, acacia flowers, vineleaves, wild chicory from the hedgerows. Stray dogs and cats were skinned for the pot. Desperate mothers took their children as close to the front as they could get, hoping to beg food from kindly officers. By the end of the war, almost 10,000 civilians had starved to death. The situation was hardly better for the Slovene evacuees from the Isonzo valley who returned after the Twelfth Battle to find their homes ransacked and fields picked bare of anything that could be eaten or sold. The very landscape had altered. One woman, returning to her village near Tolmein, recorded the desolation:

… the mountains were bare and the trees broken and destroyed by shells, it was sad to see them. There was a soldiers’ cemetery at the foot of Mount Mrzli, reaching as far as the eye could see, grave after grave, each marked with a little wooden cross and covered with moss and ivy. Wherever I looked in the valley all I could see were graves.

Boroević knew the brutal treatment of civilians was counterproductive. People hid whatever they could, depriving his front-line troops of victuals. He opened public kitchens, but his administration lacked the resources and, at lower levels, the will to ensure that people did not starve. Despite his efforts to provide a basic health service, more than 12,500 civilians perished for lack of medical care. Even the censorship office was too short-staffed to be much use, though it caught a woman from Pordenone who described the occupying army, in a letter, as ‘a mass of famished barbarians who have come to Italy to steal everything’.

For Italian nationalists safe on the other side of the Piave, the multiple identity of the occupying force proved its wickedness. One journalist wrote of ‘heterogeneous masses’ of ‘Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, even the lurid Turks set foot on that sacred ground’. She meant the befezzed troops from Bosnia and Herzegovina, many of them Muslim by confession. One of these ‘lurid Turks’ was Pero Blašković who, though not a Muslim, wore the fez as the emblem of his beloved regiment. Compared to his native land, Friuli and the Veneto were highly developed, and the handsome towns, rich countryside and dignified people impressed him. He enthused about the fine straight edges of the fields, with wheat and rice, vineyards and mulberry groves, separated by tidy ditches, neat as a chessboard. Even the military graveyard at Redipuglia, near Gorizia, was evidence of ‘the high level of Italian culture’. The Austrians were ‘literally starving’ when they arrived in this ‘blessed land’; even so, Blašković deplored the scale of pillage, with everyone ‘from the commanding officers to the chauffeurs’ stealing whatever could be grabbed, ripped out or dismantled. Everything that could be melted down for munitions, from factory plant to church bells, was sent to Austria and Germany.

Boroević’s regime could not seal the area against Italian propaganda,
1
which naturally portrayed the invasion as a primeval nightmare of rape and pillage, like the Germans in Belgium or – a local legend of mindless atrocity – the ancient Huns in Friuli (where Attila had sacked Aquileia in ad 452). Trench newspapers focused the soldiers’ minds on images of ‘the barbarian violating the women of Italy’, married women dishonoured beside the corpses of their husbands, girls throwing themselves out of windows rather than submit. ‘Protect them, soldier of Italy, for if you give way, your wife too will be defiled.’ Postcards and posters conveyed the same frightful message, which had an added charge because Italian pro-war images of ‘Italia’ had from the start been ‘very erotic’, portrayed as ‘a young, soft, rather sad girl’.