The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (59 page)

88
Foch asked Diaz to support
: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 90–1.

89
‘
certain events of utmost importance
’: This reply was sent by Secretary of State Lansing on 19 October 1918. Albrecht-Carrié [1938], 350.

90
Orlando’s government explained coolly
: Zivojinovic, 66.

91
were to await developments
: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 129. 

92
‘
an honourable peace
’: Schindler, 296.

93
on the 26th, he informed
: Falls. 177.

94
‘
no success
’: This is the judgement of the official Italian war history. Wilks & Wilks [1998], 160.

95
British corps commander had proposed
: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 189.

96
‘
A string of small boats had been
’: Gladden, 166–7. 

97
Gordon Highlanders, rowed by Venetian gondoliers
: Dalton, 242.

98
‘
not many Austrians stayed
’: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 147.

99
not an outcome that has won much recognition
: Gladden, 157; Wilks & Wilks [1998], 147, 153–4; Falls, 173.

100
‘
A new carefree attitude was
’: Gladden, 178.

101
Some reserve units refused
: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 151–2.

102
‘
He was informed
’: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 152.

103
since 14 October, when
: Primicerj, 50.

104
the army in Italy was finished
: Rothenberg [1976], 217.

105
‘
a semblance of order
’: Fischer.

106
Civilians emerged from their cottages
: Testimony of Lt. Col. Alberto Genova and Capt. Alberto D’Isidoro, in Genova, 27.

107
‘
Caporetto in reverse
’: Gratton, 510.

108
‘
Now it’s goodbye, Caporetto
’: Minniti, 24.

109
Karl refused on principle
: Rothenberg [1976], 216.

110
‘
knew literally nothing
’: Mamatey, 360.

111
‘
in headlong retreat
’: Dalton, 256.

112
Austrian rule on the Adriatic
Sea
: Fraccaroli, 76.

113
last Habsburg units still fighting
: Rothenberg [1976], 217.

114
ordered to move as many intact units
: Primicerj, 243.

115
‘
the last possible moment
’: Sondhaus [2000].

116
even – 7,000 of them – Italian
: Deák. Research into the tens of thousands of Habsburg Italians who served in the Austrian army began only recently. Its latest fruit is Roberto Todero’s study of Triestine Italians who fought for the Empire:
Dalla Galizia all’Isonzo. Storia e storie dei soldati triestini nella Grande Guerra
(Udine: Gaspari, 2006).

117
the Italians held 430,000 Habsburg prisoners
: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 172.

118
‘
we talked to them as to old friends
’: Fischer.

119
Supreme Command wondered at one point
: Cortellessa, 25–6.

120
‘
After fifteen centuries, an Italian army
’: Pieri [1986], 324–6.

121
the myth that Italians were incapable of waging war
: Pieri [1965], 198.

122
‘
Just when we learned how
’: Pieri [1986], 151.

123
‘
When I compare
my fate
’: Bernardi, 193.

124
Victory Bulletin, issued on 4 November
: See O’Brien [2004] for an excellent explication, 157–9.

125
he had to redeem this one
: Fraccaroli, 71.

126
‘
such ruins were unimaginable
’: Lucio Fabi in Medeot, 109.

127
‘
The dream has come true
’: Baldi.

128
‘
received with open hostility
’: Lederer

129
a plan drawn up by Badoglio
: Lederer, 71–75. 

130
marched on and on, beyond the Carso
: Testimony of Capt. Alberto D’Isidoro, quoted in Genova, 480.

131
France made Fiume the logistics base
: Lederer, 58, 68, 205.

1 
D’Annunzio’s finest exploit was his flight over Vienna in August 1918, when his squadron dropped 150,000 leaflets on the astonished citizens. When the news reached the occupied Veneto, civilian morale rose.

2 
First across the channel to Papadopoli was a battalion of Gordon Highlanders, rowed by Venetian gondoliers.

3 
One of the last Austrian tourists in Trieste was Field Marshal Conrad, who had been sacked from his last command (in the Trentino) after the disastrous Battle of the Solstice. As always, he enjoyed himself in Trieste by sea-bathing and sketching. He did not leave until 29 October – ‘the last possible moment’, as he told a friend. Was he savouring memories of his first visit to the city as a young man, when he had been ‘filled with a sense of joy and freedom’?

4 
Among the crowd was Trieste’s great novelist, Italo Svevo.

5 
In 229 bc, Aulus Postumius led a Roman army around the northern Adriatic to wage war against Queen Teuta of Illyria. Victory gave Rome control over much of the eastern Adriatic.

TWENTY-SEVEN

From Victory to Disaster

There is no instance of a country having benefited
from prolonged warfare
.

S
UN
T
ZU

There are things awaiting us which are in some
senses more difficult than those we have
undertaken
.

P
RESIDENT
W
ILSON
, to the Italian parliament, 3 J
ANUARY
1919

It comes down to this: a book-lined study in Paris, where three or four men design a peace treaty that shapes the postwar world. Over the course of several hundred meetings they and their assistants define borders, calculate reparations and debts, assign responsibility for the worst carnage in history, transfer colonies, and develop international law and trade.

Public hopes after a war had never run so broad and high. The four were expected, as an American advisor recalled, ‘to produce a plan of permanent peace satisfactory to thirty-odd allied states, five enemy states, to say nothing of the neutrals, at the same time that they acted as an executive commission settling the turbulent current affairs of the entire world’.

For six months, between January and June 1919, sub-committees sat late into the night; ministers, generals and geographers were summoned to advise; drafting committees laboured over nuances of text; thousands of experts wrote thousands of briefing papers; thousands of petitioners, from Romanian royalty to Vietnamese and pan-African radicals, sought access to ‘the Olympians’, as the press dubbed the Big Three, for ultimately three members of this quartet determined the settlement. Their discretionary powers were fantastic; a snippet from their session on 13 May gives the flavour, with Wilson magisterial, Lloyd George teasing and Clemenceau wry or gruff:

P
RESIDENT
W
ILSON
: If you were able, in the offers which might be made to Italy in the name of the League of Nations, to add that of Somaliland, that would help in the solutions we desire.

M
R
. L
LOYD
G
EORGE
: My intention is to give Greece the island of Cyprus also.

M. C
LEMENCEAU
: Don’t forget that, according to the Treaty of Berlin, you need my authorisation for that.

M
R
. L
LOYD
G
EORGE
: I hope you’ll give it me.

A journalist who covered the conference wrote that ‘the crushing weight of the world’ lay on these men’s shoulders. ‘They were supreme as perhaps no body of men in history has been supreme. No one could control them.’ This was not quite true; they were accountable to legislatures which could reject their work. Mutual disagreement and rivalry also provided a kind of control. While they had agreed to build the peace on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Europeans would not sacrifice their essential interests to an American notion of ‘a new international morality’. In Wilson’s view, this unprecedented war had to end with an unprecedented settlement, based on ‘unselfish and unbiased justice’. Anything less would perpetuate the cycles of resentment, ensuring a bloody resumption in the future. Imperialism should crumble before the principle of national self-determination, creating states where government was legitimised by democratic consent. Relations among sovereign states should be conducted openly, without secret treaties. The ‘balance of power’, discredited for ever by the collapse of 1914, should be replaced with collective security, guaranteed by a new institution, the League of Nations. If states only entrusted their security to this non-existent organisation with hypothetical resources, human kind would move forward.

Lloyd George was touched by Wilson’s idealism and partly supported it, though not at British expense. The 78-year-old Clemenceau, on the other hand, personified the outlook that had to be superseded if the new order was to emerge. He remembered the siege of Paris in 1870–1, and nothing could stop him straining every sinew to ensure that Germany would never be able to threaten France again. Wedded to the principle of the balance of power, he was immune to Wilson’s vision, though not to the fascination of the man: professorial, messianic, martyred.

The fourth Olympian was Vittorio Orlando. Any Italian leader would have struggled to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Big Three; Orlando had no chance. Other delegates found him fawning and evasive, or as one American put it, ‘obliging, courteous and impossible’. Lloyd George thought he had ‘an attractive and amiable personality’, faint praise indeed. Clemenceau was scathing: Orlando was ‘all things to all men, very Italian’. While his affability contrasted pleasantly with the ‘very hawklike, ferocious’ demeanour of his foreign minister, Sonnino, it hardly weighed in the balance against Wilson’s gravitas, Lloyd George’s silver tongue and Clemenceau’s salty charisma. Britain and France had forgotten neither Italy’s mercenary intervention in 1915, nor her record on the battlefield. Politically, too, Orlando was more vulnerable. Lloyd George and Clemenceau had strong mandates from their cabinets; Wilson’s Democratic Party had lost control of Congress, yet his global prestige when the conference opened gave him wide room for manoeuvre. Orlando led a minority government with a ‘unity cabinet’ that had only endured thanks to the crisis after Caporetto. He sat on the other side of the fireplace from the ‘Big Three’, in Wilson’s study. This was fitting, for he acted as a semi-detached member, rarely commenting on business that did not touch Italy’s claims. This was in deference to the others, with their greater resources, and an admission that nothing else concerned him.

A strange thing happened to Italy’s war aims in November 1918. No sooner had it won than the government stopped treating the Treaty of London as the limit of its aspirations. The ink was hardly dry on the armistice when Orlando declared that Italy’s victory was
one of the
greatest that history had recorded
. A fortnight later, he told parliament that the victory
seemed to overshadow all others in recorded history
– a mad boast that implied a warning: what might happen if the nation were denied the fruit of such achievement? He told the upper chamber that Italy ‘has revealed a power of action and will that compare with the greatest states in history and our time’. He was priming the country to demand more.

Tensions in his cabinet came to a head in December. As the leading ‘democratic interventionist’, Leonida Bissolati argued for renouncing those elements of the London Treaty that clashed with Wilson’s famous Ninth Point. Specifically, Italy should not demand German-speaking south Tyrol or Dalmatia with its Croat majority. Nor should it keep the Dodecanese Islands, with their Greek majority. As quid pro quo, Italy should demand the Italian-majority cities of Zara, which had been pledged under the London terms, and Fiume, which the Treaty had promised to the Slavs, although many of its 25,000 Italian citizens had recently voted in a dubious plebiscite for annexation to Italy. Only one other minister supported Bissolati, who gained a powerful ally at the end of December when Diaz agreed that Italy should exchange Dalmatia for Fiume. (Like Cadorna, he believed that military bases on the eastern Adriatic coast would be a liability, ‘militarily useless and dangerous’.) When Sonnino disagreed, Orlando wavered, then swung behind his foreign minister, reluctantly or with a show of reluctance. Bissolati resigned and three other ministers followed suit, including the influential minister of finance, Francesco Nitti.

Bissolati took his case to the people. He told the press that the United States would not support Italy’s claims. On 11 January, he addressed a public meeting at La Scala theatre in Milan. Allied victory had opened the way to a new international order, based on the League of Nations. Italy’s border with Yugoslavia should reflect nationality: Dalmatia to them, Zara and Fiume to us. Likewise the border with Austria. But a cabal of radical nationalists, ‘war veterans, conspirators, police agents, and random souls undone and exasperated by the war’, had packed the opera house and would not let him finish. Marinetti and his Futurists sat in a box, ready to lead the disruption. At a given moment,

… the infernal symphony began. Squeaks, shrieks, whistles, grumbles, nearly human … but a human, nay a patriotic cry became distinguishable now and then and ruled the inarticulate mass with the rhythm of a brutal march. They said ‘
Croati no! Croati no!
’ meaning that they were not Croats, that they wanted no friendship with Croats or Yugoslavs; and they meant too that Bissolati was a Croat.

Bissolati raised his voice and spoke on, until he caught sight of Mussolini’s pale, spade-like visage in the audience, and recognised ‘that unmistakable voice, dishearteningly wooden, peremptorily insistent, like the clacking of castanets’. Bissolati turned to his companions on the stage and said ‘
Quell’uomo no!
’ ‘I will not fight with that man.’ He finished his speech in a low voice, as if reading to himself. There was no applause. The political campaign for a reasonable territorial settlement was over. Around the same time, Luigi Albertini came under pressure to stop attacking Orlando’s claims in his newspaper,
Corriere della Sera
. Being Albertini, he dropped the liberal approach to the Adriatic that he had advocated since the summer and joined the outcry against the Allies. The
Corriere
even reversed its attitude to the League of Nations, discovering cynicism where it had praised idealism. Of Albertini’s many disservices to his readers, the turnaround in 1919 may have been the worst.

It is easy to see why anti-fascists turned Bissolati’s humiliation into a tragic myth. It signalled the silencing, by what has been called ‘the first act of organised fascist violence’, of principled resistance to maximal demands. These demands were unattainable, hence doomed; by dedicating himself to them, Orlando ensured that compromise – when it inevitably came – would bring him down. Behind this self-defeating strategy lay his partnership with Sonnino. As someone said in Paris, Sonnino was silent in all the languages he spoke, while Orlando was voluble in all the languages he didn’t. The most perceptive critic of this odd couple was Carlo Sforza, who as foreign minister in 1920 negotiated a more equitable (though still unworkably pro-Italian) solution to the eastern Adriatic riddle. Orlando, he wrote acidly, understood everything and persisted in nothing. As for Sonnino, ‘never was a foreign minister more stubborn and unintelligent, or more honest and sincere’. He could even drive the buttoned-up Wilson to clench his fist and use ‘unparliamentary language’. Orlando’s lack of principle reinforced Sonnino’s doggedness.

Privately, the Prime Minister recognised that events had overtaken the Treaty of London, and a realistic settlement for the eastern Adriatic could not ignore nationality. Sonnino, on the other hand, wanted the literal execution of the Treaty. Incapable of controlling his foreign minister, Orlando accommodated him by demanding everything: the Treaty of London
plus
Fiume. When he tabled his demands at the conference in early February, he knew Wilson would reject them. At their first meeting, in Paris on 21 December, the President had warned that his Adriatic claims were unacceptable. Orlando reacted accordingly; when Wilson visited Rome early in January – at the height of his popularity in Europe – he was given no chance to address the waiting crowds. He spent his days in Italy pondering ‘how far he could disappoint the Italian popular ambitions and still get through an amicable settlement’. It was the central question. He had already told Orlando that he would accept the demand for a ‘natural border’ in the north, on the Alpine watershed. Some American advisors and other delegates were appalled by this ‘disastrous concession’, which Wilson later attributed to ‘insufficient study’, though it was more likely calculated to win Italy’s commitment to the League of Nations. He got that commitment, but Orlando’s stance on the Adriatic hardened.

Ominously, D’Annunzio weighed in. Since the ‘stench of peace’ had offended his nostrils at the end of October 1918, the warrior-poet had been spoiling for a new melodrama to keep normality at bay. He published an ‘open letter to the Dalmatians’ in Mussolini’s newspaper (Albertini’s wobbly liberalism had made the
Corriere
uncongenial), championing maximal demands against ‘that mishmash of southern Slavs’. Meanwhile the Italian land-grab continued apace. In February, they blocked the transport of American food aid to Yugoslavia, Czecho slovakia and Vienna. According to the outraged Americans, this led to ‘acute starvation’. Threatened with the stoppage of American aid to Italy, Sonnino backed down. But the press continued to campaign for Fiume and officials still obstructed American aid to Yugoslavia. This ugly atmosphere made compromise more difficult.

Orlando raised the stakes again on 1 March, during a visit home. Italy was loyal to the Treaty of London, he told parliament, but it would not be deaf to appeals from Fiume, ‘that most Italian city, the jewel of the Quarnero’.
1
This purple pledge brought deputies to their feet, crying ‘
Viva Fiume!
’ Fiume could not be allowed to ‘lose its nationality and its independence’. His tone with Italy’s allies was rather different; he told House that Fiume was ‘not very important’ in itself, but ‘as a symbol’ it was ‘vital to his continuance in office’. Moreover, ‘we want to, we must, keep the Adriatic as
a mare clausum
, a closed sea’. It was typical of the man to blur a political plea with a nationalist ultimatum.