The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (6 page)

With rumours circulating that Austria and perhaps Germany were about to reach a separate peace with Russia, Salandra and Sonnino were on tenterhooks. Would they intervene too late to grab their portions of territory? The outlook was not improved when Austria – yielding to German pressure, abetted by bad news from the Eastern Front – agreed on 27 March to cede the south Tyrol (without Alto Adige), make Trieste autonomous, withdraw to the Isonzo, approve the occupation of Valona, and discuss Gorizia. Sonnino rejected this offer – which exceeded his demands in January – as ‘dubious and absolutely inadequate’. Fearing that he might have overpriced Italy’s support, he dropped the demand for Spalato (now Split), Dalmatia’s biggest city, which the proposal had called ‘the seat of glorious Latin civilisation and fervent Italian patriotism’. The Allies called on him to let Dalmatia be neutralised. He refused.

The new German Chief of Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, urged Conrad to withdraw from the Trentino at once. This would keep Italy neutral and could be revoked after the war. If the Central Powers lost, the territory would go anyway; the urgent thing was to disperse the ‘negative constellation’ looming over their heads. No, rejoined Conrad, this would not satisfy the ex-allies, who were planning a big offensive against the ‘heart of the monarchy’. He was right on both counts. Although unwilling to buy off the Italians, Conrad and his government were too disengaged and contemptuous to wonder what would happen if the traitors in Rome got a better offer elsewhere. Italy kept the illusion alive by not breaking off negotiations.

The Russians finally accepted that Dalmatia south of Split might be neutralised under Serbian sovereignty. Grey announced the good news on 10 April. With the major issues resolved, the diplomats focused on the detail. Salandra, meanwhile, instructed Italy’s regional governors to prepare secret reports on popular attitudes to fighting Austria. The result was an extraordinary snapshot of public opinion. In general, people were only ready to accept the prospect of war if it was a struggle for national survival against foreign invaders. Most people’s neutralism was spontaneous and passive. Anti-war feeling was strongest among peasant farmers, for whom war was a calamity like famine or plague. Even for middle-class Italians, who provided most of the pro-war passion, strong feelings about Trento and Trieste were the exception. In most places, only the intellectuals were pro-war; business leaders were not.

Neutralist opinion was strongest in the south, including Salandra’s home province of Puglia. In parts of Sardinia, the peasants and workers openly criticised the warmongers. In Naples, the governor reckoned that 90 per cent of all social classes were anti-war. As another governor pointed out, nobody had invaded their homeland, the south had no historic scores to settle, the previous year’s harvest had been poor, and the European war had blocked emigration – the traditional escape from poverty. The south was suffering already; why should anyone want an unnecessary war? In the north, the Socialists gave a backbone to neutralism, yet a broader vein of anti-Austrian feeling offset this. Only in Bologna did the governor warn that failure to intervene might create unrest. (So much for the danger of revolution.) At the same time, the governors reported high levels of trust in the government – thanks above all to the policy of neutrality which it was about to overturn! If war were declared, people would do their duty. This was the bottom line: the masses would fight.

With the Allies piling pressure on Rome, the final wrinkles were ironed out. As signed on 26 April, the Treaty of London stated that, in exchange for committing all its resources to fighting the enemies of France, Great Britain and Russia within 30 days, Italy ‘will receive’ all of south Tyrol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, Dalmatia down to Trogir, near Spalato, plus most of the islands further south to Dubrovnik. This unconditional promise, not to be found in the Allies’ other secret treaties, was a measure of Italy’s importance.
3

These lands were home to some 230,000 German-speaking Austrians and up to 750,000 Slovenes and Croats, far outnumbering the 650,000 native Italians. Additionally, Italy would get Valona, giving her control over the Straits of Otranto, gateway to the Mediterranean; sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands; and a guaranteed interest in a province of Turkey if the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. If Britain and France enlarged their African colonies, Italy would be ‘equitably compensated’ with territory for its own colonies: Libya, Eritrea and Somaliland. The loan of £50 million – later described by one of Sonnino’s advisors as ‘derisory’ – was reckoned enough to underwrite the short triumphant campaign that everyone expected.

The treaty pledged its signatories to secrecy. On 1 May, Sonnino called on the cabinet to repudiate the Triple Alliance, so that Italy could seal an agreement with the Allies – an agreement that ministers did not know was already in his pocket. The repudiation followed on 4 May. Next day, the poet D’Annunzio gave a well-trailed, bloodcurdling speech in Genoa. Even though Salandra kept the King and his ministers away from Genoa, the portent was clear to everybody. Cadorna hurried to Salandra’s office. ‘But this means immediate war!’ he said. ‘Yes indeed,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘we have to go to war by the 26th of this month.’

‘What! But I don’t know anything about it!’

‘Well, you should hurry up …’

In a last bid to avert war, the Vatican persuaded Vienna to reiterate its offer of 27 March, bolstered with German guarantees. But the Austrians were flushed with recent success over the Russians and more interested in crushing Italy than bargaining. Berlin, too, had lost interest; the German foreign minister wished they only had enough troops ‘to rebuff those knaves’. After the first clash, he said, they would scamper away to southern Italy and the people would overthrow the government that had pitched them into a senseless war.

Territory promised to Italy by the Allies in April 1915

The mood in Rome was so volatile that the Austrian embassy was cordoned off by cavalry and infantry with bayonets fixed. After a long absence, Giolitti returned on 9 May for the opening of parliament on the 12th. The interventionists, both those few who knew about the Treaty of London and the many who did not, saw Giolitti’s reappear ance as a threat. But he was hailed by a majority of the deputies in parliament, who hoped he would restore the opposition’s unity and focus. He told a journalist, off the record, that the ministers responsible for bringing Italy to this pass should be shot. There was no good reason to fight; Austria’s last offer was acceptable;
4
Sonnino claimed to be saving the monarchy when it was not in danger.

Giolitti gave the King and Salandra the benefit of his views. The army was incapable of attacking and winning; the Central Powers were far from beaten; the war would last longer than people realised; parliament would not support the London terms; Italy’s calculations drew contempt from both sides. (‘Our new allies will be pleased for themselves, but they will despise us.’) The government should let the deputies overturn its promise to the Allies, then resume talks with Austria. Giolitti did not realise that Italy was bound by a state treaty, over which parliament had no authority to arbitrate. Salandra and the King chose not to inform him. He had overrated the King and now, again, he underrated Salandra, who pushed back the opening of parliament to 20 May and on the 13th, persuaded the entire cabinet to tender its resignation.

It was a brilliant move. Historians still interpret it as proving the weakness of his position. In reality, Salandra was daring the neutralists to take the reins of government in an atmosphere of pro-war hysteria and incipient violence. He believed the neutralists were too divided to accept the challenge; by backing down, they would destroy their credibility. His gambit fooled almost everyone. Cadorna, out of the picture as ever, was shocked. Again he sought out Salandra. ‘What are we doing?’ he asked. 

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ said Salandra demurely. ‘I may not even be prime minister any longer. Anyway I cannot give you orders.’

‘But the whole army is on the move,’ Cadorna protested. ‘Austria is wide awake to everything.’

Salandra agreed, and shrugged: ‘I cannot let you prepare for a war that may not happen.’

‘What! Should I call off the mobilisation?’ asked Cadorna, referring to the eight corps that he had quietly mobilised on 23 April, and started moving to the north-east on 4 May.

‘Yes.’

‘But, Excellency, consider what a disaster it will be if Austria beats us to it! Do you really think it is possible to stop the mechanism just like that? At least let me continue the measures in hand; let the mobilisation take its course.’

‘No,’ said Salandra, ‘I cannot do that.’ He was determined to break the will of the anti-war deputies, whatever the military cost.

Incredibly, Italy was at war within a fortnight of this conversation. The last months of neutrality could have been used as cover to initiate a discreet mobilisation, allowing Cadorna to explode across the border when war was declared. While this could not have ensured a quick victory, it would have hugely increased Italy’s chances of breaking through and seizing Trieste in 1915.

Any appetite Giolitti had felt for a showdown was spoiled when Victor Emanuel argued that the honour of the monarchy was pledged to fulfilling the Treaty of London. If the King and Prime Minister were set on war, he could only oppose them by rallying the opposition into a force that would shout as loudly as its opponents. For this, he lacked both the nerve and the populist skills at a moment when the inter ventionists, unaware of the Treaty of London, thought Italy might still opt to stay out of the war. The historian George Trevelyan saw ‘hundreds of thousands of good people of all classes’ filling the streets of Rome and other cities, ‘intoning with a slow and interminable repetition, “Death to Giolitti, Death to Giolitti.”’ Bands of students chanted ‘Up with war!’, ‘Up with D’Annunzio!’ Theatres put on anti- neutralist sketches. The press screamed for war. Mussolini, the turncoat warmonger, accused both Giolitti and the government of ‘sabotaging the Nation’s spiritual preparation for war’. Giolitti decided it was impossible to accept the King’s invitation to form a new government. On the 16th, the King rejected Salandra’s resignation. The government was reinstated and Giolitti stumped home to Piedmont, complaining about Salandra (‘it has all been a trick, in true Puglian style’).

Salandra was reinstated and the King threatened to abdicate if parliament opposed intervention. A right-wing commentator described the pending decision in the typical apocalyptic terms that made sober debate impossible:

Either Parliament will defeat the Nation and take up its trade prostituting Her sacred trembling body to the foreigner, or the Nation will overthrow Parliament, overturning the benches of the moneylenders, purifying the dens of the pimps and panders with iron and fire.

On 20 May, parliament ratified the decision to go to war. Two days later, it bound and gagged itself by authorising the government to issue decrees with the force of law on any issues concerning ‘defence of the State, maintenance of public order and the urgent needs of the national economy’. The Socialist bloc found itself alone in opposing the bill; resistance from the liberal and Catholic blocs had melted away. Even Filippo Turati, the Socialist leader, sounded beaten: ‘Let the Italian bourgeoisie have its war … there will be no winners, everyone will lose.’

On 23 May, Italy’s Ambassador Avarna in Vienna – who privately fumed against Salandra’s ‘swinish and faithless’ policy – told the Austrian government that Italy would be at war with Austria-Hungary from midnight.
5
‘It is the last war of independence’, trumpeted the
Corriere della Sera
. ‘Generous Italian blood prepares to trace the fulfilment of our destiny with indelible lines.’ In Rome, Cadorna embraced Salandra before cheering crowds at the railway station and set off for his headquarters in Udine. The weather was fine and clear, though still cold in the mountains.

Neutrality was a façade behind which Salandra had played both ends against the middle, a means to something else – but what? Irredentism was the ostensible goal, invaluable for motivating patriots and as a label for Italy’s war aims. ‘Trento and Trieste!’ was the cry that went up from columns of new recruits, the names daubed on troop trains, not ‘Dalmatia and Valona!’ Italy’s plunge to war was decided by a blend of great power ambition and Salandra’s belief that a short, victorious war would seal his premiership. For Salandra was not obsessed by territory. He later denied having ever believed that Italy would benefit from gaining Dalmatia or the Tyrol north of Bolzano; they were to be bargaining chips after the war. 

His project was something else; he wanted to move Italian politics permanently to the right by building a new anti-Socialist bloc of northern industrialists and southern landowners, who both wanted markets abroad and civic discipline at home. A genuine reactionary, Salandra aspired – as he put it in memoirs that were written, admittedly, under Fascism – to purge liberalism of its democratic ‘dross’. In today’s terms, he was a neo-conservative, promoting business over social justice while launching military adventures abroad. As has often been observed, intervention was a response to internal pressure, meant as a solution to internal problems. The crisis caused by ‘red week’ in June 1914 was formative for his premiership, and the advent of the European war a few weeks later was an opportunity that he could not pass up. For ‘only a war, with a phase of compulsory peace on the labour front and the militarisation of society, would permit the hierarchical reorgan isation of class relations’. The same analysis was made long ago by Italy’s great liberal thinker, Benedetto Croce; intervention, Croce argued, was meant to supplant the liberal order with an authoritarian regime, ‘a modern plutocracy, unencumbered with ideologies and scruples’.

It was not only élite politicians with ulterior motives who feared standing aside when Europe’s fate hung in the balance. Events themselves strengthened the belief that Italy’s whole history made war inevitable. When two members of the Garibaldi family died fighting with the French army in December 1914, their funeral in Rome drew 300,000 mourners. The interventionists could argue that their cause fulfilled Italy’s republican tradition as well as its national aspirations. In other words, even if fighting Austria proved to be a colossal mistake, it was a
necessary
mistake, one that self-respecting patriots should be ready to commit.
6

The interventionist camp was diverse and potentially fractious, what with its neo-conservatives, industrialists wanting new markets as a valve for chronic over-production, doctrinaire nationalists committed to ‘Greater Italy’, cultural chauvinists, devotees of renewal through bloodshed, proto-fascists shrieking for expansion to accommodate the fertile Italian ‘race’, democratic anti-imperialists, syndicalist revolution aries, and Mazzinian idealists. While they bridged their differences to get Italy into the war, their rivals were incapable of such discipline. The Socialists and the Vatican could not make common cause; Giolitti could not forge an anti-war front; nobody could turn neutrality into stirring rhetoric. Italy was full of citizens who did not want to intervene, yet no way existed to leverage their opposition. It is a problem as old as politics, and still intractable.

In the end the Allies wanted Italy
in
the war more than the Central Powers wanted it
out
. One way and another, Austria helped to ensure the outcome that its Chief of Staff always thought was unavoidable. The Triple Alliance was damaged past repair by Austria’s refusal to compensate Italy after annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. Excluding Italy during July 1914 finished it off. Although the Germans leaned on their allies to make a better offer, they were not surprised by Italy’s stance. After all, Moltke had never counted on Italian support; there were no detailed plans for joint mobilisation – just as there were no German–Austrian plans for simultaneous mobilisation against Russia, Serbia and Italy.

Bülow looked back sadly at the whole saga. He bitterly regretted that Germany had not leaned harder (‘we have been the horse instead of the rider’). The weird inevitability that overhung the July crisis affected the Powers’ treatment of Italy. They acted as if Rome’s disloyalty was automatic. Even though Vienna’s attack on Serbia released Italy from its obligations, Italy might have been deterred from joining the Allies by an early compromise over Trentino and Trieste. Germany saw more clearly than Austria, perhaps because its vision was not blurred by loathing. But Vienna easily absorbed Berlin’s fitful pressure. Half a dozen years earlier, when he was chancellor, Bülow had admitted that Italy might not stand with its two allies in a European conflagration. Yet, in his view, there was no question of the Italians attacking Austria-Hungary; they lacked strength or boldness for that. In May 1915, the Italians discovered this boldness.

Two and a half years later, after the disaster of October 1917, a staff officer who served Cadorna loyally throughout the war confided some angry thoughts to his diary. Italy’s involvement in the war now looked ill-starred, tainted by falsehood from the outset. 

This whole war has been a heap of lies [wrote Colonel Gatti]. We came into the war because a few men in authority, ‘the dreamers’, flung us into it. They could not accept that you don’t do politics by dreaming. Politics is reality. You don’t stake the future of a nation on a dream, a yearning for reinvigoration. It is idiotic to imagine that war can be a means of healing. 

The chief spokesman of this dreaming – this idiocy – was not a politician at all, or even a soldier. It was, as we shall see, a famous poet.

Source Notes
TWO
‘We Two Alone’