The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (61 page)

The Italians paid a monstrous price for eastern Friuli, Trieste, Istria, the Trentino and Alto Adige. The nineteenth-century wars to unify the peninsula – the first three wars of independence – cost fewer than 10,000 lives. The war to annex these final territories killed 689,000 Italian soldiers: more than the total of Austro-Hungarian dead, missing and wounded on the Italian front (estimated at 650,000), and more, also, than the Habsburg Italian population that was ‘redeemed’ by the victory. Another million were seriously wounded, including 700,000 disabled veterans. Adding the estimated 600,000 civilians who died due to the hardships of war, the Italian death toll reached 1.3 million – around three times the number that would perish in the Second World War.

The price was also political. Orlando’s and Sonnino’s zero-sum strategy in Paris dealt a fatal wound to Italy’s liberal system, already battered by the serial assaults of wartime. By stoking the appetite for unattainable demands, they encouraged Italians to despise their victory unless it led to the annexation of a small port on the other side of the Adriatic, with no historic connection to the motherland. Fiume became the first neuralgic point created by the Paris conference. Like the Sudetenland for Hitler’s Germany and Transylvania for Hungary, it was a symbol of burning injustice. A sense of jeopardised identity and wounded pride fused with a toponym to produce an explosive compound.

The difference was that Germany and Hungary had lost the war. Uniquely among the winning states, political life in Italy perpetuated the prewar and wartime divisions. The former warmongers howled against Wilson and wept over Fiume, while the former neutralists were branded as ‘Caporettists’, collaborating in their country’s humiliation. This suited the radical nationalist mindset which expected betrayal at the hands of bullying, ungrateful Allies. D’Annunzio had warned about the peril of a ‘mutilated victory’ as early as 24 October, when the Battle of Vittorio Veneto was scarcely under way. His grisly metaphor became a rallying cry.

In truth, victory was mutilated by Italy’s own leaders. Twenty years later, from his voluntary exile in New York, the journalist Giuseppe Borgese looked back in near disbelief at the ‘unprecedented miracle of psychopathic alchemy’ that had been performed at the end of the war. ‘Italy, or at least the intellectual and political élite to which an evil destiny had entrusted Italy, had transubstantiated a victory into a disaster. The nation, masochism-stricken, exulted in frustration.’ This enduring sense of bitterness, betrayal and loss was an essential ingredient in the rise of Mussolini and his Blackshirts.

After the Second World War, Italy lost everything to the east of Gorizia and south of Trieste. The Julian Alps, the Isonzo valley, Istria, Fiume, Zara: all were transferred to Communist Yugoslavia. The new border bisects the old battlefields on the Carso. Mount San Michele stayed in Italy, Monte Santo went to Yugoslavia, and they shared Mount Sabotino. The monumental ossuaries that Mussolini built near the Isonzo to honour the remains of fallen warriors now stand at Italy’s outermost limit, within the sliver of land that Luigi Cadorna conquered in the first year of Italy’s last war of independence.

The final demarcation around Trieste was agreed in 1954, almost 90 years after Raffaele Cadorna led the Italian V Corps in its race to the Isonzo. It had taken a century to work out a durable border settlement. Even then, the collision between nationalist fantasy and ethnic reality was only cut short by Italy’s wholesale defeat and occupation in 1945. Pressure amounting to terror then drove 200,000–300,000 Italians out of Yugoslavia, across the Cold War frontier. The refugees’ plight was made doubly bitter by their near-invisibility; when Tito’s self-management reforms turned Yugoslavia into the West’s favourite Communist state and tourists flocked to Dalmatia, nobody much cared to hear about the Italian victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Only since May 2004, when Slovenia became the first former Yugoslav republic to join the European Union, has it been possible to see the sharp angles of the Isonzo valley as so many sutures, stitching the borderlands together.

Source Notes
TWENTY-SEVEN
From Victory to Disaster

1
‘
There are things awaiting us
’: Wilson, vol. 53, 598.

2
‘
to produce a plan
of permanent peace
’: Seymour [1951].

3
a snippet from their session on 13
May
: Mantoux, vol. II, 56.

4
‘
the crushing weight
’: Huddleston, 103.

5
‘
a
new international morality
’: Wilson quoted by Bonsal, 103.

6
‘
obliging,
courteous and impossible
’: Bonsal, 100.

7
‘
all things to all men, very Italian
’: MacMillan, 298.

8
‘
very hawklike, ferocious
’: Seymour [1965], 273.

9
the
government stopped treating
: Mamatey, 359–60.

10
one of the greatest that
history
: Orlando [1923], 268.

11
A fortnight later, he told
: Orlando [1923], 276–7.

12
‘
has revealed a power of action
’: Orlando [1923], 331. 

13
‘
militarily useless and dangerous
’: This was Cadorna’s judgement, though not his alone. Mack Smith [1978], 215.

14
‘
war veterans, conspirators
’: Colapietra, 273.

15
‘
that unmistakable voice
’: Borgese, 152–3.

16
reversed its attitude to
the League
: Mack Smith [1978], 223–6.

17
‘
the first act of organised
’: O’Brien, [2004] 28, citing Mimmo Franzinelli, ed.,
Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della
violenza fascista 1919–1922
(Milan: Mondadori, 2003).

18
silent in all the
languages he spoke
: Cervone, 260.

19
Orlando, he wrote acidly
: Sforza [1966], 162,

20
‘
never was a foreign minister
’: Sforza [1944], 48. 

21
‘
unparliamentary language
’: Wickham Steed, quoted by Kernek.

22
Sonnino, on the other hand, wanted
: Albrecht-Carrié [1950], 123.

23
no
chance to address the waiting crowds
: Albrecht-Carrié [1938], 83–4.

24
‘
how
far he could disappoint
’: Wilson, vol. 3. 53, 697.

25
‘
disastrous concession
’: Bonsal, 104. See also Nicolson, 170.

26
‘
insufficient study
’: Seymour [1928], vol. 4, 450 ff.

27
‘
stench of peace
’: Cicchino & Olivo, 282.

28
‘
that
mishmash of southern Slavs
’: MacMillan, 304.

29
‘
acute starvation
’: Hoover. 

30
officials still obstructed American aid
: Hoover, 104.

31
‘
that most
Italian city
’: Orlando [1923], 339.

32
‘
not very important
’: Bonsal, 247.

33
 
the King urged Orlando
: Burgwyn, 274.

34
‘
100,000 foreigners
’: Mantoux, vol. I, 277, 279.

35
Sonnino said
: Mantoux, vol. I, 285–6, 288–9.

36
he
would abandon the Conference
: Lansing [1922].

37
suggested that provisional
acceptance
: Mantoux, vol. I, 290–1, 293–5.

38
‘
moment of agitation will be
followed
’: Mantoux, vol. I, 329.

39
‘
cast doubt
’: Mantoux, vol. I, 358. 

40
‘
white with anger
’: Hoover, 206.

41
the old man pulled out a list
: Sforza [1944].

42
‘
They always believe that we
’: Mantoux, entry for 2 May 1919.

43
‘
catastrophe
’: Mantoux, vol. I, 286.

44
‘
they will soon come back
’: Mantoux, vol. I, 469.

45
‘
a compensation for the enormous
’:
Slovene–Italian
Relations 1880–1956,
126.

46
think that Wilson sympathised
: Lansing [1922], 228.

47
some Italians from Fiume, brought to Paris
: Zivojinovic, 269.

48
a spontaneous hypocrite
who
: Orlando [1960], 353.

49
The war had cost 148
billion lire
: Information in this footnote comes from Giuliano Procacci; Schindler; Toniolo; Zamagni, 210 ff.

50
‘At the very outset we shall
have followed
’: Wilson, vol. 57, 271.