The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (62 page)

51
‘
It seems to the Italians
’: On 13 May. Mantoux, vol. II, 54.

52
‘self-determination is applicable’: Bonsal, 97.

53
Wilson sought to renew
American
faith
: I owe this insight to Kernek.

54
It
was hopeless
: Seymour [1965], 323; Mantoux, vol. II; Sonnino, 338.

55
he
withdrew from Albania
: Lederer, 290–1.

56
enjoyed deploring the Italians
: Mantoux, vol. II, 571.

57
‘
Yugoslavs, clericals and socialists
’: Canavero, 18–19.

58
‘
were treated like conquered provinces
’: Mowrer, 351.

59
‘
the new enemy
that stabs
’: Hametz, 22.

60
‘
The abolition of personal rights
’: Quotation and information from Salvemini [1934].

61
‘
attempted to realise a programme
’: Slovene–Italian Relations 1880–1956, 135.

62
‘
atmosphere of war
’: a ‘Fascist journalist’ in
Corriere della Sera
, 4 April 1931, as quoted by Salvemini [1934], 20. 

63
‘
No Italian who remains
’: Salvemini [1934], 19.

64
killed 689,000 Italian
soldiers
: Schindler. This includes the estimated 100,000 Italians who died in prisoner of war camps. (Procacci [2000], 78.) Other statistics are from Schindler; Bosworth [2007], 164.

65
perpetuated the prewar and wartime
divisions
: Giuliano Procacci, 237.

66
victory was mutilated by Italy’s own
leaders
: Pieri [1965], 199.

67
‘
unprecedented miracle of psychopathic
’: Borgese, 159.

68
drove 200,000–300,000 Italians: Slovene–Italian Relations 1880–1956
, 159.

1 
The Quarnero is the bay between Istria and northern Dalmatia.

2 
Italy, with a population of 35 million, lost 689,000 soldiers in the war; Great Britain, with 46 million, lost 662,000 (plus another 140,000 missing).

3 
The war had cost 148 billion lire, a sum equivalent, as John Schindler points out, to twice the Italian governments’ total expenditures from 1861 to 1913. Italy was the only belligerent that did not increase tax levels during the war; this led to a huge public budget deficit. Foreign debt increased eightfold between 1916 and 1919 while government spending soared – as did inflation, after the relaxation of wartime price controls. Having prospered by the often corrupt allocation of wartime contracts, the northern industrialists had no interest in seeing a more honest system introduced.

4 
Meeting on the 26th, the Big Three enjoyed deploring the Italians for one last time: ‘W
ILSON
: The truth is that Italy went to the highest bidder. L
LOYD
G
EORGE
: That is a harsh thing to say; but I fear there is some truth in it. W
ILSON
: During this conference, Italy had no interest in anything that did not directly affect her … L
LOYD
G
EORGE
: I went through the entire war and, unfortunately, I always saw Italy trying to do as little as possible.’ Etc.

TWENTY-EIGHT

End of the Line

everything we say
 
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound

W
ALLACE
S
TEVENS

Looking south from the ski-lift at the head of the Isonzo valley, after summer storms, a striped tower glimmers in the farthest distance. It is the power-station at Monfalcone, more than 60 kilometres away, across a panorama of peaks and ridges; from this angle, the entire Isonzo front can be framed on the cover of a book.

The buzz of people fades when you take the path to Rombon, winding around boulders, through hollows filled with snow, across limestone amphitheatres. At this height the light is ultramarine, the air tingles. Your own breathing and the crunch of pebbles are the only sounds. Except for strands of rusty wire poking over the path, there is very little detritus. After the war, communities along the old front earned money by retrieving military scrap and human remains from the mountains. Corpses fetched 10 lire each, and 10 kilos of barbed wire sold for 1 lire. Steel, cast iron, brass and copper were more lucrative but harder to find. On the higher battlefields, foragers camped in old tunnels and dug-outs during the summer. Farmers dug up animal carcasses to sell the bones, fuelled their stoves with the stocks of old rifles, and sold the breeches and barrels. Today’s foragers scour the hillsides for memorabilia. It is a risky pastime: someone dies every year from exploding ordnance.

A couple of hours’ walking and scrambling get you to the top of Rombon, an airy field of boulders, halfway between the sky and the valley. Faint Habsburg trenches lead down towards the spur called Cukla, which overlooks Bovec, formerly Flitsch. The Isonzo is a silver line, nearly 2,000 metres below. The trenches are grooves in the rubble, more like a natural feature than man-made defences. Another hundred years will smooth these wrinkles away.

You get to Čukla by clambering down a rocky cleft, then running the scree at its base. Your boots turn up cartridge cases and bits of shell casing. Looking back, it is obvious why the Italians never took the summit. The path down to Bovec zigzags over the open hillside, then on mule tracks through woods that cloak the lower slopes. It is half an hour’s drive to Kobarid, formerly Caporetto, where the valley opens out. Kobarid is recognisably the same town that changed hands so suddenly on 24 October 1917. The south-eastern skyline is dominated by the peak of Krn, soaring like a shark’s fin.

A mule track loops up to Krn from a corrie above the valley floor. The route is popular with hikers; a hostel below the summit does a brisk trade in bean soup and beer. The summit is ten minutes away, a turret pointing at the Julian Alps. The onward path to Mount Mrzli passes a plaque to the handful of Yugoslav partisans – communist-led guerrilla forces – who died here in the Second World War. There is no plaque to the thousands of First World War dead; for more than seventy years, the nations that fought Italy from 1915 to 1918 did not care to recall the Great War. As well as the pain of defeat, there was embarrassment for the states that emerged from Austria-Hungary: their peoples had died defending the empire. The duty of remembrance fell to veterans, penning memoirs that burn with resentment at the official amnesia. After these states became Communist, they had even less incentive to examine their role as mainstays of the dynastic rule.

Matters only changed after the end of the Cold War. For Europe’s ‘new democracies’, trying to recover their pre-fascist, pre-communist history, the imperial cause is no longer awkward. On the contrary, a mild Habsburg nostalgia pervades the area from Trieste to Vienna and Prague, flattered by tourist-board posters of art nouveau cafés and rediscovered statues of Franz Josef’s beautiful empress. New monuments have been added to the Habsburg cemeteries, paying respect where it is due, yet the polished marble facets look odd amid the mossy turf and lichen-covered crosses. These places remind us that states, too, have their life-span.

The information on the plaques – name, corps, rank and date of death in German (‘the language of the army, in death as in life’) – proves that the men came from all corners of the empire. ‘What the state failed to achieve in time of peace became a reality in these war cemeteries. Here they all are, united by death in an indissoluble brotherhood.’ The mystery of obedience hangs in the air.

The Isonzo has become a recreational river. Its turquoise waters are flecked with kayaks in summer; hikers throng the paths, and the cliffs are hung with climbers’ ropes. The tree cover is thick on Mount Mrzli, above Tolmin; the stanchions of wartime cableways rot in the shade, sinking into the leaf mould. The summit is still jagged from Italian shellfire. Overhead, paragliders ride the thermals, unhurried; someone tells us they are Czechs, holding a competition. If their great- grandfathers could revisit the front, the greenery would amaze them. In their time, the tree line was lower and the grass much thinner. Even so, the grim beauty of the front made a deep impression on many of the troops, as their diaries show. Even in the worst situations, soldiers caught the scent of thyme high on the limestone ridges; the sight of comrades dying did not blot out the last patches of snow gleaming blue in the moonlight, or the constellations wheeling overhead. The ‘indescribable joy’ of battle that filled young Ferruccio Fabbrovich in June 1916 was a real thing, and it was felt more readily in the mountains. What one veteran called the ‘exhilaration of extreme situations’ could reach a pitch of ecstasy when vistas opened at your feet. The Austrian troops felt it when they went out of the line, marching to the edge of the Carso, and saw the Adriatic Sea below, azure to the horizon.

While soldiers in other theatres experienced this sensuous, heightened awareness of the natural world, it may have been more widespread on the Italian front. The Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote a story, ‘The Blackbird’, about his service in the Tyrol.

… on every one of those nights I poked my head over the edge of the trench many times … I saw the Brenta mountains light blue, as if formed of stiff- pleated glass, silhouetted … the sky stayed blue all night … sometimes I could stand it no longer, and giddy with joy and longing, I crept out for a little nightcrawl around, all the way to the golden-green blackness of the trees… It is as if the fear of one’s demise, which evidently lies on top of man forever like a stone, were suddenly rolled back, and in the uncertain proximity of death an unaccountable inner freedom blossoms forth.

This ‘unaccountable inner freedom’ enlivens much Italian literature about the war, offsetting the documentary element, the chronicling of unprecedented torment. Italian historians sometimes regret that their writers produced no classics to rank beside Jünger, Barbusse, Remarque or Hemingway. What sets their books apart is perhaps an inability to sustain the despair. Excitement keeps breaking through – not so much the Homeric bloodlust of Jünger, though this is present, as a sense of boyish adventure within an enterprise that is felt as essentially worthwhile, whatever its horrors. When the aged Emilio Lussu saw the fine film of his autobiographical novel,
A Year on the Plateau
, one of the best books about the Italian front, he objected that it was too grim. ‘That’s not all there is to war,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we even sang, joked and dreamed our dreams.’

Consider Eugenio Montale, Italy’s greatest modern poet, stationed in the spectacular valley of Vallarsa in the Trentino, linking Mount Pasubio to the valley of the Adige. Today it is a green chasm with a narrow road unspooling along the northern side, plunging through tunnels and propped on stilts. Untouched by political passion, the young Montale felt uncomfortable in uniform, like ‘an outcast’. The nearest settlement was a hamlet called Valmorbia. The valley sides were strewn with corpses, dead mules, slews of rock and mud, spilled munitions. Night transformed the brutal scene; Montale lay in the entrance of a cave, listening to the river. As the moon rose and sank, the valley seemed to set sail. Snuffling sounds and an acrid smell revealed the proximity of wolves. He turned this memory into a short poem, the only one he ever published about the front. Here is the last stanza:

The lucid nights all through were dawn

and brought wolves to my cavern.

Valmorbia – a name – and now in wan

remembrance, a land unknown to dusk.

Why does this feel patriotic when it dwells on a private moment, remote as a fairy-tale? Perhaps because the poet’s survival enacts Italy’s own, after the ravening threat of Caporetto.

The central British feeling about the First World War is elegiac indignation, fed by a certainty that the war was, in Siegfried Sassoon’s phrase, ‘a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation’, or what Hemingway called ‘the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery’. Although that phrase passes a fair judgement on Cadorna’s leader ship, Italian war writing does not by and large share this disillusion.

When the last British veterans were interviewed ninety years after the war, few had anything to say about politics or patriotism. Over time, the war had become a byword for futile sacrifice. ‘The First World War was idiotic,’ said one, typically. ‘It started out idiotic and it stayed idiotic. It was damned silly, all of it.’ Whether their younger selves would have agreed with this verdict is, of course, another matter.

The last Italian veterans were not haunted by this sense of meaning lessness. One, in his 107th year, recalled his soldier self, ‘a bit afraid, but full of hope and indomitable will’. The only woman interviewed spoke of carrying the love of her fatherland in her heart. Pasquale Costanzo (b. 1899) explained that people felt proud of the war, for ‘the Italians repulsed the enemy with honour’. Paolo Bonomini (b. 1898) praised D’Annunzio’s grandeur and charisma, and his power of discovering ‘the will to believe in the highest values of the fatherland’ in the ‘farthest recesses of our soul’.

Testimony of this kind explains why the Great War was Italy’s ‘first true collective national experience’. More than five million Italians were mobilised, and many of them welcomed the collective endeavour as something precious which mitigated the hardship. A poet in the trenches, Piero Jahier, expressed his emotion at hearing the mixture of dialects. ‘
Brava Italia, che si lega per sempre nel sacrificio
.’ ‘Splendid Italy, binding herself forever in sacrifice.’ These lines are displayed in the Museum of the Risorgimento, in Rome. Warm bonds of comradeship, which gave soldiers on all fronts an intimate motive for persevering, had an added political dimension in Italy. Nor was the experience limited to men in uniform. A teenaged boy from Friuli who spent the year after Caporetto as a refugee ‘left as a Friulan and returned as an Italian’.

Were nationalists right, then, to say that the war completed the Risorgimento? Liberals denied it. A counter-argument was provided by the journalist Luigi Salvatorelli, another veteran of the Isonzo, for whom the Risorgimento was a project that would only be fulfilled by ‘the formation of a national democracy’. The vision of Mazzini and Garibaldi had been dedicated to something greater than enlarging the territory under the House of Savoy. They had had a moral goal: the liberation and unification of a nation, realising rights to which other nations were equally entitled. Tragically, this project was opposed by a range of conservative and illiberal forces, clerical, landowning and nationalist.

On this view, far from completing the Risorgimento, the First World War had confirmed, by contrast, the lost greatness of that epoch. For May 1915 had seen the birth of ‘a mixture of Nationalism and Fascism’. Hence the war, which ‘was called – and in a sense, was – the last war of the Risorgimento’, began with ‘a profound moral scission, into which the anti-Risorgimento thrust its poisoned steel’. The Risorgimento was libertarian, patriotic, democratic, enlightened and still unfinished, forever wrestling with its antithetical twin: authoritarian, manipulative, nationalistic, conspiratorial and aggressive. From 1915 to 1944, the anti-Risorgimento had the upper hand. Perhaps the two still contend for mastery of Italy’s dark heart.

The price of Italy’s nation-building achievement in the war was a sense of betrayal by the state. The government and the newspapers lied to the common people while the army under-paid, under-equipped and under-fed them, before getting them killed in hopeless offensives; even the Church failed to protect them. It was an experience marked by brutality, contempt, corruption and oppression, fatigue duty like slave labour, rations filched or sold on. At the end of the war, their pensions were not paid, the economy was in melt-down, and they were at daggers drawn with their eastern neighbours, the Yugoslavs. It was as if national consciousness could only grow by undermining national institutions and sharpening political divisions. The interment of the Unknown Warrior in Rome was one occasion that focused these antagonisms. Socialist posters mocking the ceremony, in November 1921, were torn down by the police. If the nameless warrior could rise from his tomb, leftist agitators said, he would curse the war. Proletarians should honour him by cursing it themselves.

In this riven atmosphere, Mussolini offered a positive myth of the war. As early as December 1916, he had looked forward to the day when Italy would be governed by a ‘
trenchocracy
, a new and better élite’. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, he vowed to rebuild the state on the basis of the soldiers’ achievement. This was a potent promise in a situation where, as the leading scholar of Italian fascism argues, ‘Most veterans were convinced they were the aristocracy of “new men” bound to regenerate society and the State.’ From the outset of his regime, Mussolini claimed a monopoly on the meaning of the Great War. Entering the Quirinale Palace on 30 October 1922, he bowed before his sovereign. According to Fascist myth, he said ‘Sire, I bring you the Italy of Vittorio Veneto.’ It meant that the mantle of victory – the one that, in Orlando’s boast, overshadowed all others in recorded history – was in his gift and nobody else’s. He then paid homage at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.