The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (64 page)

Source Notes
TWENTY-EIGHT
End of the Line

1
‘
everything we say
’: Stevens, 302.

2
foragers camped in old tunnels and
dug-outs
: Sacco, Monticone & Rigoni Stern, 105.

3
someone dies every year
: According to staff at the war museum in Kobarid. On one estimate, the war left 12,000 tonnes of Italian lead embedded in the Slovenian landscape. Pirc & Budkovič.

4
‘
the language of the army, in death as in life
’: Abel.

5
 ‘
exhilaration of extreme situations
’: Comisso.

6
soldiers in other theatres
experienced
: See, e. g., Private Fred Hodges’ memories in van Emden, 304.

7
 ‘
on every one of those nights
’: Musil [1995], 135–6.

8
Italian historians regret
that
: Bonadeo [1989]; Fabio Todero [1999].

9
‘
That’s not all there is to
war
’: Rigoni Stern. Lussu’s book has been translated as
Sardinian Brigade
(London: Prion Books, 2000). Francesco Rosi’s film, called
Uomini contro
, was released in 1970.

10
valley seemed to set sail
: Cortellessa, 465.

11
‘
a dirty
trick which
’: Sassoon.

12
‘
The First World War was idiotic
’: Arthur. The other book of interviews is by van Emden.

13
the
‘
farthest recesses of our soul
’: These quotations are from Bultrini & Casarola.

14
‘
first true collective national
experience
’: Minniti; also Giuliano Procacci, 236.

15
‘
left as a Friulan
’: Romano, 29.

16
‘
a profound moral scission
’: Salvatorelli [1970], 188.

17
an
experience marked by brutality
: Malaparte [1967].

18
‘trenchocracy,
a new and
better élite
’: O’Brien, [2004], 116.

19
‘
Most veterans were convinced
’: Gentile [1986], 112.

20
According to Fascist myth
: Bosworth [2002], 170.

21
then
paid homage at the tomb
: Schindler, 321.

22
‘
sacred history
’: Gibelli, 361. 

23
‘
the glorious epic of the great Redemption
’: Gentile [1996], 38–9.

24
New
accounts of such ghostly resurrection
: Cortellessa, 356–7.

25
until dawn
dispersed them
: This story is told by Mario Rigoni Stern in his preface to Frescura, 5.

26
‘
We are for the ephemeral
’: Carrà.

27
‘Even the dead
will not be safe
’: Benjamin [1979], 257.

28
into a holy family
: Canal.

29
‘
It had been a great
misfortune
’: Levi, 119.

30
‘
the anonymous flesh of the infantry
’: Rebora, in a letter dated 28 November 1915.

31
‘
the simple and primitive souls
’: O’Brien [2004], 117.

32
‘
Who are these valiant souls
’: Fabio Todero [2003], 231.

33
‘
I did not know why there was a war
’: Pte. Pasquale Costanzo, quoted by Bultrini & Casarola, 65.

34
‘
how a man can create a new soul
’: Malaparte [1981], 54, 65.

35
‘
the purity of intention and certainty
’: Ungarelli, 110–14. 

36
‘
the noonday heat without trenches
’: Gadda [1963].

37
a swipe at
Hemingway
: ‘Hemingway’s was not the only eye that saw Italian soldiers marching to the trenches through the mire and driving rain’. Ungarelli, 110.

38
‘
break the
circle of silence
’: Roscioni, 126.

39
nobody in the Europe of August 1914
: Fussell, 21.

40
Fell in the course of combat
would suffice
: Roscioni, 129.

41
‘
I never use big words
’: This was the future historian, Adolfo Omodeo. Bonadeo [1989], 95–6.

42
Father Gemelli argued
: Labita.

43
Panzini
wondered with sharp flippancy
: Panzini, 270.

1 
Captain Kurt Suckert of the 5th Alpine Regiment was one veteran who found seeds  of hope in the soldiers’ desolation. In
Viva Caporetto
! , still a startling  ook, Suckert – known by his pen-name, Curzio Malaparte – argued that the war had (
continued on p. 392
) humanised the soldiers by burning away their Catholic pieties about death, and teaching them ‘how a man can create a new soul and a new life for himself’. Caporetto was the result of the growth of class consciousness among the infantry, ‘the proletariat of the army’,  rebelling against the hierarchy personified by Cadorna, ‘the enemy of the infantry’. Malaparte’s thesis was too revolutionary for Giolitti’s Liberal government, which  suppressed his book. The Fascists banned it as well, even though Malaparte was a party  member until 1931.

A
PPENDIX

Free from the Alps to the Adriatic

Until Italy’s eastern frontiers are all her own,
it is certain that her national independence
will not be complete. Thus, further wars will
be inevitable
.

P
ROSPERO
A
NTONINI
(1865)

The Third War of Italian Independence, 1866

It is a summer evening in 1866. A coach sweeps along the highway from Cormons to Udine, splashing through streams, not slowing in the quiet hamlets. The postilion sways drunkenly in his saddle, but he has found excellent horses and the coach makes good time. The passenger has urgent news for his king and country. For he is an Italian general who arrived only two days before. Against the odds, he leaves with head high.

The date is 12 August. The Habsburg empire has just agreed that Italy should get the province of Venetia, including Venice. It is the latest twist in a summer of extraordinary reversals. Thanks to General Petitti, the project to unify Italy looks in better shape today than anyone had expected 24 hours earlier. But it is still fragile, still incomplete.

Austria was not the only foreign power with a territorial stake in the Risorgimento. France coveted the Alpine portion of Savoy, near Geneva, and the coast at Nice. Europe’s other great powers – Britain, Russia and Prussia – took a remoter interest, aiming to contain wider disruption and stop each other benefiting by the process too much. Emergent Italy’s dispute with France was settled in January 1859, when they closed the last open territorial issue: France got Nice and Savoy in exchange for a military alliance to drive Austria out of the Italian lands. A few months later, in April, Austria provided a
casus belli
and lost to the allied forces at Magenta and Solferino. The French and Italian emperors had reasons of their own to negotiate peace before Austria was forced to its knees: Napoleon III was alarmed by his casualties and had one eye on averting Prussian intervention, while Franz Josef was shocked by his army’s poor fighting form. So Piedmont gained Lombardy but not Venetia. This outcome was sealed by a treaty that pledged the Kingdom of Piedmont- Sardinia (i.e. Italy) to ‘peace and perpetual friendship’ with Austria.

The language deceived no one. The Austrians were obsessed by Italian unification. Although Lombardy and Venetia were a long way from the Germanic, Magyar and Slavic heartlands of their empire, they believed these provinces were crucial to its stature. More than anything else, Austrian hostility was the anvil on which Italy was hammered into existence.
1
The treaty opened half a century of duplicitous relations. The ink was hardly dry on the treaty when Camille Cavour, Piedmont’s brilliant prime minister, said privately that he was ready to fight for Venetia.

The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed the next year, threatening the ‘Concert of Europe’ that had endured more or less since 1815. The other European powers recognised the new arrival, reducing Austria’s allies to two, both second-rate: Spain and the Pope. Cavour assured radicals in parliament that Rome and Venice would be annexed in the not too distant future. He also promised Garibaldi that Venice would be plucked from Austria when the time was right. The challenge of annexing the south Tyrol, Istria and Ticino (the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland), not to mention the island of Malta (a standard claim, however far-fetched), would pass to future generations. When one of his provincial governors said that the port of Trieste and the coast of Dalmatia were Italian objectives, Cavour denied it. The governor was taken aside and warned that loose talk would alienate the great powers. A few weeks before his death in June 1861, Cavour told parliament there could be no lasting peace with Austria until Italy got Venetia. Privately, he predicted that this would probably happen the following year.

Austria’s leaders were no more inclined than Italy’s to accept the 1859 border as permanent. Convinced that Italy would always destabilise the empire’s south-western corner, Franz Josef’s generals dreamed of reconquering Lombardy and garrisoned Venetia with 100,000 men. The shock of Magenta and Solferino wore off; old illusions of military competence returned. The Austrians knew they enjoyed Prussian backing, due to concern over pan-German use of Trieste and the Adriatic seaways.

Egged on by followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini, successive governments vowed to drive the Austrians out of Venetia. In 1864, King Victor Emanuel II announced that Venetia and Papal Rome would be gained for Italy. The army and navy were built up, but Italy was still weak. More than once, the government secretly offered to buy Venice with cash. Vienna was not interested. Count Rechberg, the Austrian foreign minister, wrote privately that Italian nationalism would destroy the ‘monstrosity’ called Italy if the empire waited patiently.

Unification could only proceed in linkage with stronger states whose interests coincided with Italy’s. Prussia’s sharpening rivalry with Austria held promise. All three states made token efforts to avoid war, but talks came to nothing. Victor Emanuel was ready to ally with Austria in exchange for Venetia and the south Tyrol, but the Austrians would not pay this price, and anyway were confident of defeating Prussia unaided. Bismarck, on the other hand, was interested; he had a better chance of knocking Austria off its pedestal as the senior Germanic power if Italy attacked in the south. In April 1866, Italy secretly pledged to open a second front in Venetia and South Tyrol as soon as Prussia declared war, in exchange for Bismarck’s support over Venetia (though not the Tyrol). Austrian agents discovered the plan immediately. The Emperor ordered his generals to be ready for war against Prussia in the north and Italy in the south. The Austrians aimed to carry the fighting down the peninsula, exorcising what Metternich had called the ‘phantom of Italian unity’, replacing the kingdom with a federation or loose confederation of statelets. This scenario rattled Napoleon III, who saw France’s interest as staying out of the war while preventing anything too dramatic happening to Italy or Austria. He wanted Italy to have Venetia, fulfilling France’s commitment to unification while also diverting the Italian appetite for Rome. And he wanted the two Germanic powers to keep each other weak. Practically, this meant helping Austria to become a stronger counterbalance to Prussian power.

The opinion around Europe was that Austria could beat Prussia and Italy combined. Even so, a two-front war should always be avoided, and in early May the Austrians offered to trade Venetia for Italian neutrality. The Italians said they could not break their pledge to Prussia. In truth, they wanted to take Venetia and South Tyrol by arms. Nino Bixio, a hero of Garibaldi’s campaigns, told parliament that he would rather 100,000 Italians died for Venice than accept it without fighting. The King agreed. The idea that national greatness required Italy to fight for something that might be obtained by diplomacy would prove disastrously durable. Year-on-year cuts in military spending since 1862 did not worry the pro-war faction. The mobilisation in May has been called ‘a bureaucratic and logistical nightmare, which pointed anew to the difficulty of building a single new state from the wreckage of a half- dozen old ones in as many years’. The King and his prime minister, General La Marmora, waited several weeks before inviting Garibaldi out of retirement to muster a force against the Tyrol. The Liberator left at once for the north-east. Suspicious of volunteers and Garibaldi’s popularity, the army laid not so subtle traps, giving the old hero what he called ‘the usual defective rifles’. He had no artillery and many volunteers had to wear their own clothes. Austrian agents reported gleefully that Garibaldi’s 20,000 volunteers were teenagers with no fighting experience. Historians put the number at 10,000.

With their confidence waning, the Austrians formalised their offer to cede Venetia peacefully, and were again rebuffed. In desperation, they promised that, even if they won, they would not change Italy’s borders. The King and his generals were not listening. In an abrupt switch, the Austrians tried to involve Napoleon. On 12 June, they offered to let him mediate the transfer of Venetia to Italy in exchange for French neutrality. Napoleon was non-committal.

No one wanted to fire the first shot. Bismarck prevailed on the King of Prussia to mobilise on 15 June. With 350,000 men under arms, Prussia invaded Hanover and Saxony, crossed the Austrian frontier, occupied most of Bohemia and attacked Silesia. To Bismarck’s lasting irritation, Victor Emanuel waited four days before declaring war on Austria ‘for the honour of Italy and the rights of the nation’. Damning Italy’s ‘treachery and arrogance’, Field Marshal Albrecht vowed not to let the King ‘plant his standard on the Brenner Pass and the Carso’. With Austria’s main force fighting the Prussians, Italy began its third war of independence with 200,000 men and 370 guns against 75,000 men and 168 guns. These numbers were misleading; La Marmora admitted that only half his troops could properly be called soldiers at all. Cadets with less than two months’ training were sent to front-line companies. Desertion rates were high. Few of the divisional generals had any combat experience. An idea of the army’s readiness can be gleaned from the fact that many officers flatly refused to believe their king would lead them into war in high summer. Even in camp, senior officers dressed like dandies in linen suits and silk cravats – a scandalised Prussian envoy called them ‘voluptuous neckties’.

The King refused to clarify the command structure, rivalries among senior generals were not resolved, and communications were bad. Victor Emanuel tried to impose an incompetent chief of staff; when this proved impossible, he gave the position to La Marmora, already prime minister and foreign minister, but denied him full authority. The King and La Marmora took up their command only three days before Italy declared war. While there was no real battle plan, the idea was for a three-pronged attack. La Marmora would lead 12 divisions (some 120,000 men) across the River Mincio – marking the border with Venetia – towards the fortresses of the so-called Quadrilateral (Mantua, Peschiera, Verona and Legnano). His most talented general, Cialdini, was a hundred kilometres to the east, poised to lead eight divisions across the River Po, outflanking the Quadrilateral. Garibaldi would lead his volunteers into the Tyrol, where the Austrians had 16,000 men.

While La Marmora crossed the Mincio, Garibaldi led his volunteers up the western side of Lake Garda. Albrecht astonished the Italians by taking the offensive in the centre. La Marmora had made no defensive plans. The armies clashed at Custoza on 24 June. It was a messy collision along a ridge of rolling hills. La Marmora – leading only five and a half divisions – did not know the Austrians’ location or strength. Many soldiers had not eaten for two days. Disoriented and demoralised, whole units surrendered at a jog, abandoning the wounded. The King tried in vain to rally his men, who doffed their hats as they ran away from the Polish Lancers, ignoring his appeals. Dispersal and collapse of morale were the problem, not casualties, for only 725 Italians died at Custoza: far fewer than the Austrian losses.

The King, La Marmora and Cialdini formed a bizarre trio, acting ‘as though they could not order one another to do things; they just “requested” or “urgently begged” for action’. The situation could have been retrieved if Cialdini had crossed the Po, but he pulled back. The two parts of the army hardly co-ordinated with each other, let alone with the naval operations or Garibaldi. Panicking, the King and La Marmora retreated 50 kilometres and ordered Garibaldi to fall back. The great basin of the River Po was there for the taking, but Albrecht’s priority was to strengthen the front against Prussia. Some 60,000 men were transferred to Bohemia. By failing to exploit their victory, the Austrians let Italy profit from a war that it had already lost.

While Victor Emanuel and his generals tried to grasp what had gone wrong and wrestled over the post of chief of staff (honourably vacated by La Marmora), the Austrian commander in the north asked permission to seek an armistice. Vienna refused, and looked how to bring more reinforcements from Italy. When the Prussians won a clinching victory at Sadowa on 3 July, the road to Vienna lay open. Austria reacted by pulling its remaining forces out of Italy, and Bismarck told Victor Emanuel to attack at once. The price of refusal, he made clear, might include an unfavourable territorial settlement.

Napoleon III feared that Austria would not emerge strong enough to counterbalance Bismarck’s Germany. On 4 July he urged Victor Emanuel to end the war. Picking up Austria’s offer from 12 June, he promised that the Italians would get Venetia as a gift from France, but not the south Tyrol or Trieste. The Austrians welcomed this chance to hang the albatross of Venetia around Napoleon’s neck.

For a king bent on a glorious campaign to unify his country, every outcome proffered humiliation. Failure to obey Bismarck could lead to a settlement that reflected all too faithfully his performance on the battlefield. If he obeyed Bismarck and attacked, he risked losing Napoleon’s favour. At best, Italy would receive Venetia without conquering it – an ‘intolerable’ outcome, in La Marmora’s judgement. As a sop to Bismarck, Cialdini launched a limited operation across the Po on 5 July, and Garibaldi’s volunteers were let off the leash.

Unexpectedly, the cabinet asserted itself: Italy should prosecute the war with maximum force, creating facts on the ground to shape the settlement that Bismarck would soon impose. As well as Venetia and the south Tyrol, the army should make a grab for Istria. For without Istria, the new prime minister, Baron Ricasoli, said, ‘We shall always have Austria as master of the Adriatic. It is right to profit from this occasion – not so much rare as unique – to undo every interference by Austria in the Adriatic.’ Ricasoli told Cialdini that they must fight the Austrians in Venetia or be accused of bad faith; then they would be in no position to demand the south Tyrol. Admiral Persano, commanding the navy, was instructed absurdly to put to sea, sink the Austrian fleet and occupy Istria within a week. For the Austrians might be forced to make peace any day now; whenever this happened, the Italians would have to stop. They could not count on getting any territory that they had not conquered.