The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (9 page)

He could have added a second law of history: in Italy, the pro-war minority takes no serious interest in the military calculus (tasks-to-resources) that determines actual performance on the battlefield. It was a law that General Cadorna learned the hard way in 1915.

Source Notes
THREE
Free Spirits

1
‘
For almost thirty years
’: Woodhouse, 240.

2
an exchange from summer 1904
: Woodhouse, 218, 219.

3
he was thrilled by the Libyan campaign
: Woodhouse, 263, 264.

4
‘
in a species of lyric frenzy
’: According to Thomas Page, the US ambassador to Italy.

5
did not even mention D’Annunzio or his speech
: O’Brien [2004], 57.

6
‘
a new species of
“
free spirits
”’: O’Brien [2004], 57.

7
He drafted a manifesto on the
‘
profound antithesis
’: O’Brien [2004], 32

8
Mussolini was latently pro-intervention:
O’Brien [2004], 34.

9
A former comrade in the Socialist Party later alleged
: Rossi.

10
Mussolini waited to be called up
: O’Brien [2004], 68.

11
‘
The people’s heart is never in any war
’: Mussolini, 59–60, 110, 111.

1 
Here is a wartime propagandist’s hilarious account: ‘Almost in voluntary exile, and rapt in his sublime visions, he seemed to have forgotten his beautiful fatherland. But no, as soon as the first signs of the new dawn appeared in the skies of the fatherland, he arose proudly and his heart inflamed his mind with a shudder of love, and he ran to the breast of the great Mother.’ Did the author, Stefania Türr, pen this passage before, after, or even while being pleasured by the Bard? 

2 
Colossal statues of mythical twins Castor and Pollux, on horseback, in the piazza in front of the Quirinale palace, then the residence of the royal family, now the seat of the President of the Republic.  

3 
During the war, 162,563 soldiers were court-martialled for desertion and 101,685 were found guilty. Either Mussolini made up the figure of 535,000 on the spot, or he referred to the propaganda myth – discussed in a later chapter – that most of the 600,000 Italian prisoners of war, taken by the Austrians and Germans, were ‘deserters’.  

FOUR

Cadorna’s Clenched Fist

The Commander stands for the virtues of
wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and
strictness
.

S
UN
T
ZU
,
Art of War
(
c
. 512 bc)

Who is Cadorna? What has he done that
Italy’s destiny should be placed in his hands?

C
OLONEL
G
IULIO
D
OUHET
, J
ULY
1916

Of the cadets at military academy in 1866, none was marked by the botched campaign against Austria more strongly than Luigi Cadorna (b. 1850). His father, Count Raffaele, who led the hopeless lunge to Trieste that summer, always warned his son that splitting the army leadership led to disaster. He clenched his fist to show what the command should look like. Repeating the gesture for the last time in 1897, on his deathbed, he gave it the aura of a sacred decree.

Young Luigi was destined for a career in uniform. Civilian life ended in his tenth year, when he was enrolled at the military college in his home city of Turin. Discipline was harsh, but Luigi had less trouble with the occasional nights in a solitary confinement cell than with the regular syllabus. Maths and history were particularly challenging. He was a complex boy: resolute, opinionated, incorruptible, studious, touchy, unforgiving and unsociable, physically robust, never brilliant, yet able to shine through diligence. These characteristics became more marked as he grew. Nothing seemed easy for him, yet his potential was widely noticed. Those who knew him well said his remoteness was due to timidity. Others saw pride or arrogance as the root.

After graduating, he was attached to the general staff. Promotion was steady, not remarkable. Captain in 1880, major three years later, colonel in 1892, major general in 1898, lieutenant general in 1904. He gained a reputation for ferocious discipline and inflexibility. The Ministry of War once wanted a young man in his regiment to take the officers’ training course. Cadorna demurred: the man was one centimetre shorter than the minimum height required. The ministry insisted. So did Cadorna: if we start making exceptions, where will it end? When the ministry approved the exceptional admission, Cadorna asked if this authorisation was in fact an order? Colleagues thought he was his own worst enemy, fated by temperament never to reach the highest rank. His caustic comments about Giolitti and strong dislike of the Masonic lodges (influential among the Italian élite) were other indiscretions that boded ill for Cadorna’s career.

His Catholic faith was central in his life, yet relations with the Church were often difficult, partly because his father had led the army that liberated Rome from Papal rule in 1870. Luigi was present as a junior officer in an artillery regiment – his only combat experience before 1915, for he was not sent to Libya. Pride in his father’s achievement and loyalty to the House of Savoy trumped any qualms that he might have felt at this reduction of the Church’s earthly power. His scepticism about professional politicians – fickle, always playing to galleries – was confirmed forever in 1877 when his father learned from the newspapers that he had been retired by the Ministry of War. When it came, the communiqué was disdainfully vague: ‘length of service and reasons of state’. What humiliation! In truth, as everyone knew, the government wanted to dilute the Piedmontese presence in the senior ranks of the army, so that more southerners could be promoted. This would have struck father and son as appallingly short-sighted, for Italy’s only real military tradition came from Piedmont.

When the Chief of the General Staff fell ill in 1906, opening the question of a successor, Cadorna pushed his interest behind the scenes. The vacancy materialised in 1908, and Cadorna was contacted by one of the King’s adjutants. Was it true that he would reject any supervision in the exercise of his command? Cadorna’s views were well known and he stood by them now, but he hotly denied ever having called for the King to lose his position as supreme commander. While he would resist the King’s assumption of operational command in wartime, he never challenged his constitutional supremacy. In practical terms, the chief of the general staff’s power should be absolute, for ‘It is absolutely necessary to avoid any recurrence of the rivalries, and worse, of past wars and especially the war of 1866.’ The fist must be clenched. The imperative of ‘unity of action’ meant that authority and responsibility had to have a single address.

Cadorna’s refusal to veil his opinion, cost what it may, was admirable. Yet his touchiness was hardening into a persecution complex. The manner of his denial, blasting the ‘slanders’ that his candidacy had provoked, told against him. The job went to General Alberto Pollio, who was oil to Cadorna’s vinegar. Cadorna reckoned that Giolitti and Pollio’s Jewish wife had intrigued against him (‘everyone knows how much the Jews meddle and conspire’). To old Piedmontese military stock, liberals and Jews were always suspect.

Even if Cadorna had not felt victimised, he and Pollio were too unlike to have seen eye to eye. Cadorna was inordinately proud of his single contribution to tactical thought, a pamphlet called
Frontal Attack and
Tactical Training
that started life as an article for the Italian military journal in 1888, was revised in 1895 and further amended over twenty years. He shared the blind commitment to compact infantry offensives, regardless of enemy firepower, that was standard doctrine at that time. 

The offensive is profitable and almost always possible, even against mountainous positions that appear to be impregnable, thanks to dead ground that permits (a) advance under cover, (b) deployment towards the flanks or weak points, unseen by the enemy.
1
If the defender holds the crest, he will not see. If he descends to lower ground, his retreat will be very difficult. It is often possible to use diverse lines of fire, obtaining the participation of successive ranks in the attack. 

The campaigns on the Isonzo would expose the fallacies in this passage. Where was the dead ground at the foot of Carso escarpments? What would the Habsburg forces not see from their trenches on the summit ridges? Even if the enemy had to retreat, how would their difficulties compare with those of the Italians, attacking uphill all the way?

There were, he stated, two ways to demoralise and defeat the enemy: ‘superior fire and irresistible forward movement. Of these, the latter is more important (winning means going forward).’ His thinking rested on a truism that hid a tautology: wars are won by offensives, so commanders should go on the offensive. About defensive operations he had nothing to say.

Cadorna sent his pamphlet (3rd edition) to Pollio, whose replies revealed wide differences in their thinking. ‘If the defending infantry is concealed behind trenches or other shelters,’ wrote Cadorna woodenly, ‘the attacker’s artillery will only have a limited impact; but when the infantry advances, the defender must in most cases expose himself if he wants to hit it and the artillery can then take the opportunity to strike the defender with rapid fire.’ 

‘Why so?’ asked Pollio. ‘Don’t any trenches permit fire from close range? If the attacker is very close and the attacking artillery uses indirect fire, the attacking artillery can no longer fire in case it hits its own men.’ When Cadorna ordained that ‘the attacking side must have superior strength in artillery’, Pollio said it all depended on the immediate disposition of forces. ‘One can have twice the artillery, but at the place where one attacks, the defender may very well be stronger.’ Pollio danced around Cadorna like a picador with a stolid, hard- breathing bull.

But it was the picador that died, leaving the bull to get ready for war. He had to start from scratch, for Pollio had not considered operations against Italy’s allies. On 21 August 1914, Cadorna issued a memo randum on fighting the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The south Tyrol salient was well fortified and the Italians lacked the heavy siege artillery for a direct assault, so they would surround the Trentino on three sides and neutralise it with limited incursions. Cadorna’s prime targets were Trieste and Gorizia. After engaging and defeating the bulk of enemy forces, the Italians would surge towards Ljubljana and even Zagreb. The left (or northern) flank would capture the high passes leading to inner Austria. The right (or southern) flank would drive to Trieste, then swing inland to rejoin the principal forces on the Slovenian plains. If he attacked across the middle and upper Isonzo valley before the end of October,
2
he believed he could reach ‘the heart of the Habsburg monarchy’ in a matter of weeks. Either the Italians would steamroll towards Vienna or the Austrians would redeploy substantial forces from Serbia and the Eastern Front to the south-west, in which case Italy would defeat them then and there.

While Cadorna’s concept was in line with strategic planning since the 1880s, his confidence in an easy victory was new. Although he conceded that his army might be ‘paralysed’ by resistance on the Carso, he made no tactical allowance for this possibility. If his optimism was pardonable in August 1914, when Austria’s border with Italy was almost undefended, it was inexcusable in May 1915. 

The government refused to declare a general mobilisation, and Cadorna rejected the Minister of War’s compromise idea of partial mobilisation because no plans existed for that. Salandra pretended to be afraid of provoking a pre-emptive attack; in truth, he was undecided on intervention and the fortunes of war still favoured the Central Powers. Always quick to scorn, Cadorna accused the government of lacking martial spirit. The King told him to back down. On 22 September, Salandra challenged Cadorna to say that the army was ready to take the field and win. Cadorna grudgingly agreed that mobilisation should wait until spring. The moment for a rapid attack had passed; winter was too close.
3

As Sonnino parleyed with Vienna and London, Cadorna prepared the army. Italy’s choice of allies mattered less to him than its commitment to fight; his consternation in early August was professional, to do with the practicalities of dragging the troops back from the French border. And there was so much to do. The army had faced huge challenges since 1866; it had to defend the kingdom, with its long borders, against powerful potential enemies; protect the civil order; help build the new nation; and fight overseas wars. And it had to do these things as the instrument of governments that were almost always unstable and often divided, and of a monarchy that was still widely felt as more Piedmontese than Italian. Overseas wars had brought no glory. Efforts to carve out an empire within a few years, with no experience or expertise, lacking knowledge of their opponents, had led to the colonial disasters of the 1890s, leaving a stain that seemed indelible. The occupation of Libya, though not an outright failure, was an expensive distraction that absorbed more troops than the army could spare.

In summer 1914, Italy’s army was the weakest of any aspiring great power. Decades of high military spending – averaging almost a quarter of the state budget from 1900 to 1914 – had not overcome the deficits of professionalism and equipment. The army was top-heavy with administration and red tape, burdened with ancillary units (doctors, vets, chemists, engineers) far beyond its needs. Procurement and supply problems were endemic. Up to a half of the soldiers were illiterate. The officer corps was badly depleted, lacking as many as 15,000 men. With 27 permanent divisions, Italy’s standing force was about half the size of France’s and Germany’s, and its reserves were much weaker: only 13 divisions could be mobilised for war – about the same size as Britain’s home-defence territorial reserve in July 1914 – compared with Germany’s 44 reserve divisions. The rail network could not meet a modern army’s needs. A decision taken decades earlier to develop fortifications rather than transport had left the country short of track, locomotives and rolling stock. War-games around 1900 had showed Italy losing to Austria in the Trentino and Friuli. As for nation-building, the Piedmontese military had no model for absorbing conscripts from around the country. The most notable step involved mixing troops from different parts of Italy in single brigades. The drawback was that many regional dialects were mutually incomprehensible, and some brigades could not operate without junior officers ‘interpreting’ between their men. 

Pollio had wanted to increase the standing army by 70,000 (to 345,000), modernise the artillery and accelerate the officers’ training. The government rejected these plans as too ambitious and costly. Parliament, controlled by anti-war deputies, still refused to increase military spending, and Cadorna only got the go-ahead for these reforms in October. He quickly moved his people into leading positions; General Vittorio Zupelli proved an effective Minister of War, pushing hard for more rifles and ammunition, though not for artillery or machine guns. The army started the war with sufficient manpower, uniforms, cars, rifles and bullets, but dire shortages of the weapons that mattered most. Only 309 of a notional total of 623 machine-gun sections were ready by mid-May 1915. The artillery was in even worse shape, with most batteries at a quarter strength.

In December 1914, Cadorna told Salandra that the army would not be ready to fight before April. He shared the judgement that Germany could not defeat France. With Serbia still defiant and the Eastern Front locked in attrition, the outlook for the Central Powers was deteriorating. He told a journalist off the record that ‘if another army were thrown into the fray, it would tip the balance’. Italy’s aim, if it were to intervene, should be to smash Austria, in co-ordination with Russia. Sonnino’s imperial vision left him cold, because he realised how costly it would be to secure the eastern Adriatic with its maze of inlets and islands on such a tiny demographic basis. Yet, like the Prime Minister, he was thinking big: Trento and Trieste were springboards for a much greater endeavour, leading towards Vienna. The scale of his ambition made him Salandra’s natural ally.