by Gay Talese
No less than 167 soldiers were executed for committing mutiny and other acts of insubordination in 1916. This was a hundred-man increase over the number shot for similar offenses in 1915. Appalled by the ongoing violations of patriotic duty, General Cadorna endorsed the execution of 359 soldiers in 1917, but he still did not get the results he desired. The army of 1917 was no better than the army of 1916.
There were many Italian soldiers who fought heroically, but their valor was likely due less to discipline or patriotism than to what had always motivated men in danger—the will to survive. All combative nations forced their young men to bear arms, to confront one another and live or die on the battlefield; and some lived, some died, and some ran. The determining factor had little to do with national propaganda or love of country, and much to do with good eyesight, fast triggers, and trench loyalty. The men who fought hard did so to save themselves and their buddies. The number of miles gained in battle was almost incidental, though usually gratifying. But for every mile gained by the Italians, their route being primarily uphill and perilous, thousands were killed or maimed, and those who survived rarely understood why they were fighting, except to survive. The ground gained was mostly rocky and infertile. Italy already had enough mountains without seizing more from Austria. If Italian soldiers could have imagined that they often risked their lives for territory that in future decades would be most suitable for ski resorts, their patriotic zeal, such as it was, would have diminished further.
Still, in 1916 and 1917, Italian soldiers were ordered uphill, again and again; and those who disobeyed were often executed, and those who obeyed were often cut down by enemy howitzers or machine guns, or by rock slides caused by bombardments, or by avalanches of snow that buried and froze them until spring—when their corpses would be discovered along the melting mountainsides, stiffened in the same positions and attitudes that they had assumed as they perished.
Soldiers advancing across mountain streams often stepped on bodies of men who had drowned there weeks and months before; and when food and ammunition were sent by cable car to units fighting on the peaks, the perforated containers of the teleferica would usually return carrying dead or wounded soldiers, their blood reddening the ropes, their bodies swaying in the sky and inviting additional target practice from Austrian riflemen crouched along the cliffs.
Unrestricted German submarine warfare sank many Allied ships transporting supplies desperately needed by the Italian nation; and the bread riots of Italian women on the home front, no less than an Austrian assault north of Lombardy and continued political bickering in Rome, caused the frustrated Antonio Salandra to resign as prime minister and brought renewed cries for the ouster of Cadorna.
But the Italian army’s ability to drive out the Austrians in the north, and also to move eastward and capture the fortress city of Gorizia, temporarily saved the career of the general, even though he continued to subject his units to massive losses. More than 90,000 Italians were killed and wounded in the campaign north of Lombardy—a casualty figure forty percent higher than that of the Austrians. The taking of Gorizia, east of the Isonzo River, resulted in 48,000 Italian deaths and injuries, more than double the total for the Austrians. One Italian injured at Gorizia was Antonio Cristiani.
Antonio was knocked unconscious by the explosions around the trench in which he and his fellow infantrymen were gathered, about to join an uphill charge. His friend Conti, with whom he had served in the reconnaissance patrol, was killed in this barrage of machine-gun fire, mortars and heavy artillery. Bleeding from internal injuries caused by shattered rocks and bits of shrapnel, Antonio was carried by two soldiers into a medical station in a cave, and was then transported downhill via teleferica to a wagon crowded with fallen troops bound for the base hospital. There he slowly recovered from his wounds and the concussion, high fevers, and, later, pneumonia; during several weeks of convalescence, in which he regularly drifted in and out of consciousness, he saw dozens of soldiers dying around him, soldiers who prior to death received an ersatz form of extreme unction from crucifix-bearing medics in dark suits impersonating priests.
There were never enough clergymen in the battle zones to administer the last rites to those with fatal injuries, and during much of the war the Vatican seemed tentative about the secular role it should play with the two belligerent Catholic nations. If Pope Benedict XV was privately partial to the Austrians, as many Catholics on both sides suggested, it was perhaps understandable, given the contrast between the Hapsburg crown’s history of homage to the Church and the seizure of the Papal States by the Italian leaders of the Risorgimento—led by the Pope-baiting Garibaldi. Even the passage of nearly fifty years had failed to heal the rift between the Italian government and the Vatican. The papacy had yet to recognize officially the nation of Italy.
By the late summer of 1917, however, as more and more Catholic soldiers on both sides continued to die, to the detriment of the Church’s international solidarity as well as its numerical strength, Benedict XV finally did speak out against the war and volunteered to mediate a peace based “not on violence but on reason.” But Italy would declare war on Germany, which Austria had summoned for assistance after the Italian capture of Gorizia; and the Germans in 1917 were in no mood to stop a war they thought they could win. While the United States had recently joined the Allies, the Germans believed that the Anglo-French forces on the western front would collapse before the American presence in Europe could save them—the British, for example, had suffered nearly six hundred thousand casualties in the Passchendaele offensive; for every yard of ground gained, fifty-six British soldiers were killed or wounded—and on the eastern front the Russian army was stalled by combat fatigue and undermined by the armistice-seeking Bolsheviks, who were rising to political power in the wake of the czar’s abdication. If the Pope’s peace initiative, made public in August 1917, had any influence on the war, it was probably to the disadvantage of General Cadorna, for it provided Italian men who had no stomach for battle with an added excuse for laying down their arms. This was particularly true among soldiers from the south and Sicily, where the influence of the Church was strongest, and where even heretics and agnostics now might attribute their desertion or draft-dodging to a belated spark of religiosity.
So the Italian army’s sick list became longer in the war zones, while the number of mutineers and deserters increased at the front and at training bases around the nation (in Sicily alone there were twenty thousand military insurrectionists); and there was little General Cadorna could do except continue his policy of executions, which he did, and make life so miserable for the ambulatory but allegedly ill rearline troops that they soon would welcome the front as an escape from the excruciating labor and demeaning drudgery that he summarily ordered upon them.
Since Antonio was legitimately incapacitated and hospitalized during this period, he was not subjected to such attention; and as a consequence, in October 1917 he avoided the possibility of being sent to Caporetto. In this he was fortunate. For the battle of Caporetto would prove to be Italy’s most horrible and humiliating experience of the entire war.
It began early in the morning on October 24, a day of thick mist and heavy rain that on the mountaintops was turning to snow. The town of Caporetto was situated along the upper part of the Isonzo River, far north of where the Italian and Austrian armies had conducted most of their mountain and waterside warfare in the previous twenty-nine months. General Cadorna had not been expecting a big attack in the vicinity of Caporetto, believing that the narrowness of the land between the mountains, and the difficulty in crossing the river, which in those parts flows in a deep gorge, would make a powerful widespread thrust by the enemy impractical and unlikely. So he left it minimally defended, and the Italian troops he posted there were generally exhausted and undermotivated. Many had seen considerable combat in the past and had not received furloughs in nearly a year.
A number of soldiers in these units were Socialists, it was later rumored, a f
ew of whom had actually sneaked over into the enemy camp and fraternized with Austrian Socialists; and such men were said to have spread subversive propaganda within their ranks to escalate disobedience and sabotage the war effort. The Italian troops were reminded that their nation had been the aggressor against Austria; unlike France and Belgium, Italy had not been invaded, and yet in 1915 it had violated the northern borders and initiated hostilities against the Austrians.
In any case, the war had now gone on too long; on this point most soldiers could agree. Many Italians had actually thought the war would end four or five weeks before, in mid-September 1917, as their officers had optimistically predicted, after General Cadorna’s attacking forces had captured the Bansizza Plateau, south of Caporetto along the Isonzo. But this triumph of dubious significance, which was also the eleventh extensive clash between the two armies in the area since the war began, brought peace no closer and cost the Italians 40,000 dead and 108,000 wounded. The futility of their efforts in the Bansizza campaign had a demoralizing effect on the surviving Italian troops in the autumn of 1917, and doubtless was a factor in the lack of esprit de corps that characterized their performance against the retaliating Austrians and their German allies at Caporetto.
On the eve of the attack, on the high ridges that the Austrians controlled miles below the peaks of the Julian Alps northeast of the Isonzo, the Germans made the final preparations for the launching of 894 projectiles containing poison gas, a mixture of phosgene and chlorine that they intended to lob upon the Italian contingents controlling Caporetto. For weeks the Germans had been slipping down quietly into this area from the highlands behind them, and at the time of the attack six German divisions had joined seven Austrian divisions to form the new Fourteenth German Army, under the command of Germany’s General Otto von Below, who had been transferred from the western front.
The Italian failure to detect this buildup was due to its insufficient air reconnaissance as well as to the adroit precautions of the enemy; and the fact that the attack itself caught the Italians completely by surprise can be attributed to the heavy mist that prevailed on the morning of October 24. The Italians could not see what was coming until it was too late to respond to it effectively; and they were not only outnumbered but ill equipped to combat the gas brigades who exploded shells all around them. Hundreds of Italians died within seconds. Thousands of others retreated in panic, struggling for breath while trapped between the river and high slopes of the mountain that prevented the gas from dissipating. Even those Italians wearing gas masks did not survive. Either the respirators malfunctioned, or other aspects of the design proved to be vulnerable to the lethal compound spread by the Germans. Although chemical warfare had been used on the western front by the Anglo-French forces as well as the Germans, this was Italy’s first experience with it in battle, and countless Italians died in a state of delirious bewilderment.
General von Below’s army meanwhile penetrated Caporetto, not only overwhelming the Italian frontline with gas, machine guns, and artillery, but routing the second line as well, and thus nullifying the Italians’ capacity to counterattack and also to communicate, since the telephone system was totally destroyed. The commanding officer whom General Cadorna had placed in charge of the area had left his post four days before the assault because of illness, but the single fact of his absence or presence mattered little against the combination of factors that thwarted the Italians. They were largely beaten from the start. The men were tired and apathetic, underarmed and underfed—the latter conditions exacerbated by the Germans’ submarine success against Allied shipping into Italy.
Spearheading the Caporetto invasion were blitzkrieg specialists, elite German troops recently trained in ground tactics that were novel in their ferocity, and that would prove equally effective against Italy’s allies the next year on the western front near Saint-Quentin. The front-running Germans at Caporetto had been selected for their speed, stamina, and steadfastness. They would race boldly ahead and create havoc with their blasting guns while their opponents were still swooning and choking from the gas. Supporting the German advance guard were heavy rear guns that fulminated deafeningly, but at short range and for limited lengths of time; the artillerymen wished to shatter the defenders without unduly destroying the terrain and scorching the atmosphere and the surroundings through which the fleet German frontline would soon be passing. Speed and surprise, not heavy and continuous bombardment, were favored in this strategy. The main mission of the forging units was to move ahead unhesitatingly and to penetrate deeply, to level whatever opposition stood in front of them, but not to widen the attack, or to mop up those staggered defenders who might be lingering along the sidelines, or to engage the Italian soldiers who might be shooting down from the nearby hills. This would be the responsibility of the masses of regular Austro-German infantry who were moving quickly behind, providing the knockout punch to the wider surface that had been cut through the middle by their predecessors.
As a result of these tactics many Italian soldiers stationed in the hills suddenly saw the enemy in front and behind, and their ability to defend themselves depended on the amount of ammunition they had with them in the highlands. Since they were cut off from added sources of supply, and frequently cut off as well from telephone contact with their superiors, they were left in perplexed isolation and chaos. This had been the fate of several Alpino units who, before the seizure of Caporetto, believed they could dominate the area from their higher vantage point. But with the startling appearance of the German vanguard pouncing through the misty morning, followed by the regular infantry advancing behind clouds of flying bullets and floating poison, the marooned Alpini found themselves desperately on the defensive. They fought as long and as courageously as they could. After their ammunition ran out, they hurled rocks down upon the Austro-German soldiers who were climbing up to eliminate them. Finally the Italians were reduced to fighting with knives and rifle butts. Such deterrents against their heavily armed pursuers, however, were futile. The Alpini died almost to a man.
Those Italians who did not die on the hills or on the plateau from bullets, shell blasts, or gas—and who did not abandon their units, or join them in the orderly retreat that General Cadorna was compelled to command—usually surrendered to the enemy quickly and compliantly, happy to be alive. Territory that had taken the Italians two years to conquer, including the town of Gorizia, was lost within hours as the breakthrough at Caporetto soon destabilized the entire Italian front. General Cadorna could not push up reserve troops from the rear because the narrow roads between the mountains ahead were jammed with retreating troops and pack animals, trucks and ambulances. The frantic and uncontrollable scene would be re-created by Ernest Hemingway in his novel A Farewell to Arms. Von Below’s army overran the Italian military headquarters at Udine, west of the Isonzo, five days after the invaders’ initial drive. King Victor Emmanuel III had often traveled from his villa outside Udine to visit the Italian front in happier days, early in the war—“the King pass[es] in his motor car … his face and little long necked body and gray beard like a goat’s chin tuft,” wrote Hemingway—but he was long gone from the ancient city as the Austro-Germans arrived on October 29, having crossed the path that had been used some fourteen centuries before by Attila and his Hun warriors on their way to burn and plunder Aquileia and other Roman cities on the Venetian plains. In fact, many injured but uncaptured Italians later claimed that as von Below’s ferocious troops crushed through their line, they were shouting loudly and in unison: “Roma! Roma! Roma!”
By the end of the month, the German vanguard had gotten twenty miles past Udine and driven Cadorna’s defenders back to the Tagliamento River. Nearly 40,000 Italians had already been killed or wounded, and 250,000 had been taken prisoner. One young German lieutenant leading an attacking unit had himself captured 8,000 Italians in a single day, while his unit suffered less than a dozen casualties in the whole campaign. His name was Erwin Rommel. The fleeing Italians left twenty-f
ive hundred artillery pieces in place, and tons of food and clothing supplies. Much of what had not been sunk earlier by German submarines now fell into the hands of the German foot soldiers entering abandoned depots. In Rome, angry politicians in parliament demanded and accepted the resignation of the man who the year before had replaced Salandra as prime minister—Paolo Boselli, whom one colleague described as heading “the ministry of weakness simulating strength.” Boselli was replaced by the minister of the interior, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, who had been christened in honor of the current king’s grandfather, the crown head of the Risorgimento. Trying to bring unity and revive discipline in a nation stunned by defeat and despair, King Victor Emmanuel III urged in a public statement: “Citizens and soldiers, be a single army. All cowardice is treachery, all discord is treachery.” The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Milan newspaper editor he so profoundly influenced, Benito Mussolini, expressed similar sentiments. Mussolini, Socialist turned interventionist, had served in the army until February 1917—when, while operating a faulty grenade thrower during a training exercise, he killed five of his fellow soldiers and was hospitalized with forty fragments. Released from the army, he resumed editing Il Popolo d’Italia; and with the continued failings at the front after the fall of Caporetto, he increased his denunciation of the quality of the army’s leaders and the disloyalty fomented at home by his former companions the Socialists. What Italy needed, in his private view, was not a squabbling, impotent parliament but rather a single powerful figure, a dictator who could militarize the nation and restore pride to the Italian people.