Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The garden’s architecture was formal. Brick walls, battered by time and the salty air, surrounded it. Pergolas supported on ancient columns and draped with wisteria traversed it. There were flights of steps, a wrought-iron screen overlooking the lagoon, a gazebo at the centre, paths paved in red and white and edged with hedges as low and fine-clipped as garlands. “We passed through a sequence of adjoining rooms, rooms of box, of hornbeam, of myrtle, of laurel, of honeysuckle.” He would bring his pilot and beloved friend Miraglia here after some of their most hair-raising flights, to meditate and to allow the adrenalin to subside.

  Miraglia was the first of the young comrades-in-arms whom d’Annunzio, during the war years, was to befriend, to idealise and eventually to mourn. His relationships with these young men were emotionally intense. He himself freely used the word “love” to describe his feelings for them. He appreciated their beauty; he revered their courage; he basked in their admiration. They were sons more satisfactory than the ones he had actually fathered, fellow warriors who renewed his youth by accepting his friendship, sacrificial victims whose bodies he could cast into the flames of war.

  At the northern end of the Contarini garden, steps lead down to a wrought-iron grille which affords a view across the Lagoon to the cemetery island of San Michele. There d’Annunzio and Miraglia used to sit, the latter in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. On one occasion a woman (perhaps Miraglia’s mistress, perhaps one of d’Annunzio’s) was with them, coyly asking them to compare her beauty with that of a water lily in the marble basin. On another Miraglia, who had learnt from d’Annunzio to appreciate the “poetry of the extreme Orient” and whom d’Annunzio repeatedly describes as looking like a bronze Buddha or a bonze (a Buddhist monk), composed an approximation of a haiku as he watched a white butterfly settling on the rusty screen. “Its wings still flutter/Already it has landed.” A few months later, when Miraglia was buried on the island of San Michele, d’Annunzio would reflect that the lines might have made a fitting epitaph for him, but that the memory of his subtle smile had been darkened by the “severity of his fate.” Gardens and butterflies, Japanese verse and subtle smiles were all very well as private pleasures, but for the duration of the war, rigor and severity would be the key notes of d’Annunzio’s public utterances. Venice was in peril. D’Annunzio went one night to a scruffy little pensione frequented by artists and intellectuals who had volunteered to act as air-raid wardens, protecting the marvellous city. There the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero was playing the music to which he had set d’Annunzio’s play Sogno d’un Tramonto d’Autunno (Dream of an Autumn Sunset). One of the audience reports that “the room, which was horrible, and the piano, which was worse, upset the musician, who played badly,” but d’Annunzio was gracious, and made a lifelong friend of Malipiero, a fellow enthusiast for early music in general and Monteverdi in particular.

  Before he left Italy in 1910, d’Annunzio had been calling upon his government to form an air force. Slowly they did so. In Libya in 1911 planes were used, initially for reconnaissance and then in actual combat. Marinetti, who was there, wrote of one of the pilots: “Higher, more handsome than the sun, Captain Piazza soared, his bold, sharp-edged face chiselled by the wind, his little moustache crazy with will.” In Libya the first ever aerial bomb was dropped on Turkish troops. Marinetti waxes ferociously enthusiastic as he describes wings “slicing brutally” through the halo of the sunset and a pilot singing as he opens fire on the “torrential sea” of the enemy army. D’Annunzio celebrated Piazza in one of his Songs on the war.

  From 1914 onwards, people all over Europe, dismayed by the horrors of modern mechanised war, fixed on the exploits of the pilots as evidence that one aspect at least of the ghastly conflict allowed scope for gallantry. D. H. Lawrence, watching a zeppelin over London, had apocalyptic visions of “light bursting in flashes to burn away the earth.” This was terrible, but at least, unlike the wasteland of mud and decomposing body parts and trashed towns which was the Western Front, it was brilliant and grand. At high altitude, wrote d’Annunzio, “nothing mean or fearful can survive.” The upper air was the domain of heroes, and a dashing show. Miraglia, in helping him to a starring role in it, had given him his heart’s desire.

  We have seen how the two of them overflew Trieste on 7 August 1915. On the twenty-fifth they flew to Grado, passing low over the waters near Monfalcone to drop a bouquet over the spot where the submarine Jalea had sunk, becoming a gigantic iron coffin to the dozens of men drowned in her. On 28 August they were over Trieste for the second time. On 20 September, this time with a different pilot, d’Annunzio took off from Asiago to drop leaflets over Trento, the Austrian enclave in the foothills of the Alps which was one of the territories Italians were most anxious to “redeem.” In October he was in the sky above Gorizia, near to what is now the Slovenian border, which would be a battlefield throughout the war. These flights were bombing raids: they were also important for reconnaissance. At the outset of the war military commanders had sent observers scrambling to the top of church towers in a futile attempt to see the Austrians’ mountain-top positions. D’Annunzio and his fellow aviators were able to bring back far better information.

  On each flight d’Annunzio made notes on the landscape beneath. “The shore is cut like a high-curved saddle.” As he jotted down poetic similes there were bombs beneath his feet. Repeatedly he passed through anti-aircraft fire. On one occasion the damaged plane dropped 1,800 metres before the pilot recovered control. Risking death, he felt intensely alive. “The mocking wave at the enemy gunner; the indifference to the pain in the half-frozen right hand; the mad urge to sing.” He had no desire to protect himself. “Life’s value is that of a spear to be thrown.” All that mattered was the next planned sortie, and that was “everything.”

  Back on the ground he frequently dined at Montin’s, usually in company with assorted writers, artists, journalists—almost all of them in uniform now. He was particularly partial to the chef’s zabaglione.

  “One does not advertise ideas as though they were laxatives or toothpaste,” said the Emperor Karl, last of the Hapsburg Emperors of Austria-Hungary—a mistaken opinion which was one of the contributory causes of his own downfall and the disintegration of an empire which had endured (in various forms) for a millennium. D’Annunzio knew better.

  Advertising was a fast-growing cultural phenomenon of the early twentieth-century world and the most acute artists were already employing its techniques and questioning its strategies. In Paris, Braque and Picasso were incorporating adverts into their collages. In Trieste, when the war started, a language teacher named James Joyce was working on an immense novel based, like d’Annunzio’s Maia, on Homeric epic, whose hero is a seller of small ads. D’Annunzio was well aware that the things of the mind—whether poems or political programmes—needed to be marketed every bit as energetically as material merchandise, and he had no compunction about employing all of advertising’s tricks for the purpose. He used public readings to promote his poetry: he turned his political speeches into bookselling opportunities. When his Life of Cola di Rienzo was being published in Tom Antongini’s journal, d’Annunzio, anxious about sales, had urged Antongini to pay more attention to publicity. “Why don’t you ‘hustle’ your review?” he asked. “Take an example from TOT.” (TOT was a remedy for indigestion.)

  Advertisers use the military word “campaign.” D’Annunzio’s war-making was real and deadly. But it was also a “campaign” in the advertisers’ sense of the word. Flying, he was flyering. The conventional phrase “theatre of war” was one which he was sophisticated enough to take literally. His flight over Trieste was the first of a sequence of exploits—part performances, part acts of derring-do—with which d’Annunzio demonstrated how close acting (as in staging a show) is to action (as in violence). He knew that winning sympathy was as important as winning redoubts, that small-scale acts of terrorism could have a bigger effect than massed attacks, and that an army fights not only on its stomach but on
its convictions.

  Dropping pamphlets over Trieste he was applying a double strategy of menace and cajolement which he would employ repeatedly. The text was an attempt at persuasion. The act of dropping it (and so demonstrating how easy it would have been to bomb the city) was a threat. As his pilot Miraglia banked and turned, d’Annunzio looked down at the grandiose white stone buildings around the waterfront piazza and inwardly vowed: “We shall not harm them” (he was still the conservationist), but the implied meaning of his “action” was, precisely, that harm them he might.

  Around dawn on 19 September 1915, the day before his flight over Trento, d’Annunzio dreamt he was in a plane crash, and that his thigh was sliced open from hip to knee, laying open the muscles, veins and tendons.

  He had listed the things he needed to take with him. The usual aviator’s leathers and fur-lined boots, plus woollen dressing gown, woollen pyjamas, woollen underclothes and socks—d’Annunzio was the human salamander and he was going to spend the night in a military base in the mountains where adequate heating could not be relied upon. Dressing case with soap and so forth, clothes brush, beard brush (he no longer needed a brush for the hair on his head), shoe-cleaning kit, jars of face powder. Now that he was constantly in the public eye appearances mattered and he kept them up assiduously. Ugo Ojetti confirms that when addressing the troops he did so “powdered and perfumed.” He had redeemed Duse’s two immense emeralds from the London bank to which he had pawned them, and wore them always in rings on his right hand, and a fellow officer was amused to notice how his shiny high-heeled boots twinkled as he clambered into a plane. His enemies seized on the unmanly care he took over his grooming. An Austrian wartime cartoon shows him as a raddled woman in a gauzy negligee, powdering his nose at a dressing table laden with cosmetics.

  His son Gabriellino and the captain of the Impavido, by now a close friend, accompanied him in the motorboat to Mestre (Venice’s mainland port) where his car and driver awaited him. He was driven along the Brenta Canal, passing the gardens and villas he had explored with Duse and described in Fire, and he felt a wave of nostalgia for the richness of peacetime life. In Vicenza he stopped to go shopping. (Had something been left off the list?) He was recognised and a crowd gathered to cheer him as he proceeded on his way.

  The road wound up into the mountains, the long motor car negotiating the precipitous bends with difficulty. At Asiago, d’Annunzio was received by officers and escorted to the airfield in an alpine meadow, where he tried out the plane waiting for him. Tiny, a flimsy frame held together by steel cords and covered only with canvas, it pleased him. He would have nothing in front of him but the machine gun. He fired a few test rounds. He had brought pamphlets attached to little sandbags, and red, white and green streamers. He and Beltramo, his new pilot, talked seriously about how to avoid getting the streamers tangled in the propellers, or in the steel rods of the plane’s armature. He noticed the tiny mauve flowers growing in the closely mown grass.

  That night, dining in the mess, he proposed a toast to the assembled officers, asking them to receive him, not as a speaker, but as a soldier on active service. Nonetheless, at great length and with unmistakable pleasure in his own fluency, he spoke.

  The following afternoon, after hours of waiting on the weather, he took his seat in the plane. Cameras were clicking and snapping. Everything d’Annunzio did provided useful images for propaganda, and thrilling stories for the press. Photographers were as essential to these exercises as the pilots and mechanics were. He and Beltramo flew up through cloud, and then into a head wind. On the peaks beneath them pointed rocks stood like the columns of primitive temples, or Nibelungen castles. Passing the notebook back over his shoulder to the pilot, d’Annunzio had—unusually for him—a moment of vertigo, feeling how easily the book, and by extension the plane and its occupants, might drop into the abyss.

  Safely back on land, having reached Trento and dropped his pamphlets, d’Annunzio addressed the officers at the airfield again. More words, and with many more to follow. The next day he spoke to engineers constructing trenches. Three days later he delivered a harangue to the survivors of a battle in which over a thousand men had been killed. In October he was speaking again, this time at a Mass attended by the royal Duke of Aosta. His major speeches were carefully prepared, and published afterwards in the Corriere della Sera and subsequently all over Italy. Others, toasts proposed to his fellow officers, addresses to crowds who gathered round his car—were delivered ex tempore.

  The themes were constant. Combatants were heroes (and so, depending on his audience, were sappers or mechanics). They were martyrs. They were as noble and constant as the heroes of classical mythology or the legions of ancient Rome. They would never retreat or surrender. Their blood would drench the disputed ground. They owed it to their dead comrades to fight on until all “Greater Italy” was liberated. The dead would haunt them forever if they proved unworthy. They would fight to the death, and so would he. “This we swear, this we will do, for the holy spirit of our dead.”

  He flattered and cajoled. He shamed and inspired. His speeches were incantatory, designed to work, not on their hearers’ intellect, but on their emotions. “Soldiers of Italy, gunners of a great destiny, today begins your heroic symphony, the tremendous symphony of victory and of glory.” If the war was a symphony, his orations, too, were musical compositions full of virtuoso displays and insistent refrains. Words toll through them like leitmotifs—words like blood, dead, glory, love, pain, sacred, victory, Italy, fire—and again blood, dead, Italy, blood, dead, blood. They build slowly, in great hypnotic swells of language, wave after wave of charged rhetoric succeeding each other, crest after crest of rousing calls, culminating at last in great crashing climaxes of acclamation—d’Annunzio’s acclamation of his hearers’ supposed “heroism,” their acclamation of his hero status.

  Italy’s opponent was its neighbour and “hereditary enemy,” the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had, within living memory, ruled over much of the Italian peninsula. (Italy’s declaration of war against Germany didn’t come until August 1916.) For most Italians the Great War was, first and foremost, a war of Italian liberation.

  The Hapsburg army was manned by the Empire’s subject peoples. Many of the troops whom the Italians faced were Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, the people who, after the war’s end, would form the state of Yugoslavia. The line of battle ran all the way along the border for some 600 kilometres from the Swiss frontier down to the Adriatic coast west of Trieste. Inland the Italians were fighting in the mountainous region to the south of the Alps which the Austrians called the Tyrol and Italians Trento, or the Alto Adige. In the mountains the peaks were snowbound even in August. Soldiers were given inadequate boots. The first consignments had cardboard uppers and wooden soles: frostbite was almost unavoidable. Before they even came under fire, men lost their feet. At the southern end of the line the disputed territory included the coastal plane of Friuli, cut by rivers which flood in winter, forming—turn by turn—useful lines of defence or insuperable obstacles.

  The major battlefield was the Carso (now Karst), a limestone upland stretching inland from Trieste, eastward into Slovenia and northward towards the Alps. Deeply eroded, it is riddled with fissures and caverns, its upper surface pitted, its lower layers such a baffling complex of sharp rock and deep holes that it has been likened to a petrified sponge. Water drains through it in underground rivers, which d’Annunzio repeatedly used rhetorically. The Carso, he said, was “greedy for blood.”

  There is no constant water supply on the plateau, but there are floods which fill the potholes with liquid mud. A griddle in summer, where men were blinded by the glare off the rock and parched by the lack of spring water, in winter it became a treacherous three-dimensional maze of snowdrifts and crevasses and red mud. Swept by a wind ferocious enough to have its own name, the Bora, the Carso is an inhospitable terrain for any purpose. For trench warfare it is hellish. Unable to dig, troops hacked shallow grooves
in the rock or sheltered behind loosely constructed dry-stone walls, often no more than knee height. A bursting shell filled the air with shards of broken rock.

  All along the line the Italians were attacking, nearly all the time, uphill, on slopes that only a properly equipped mountaineer would now consider climbing. They advanced by scrambling up forty-degree inclines carrying packs that weighed thirty kilos, often slipping and slithering back down twenty or thirty metres of desperately hard-won slope. This war was horrific both in its primitivism and its modernity. D’Annunzio, in his Francesca da Rimini, had dwelt with relish on the horrid machinery of mediaeval warfare. Now men were killing and being killed with implements that were equally crude, equally grotesque. Blades mounted on iron wheels, spiked maces, fireballs made of resin and bitumen. Newer technology added to the horror. Isolated peaks were mined and blown to smithereens. Poison gas left whole companies dead in their holes. The Italians scrambled upward into a hailstorm of grenades.

  The landscape was infernal. The war fought in it was made even more murderous by human stupidity. When the Germans dug in on the Western Front, Lord Kitchener confessed he was baffled. None of the conventional theories could help him: “This isn’t war.” The Italian commander-in-chief, General Cadorna, was faced with an even more intractable problem. His Austrian opponents had also adopted defensive positions, but theirs were on the peaks and ridges of mountain ranges. Cadorna simply ignored the problem, ordering attack after attack against entrenched mountain-top positions defended by barbed wire. Discipline was rigorous. On freezing nights men were tied up and left outside for minor breaches of discipline. “Ordinary soldiers,” wrote a conscript condemned to six months’ imprisonment for complaining about conditions, “were treated worse than beasts.” In the opening months of the war officers led from the front, brandishing useless swords: only in January 1916 did an order go out permitting them to bring up the rear, as Austrian officers did, with revolvers at the ready to shoot deserters. The men advanced in close order, presenting the Austrian machine guns with a conveniently easy target. “It looked,” said an Austrian officer, of one of their advances, “like an attempt at mass suicide.”