Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  To her he wrote long accounts of his exploits, but he preferred her letters to be concerned exclusively with “Ordella, Muriella and Pentella” (her nipples and cunt). This was not one of the great loves of d’Annunzio’s life. But the tone of their correspondence suggests that with Olga he enjoyed an uncomplicatedly happy affair, beginning without difficulty and ending without rancour. Olga was “the prize” of his combat, he told her, “the rose” of his war.

  Having established that he could still fly, he remained grounded for months. His bandages made it hard to wear a helmet and goggles. Instead of flying over the lines, he came to know them on foot. In October and November 1916 he visited the battlegrounds over and over again, rising long before dawn to reach the observation posts before the troops’ day had begun, picking his way along boardwalks blocked by corpses, hearing the wounded whimpering and crying out for their mothers, inhaling the odour of death.

  He was present during the fighting on Mount Veliki and Mount Faiti. One-eyed, his balance was disturbed, his ability to judge distances poor. He stumbled over the pitted ground of the Carso. In trenches and tunnels he struggled to stay upright in his heavy nailed boots. Once on Faiti he fell and injured his leg so badly he was sent back to the dressing station, but insisted on returning to the front with a soldier to lead him by the hand. His sight, even in his still-functioning eye, was distorted. By day everything was veiled in a sickly yellow. By night whatever he looked at was ringed with light. He turned the annoyance into a symbol of glory. His comrades, he liked to say, were haloed.

  At the front he was constantly in danger, and passed days on end in circumstances so wretched that he would normally have found them insupportable. He stood in trenches, knee-deep in “dysentery-coloured filth.” He spent the night in foul-smelling caves, his only covering the standard grey-green uniform cloak, sleepless, listening to the scrabbling of rats and the moaning of the wounded. In the cramped dugouts and rocky hollows he was jostled ceaselessly by unwashed men. Worse, he was unwashed himself. “I have accustomed myself to the impossible: I go five days without a change of clothes, without so much as washing my face.” He endured hunger and thirst and extreme cold. He lived in the din of bombardments, and he was happy.

  An officer of the engineers was hit standing beside him. D’Annunzio helped bandage the man’s leg. He went down on his hands and knees in the hole where a badly wounded man had hidden; the man whispered to him that he was his “disciple.” He dreaded nothing except a loss of dignity. To be killed with his mouth full, he thought, would be horrible: to die in the “bestial act” of nourishing the “sad sack” that was his body. Otherwise he was fearless.

  He travelled from battle line to cemetery, from field hospital to base in his new motor car, a grey Fiat 3Ter Torpedo, “as slim and pointed as a little torpedo boat,” addressing men who may not have understood much of what he said, but who responded to the presence of the hero-poet with adulation.

  The soldiers came from all over Italy. In his notebooks d’Annunzio specifies their regional origins. They are Sardinian, or Pugliese, or Tuscan or Sicilian. Each region had sent its tributary stream to the great torrent of sacrificial blood poured out on the harsh rocks of the Carso. In its army, Italy finally appeared to be one. Every foot soldier’s face reminded d’Annunzio of some episode of the heroic past. Each exhausted teenage peasant could be likened to an intrepid Venetian mariner, to a Roman legionary, to a mediaeval knight, to a martial saint recreated by an Italian Renaissance master. His vision of Italy’s glorious past overlaid the ghastly modern conflict like a theatrical gauze, lending a shimmering glamour to the excrement, the din and the heaps of dead boys.

  Officers worried about his being taken prisoner, a tremendous propaganda coup for the other side, but he reassured them. He would never be taken alive. He had his little enamel vial of poison with him at all times. Everywhere he went he was recognised. An order of battle ended with the announcement: “The Great Poet of the New Italy is with us.”

  His notebooks record his serenity and exaltation. Stepping out of the cave in which he had spent the night he found himself in moonlight, and noted his “marvellous feeling.” In the devastated landscapes of foul mud and trees shredded by shellfire he was on the lookout for beauty, noticing the flash of a green woodpecker at an observation post, the shimmer of a blue and silver dragonfly on a hillside where the infantry advanced on their stomachs, crawling past the dead. To him the shells, exploding with sounds like the striking of great bronze cymbals, seemed to signal a dance.

  Looking up at the mountains around, he thought that the pinnacles of rock were like crosses made ready for the crucifixion of thousands upon thousands of Christ-like martyrs, the troops. The young men around him—wretched conscripts or callow young officers alike—were beautiful. He loved them. He rejoiced in the thought that they had been brought here, by him and those like him, so that they might all die.

  By the end of 1916 he had been awarded his second silver medal. He cared about such things. A year earlier he had hinted to Albertini that the latter might, in his turn, hint to General Cadorna that the blue ribbon of a decoration would make a very pretty Christmas present for Italy’s bard. He pestered Antongini, still in Paris, to see what he could do about getting him a Croix de Guerre. He also asked Antongini to translate the citation for his Cross of the Military Order of Savoia for circulation to other nations who might wish (or be prevailed upon to wish) to decorate him, and for publication in Le Figaro and Le Temps. The motive for his medal-hunting was not pure vanity—to some of these honours a stipend was attached.

  D’Annunzio was back in Venice in January 1917, in bed with a fever, when he received a message from the commander-in-chief, Cadorna himself, breaking the news of his mother’s death.

  D’Annunzio’s last sight of Luisa in reality, when he visited Pescara in 1915, had been distressing. He hadn’t seen her for the five years of his sojourn in France and he found her unrecognisable, “a poor, poor, bent, formless thing” who could barely see or hear or speak. When the peasant woman who cared for her had repeatedly told her that Gabriele was there she had lifted her hands and laid them on his head as he knelt before her. The hands were a dead weight. Afterwards he admitted he recoiled from the sight of her, but at the front he repeatedly claimed to have seen visions of her, strong and beautiful, and watching protectively over him. When he had moved away from a battery seconds before it was shelled he claimed afterwards that his mother had taken him by the hand and led him away from danger. Now he received sacks full of telegrams and letters of condolence, from unknown admirers and from powerful ministers of state.

  He rose from his sickbed, and arrived in Pescara (as he had not done for his father) in time to be present at her funeral.

  In May 1917 he began flying again, and in the same month he wrote a long and detailed letter to General Cadorna, laying out his vision of aerial warfare. Hundred-strong squadrons of Italian planes, he wrote, should be bombing the armaments factories of Germany. He had the technical knowledge to back up his suggestions. His proposals went into minute details about bombs and fuel capacity, instruments and wing structure. The Italian aeronautical industry, which had produced its first plane in 1911, was expanding prodigiously; by the end of the war it would provide employment to 100,000 people. D’Annunzio had made a friend and collaborator of Gianni Caproni, whose factory had produced the first Italian-made aircraft in 1911, and who was soon supplying bomber planes not only to the rapidly expanding Italian air force, but to the British and the French as well. Veniero, d’Annunzio’s son, was working for Caproni as an engineer and test pilot and was a regular visitor to the Casetta Rossa. Conversations in the rococo-mirrored dining room were now as often about fuselages and fuel tanks as they were about poetry.

  Cadorna was impressed. D’Annunzio was given command of a squadron of Caproni bombers. He was now not just a mascot, but an officer with wide responsibilities. When he bombed Pola in August 1917 he did so at the head of thirty-
six planes, all of them under his command. He called his squadron the Serenissima, and designed insignia for their fuselages and mottoes for their proclamations. As their leader he was as glamorous and deadly as the condottieri he so much admired. Marcel Proust, watching an air raid over Paris, was enthralled by the gallantry of the aviators, who seemed to him like “human shooting stars” or Wagnerian Valkyrie. D’Annunzio, risking death repeatedly on his sky-high missions, had become one of those superhuman beings.

  One after another his fellow aviators were killed. Luigi Bologna crashed into the lagoon not far from where Miraglia had died, and died in his turn. D’Annunzio, flying two missions a day during major offensives, was as vulnerable as any of them, protected only by his amulets. (He was now carrying a pocket-sized Roman terracotta phallus and Duse’s emeralds for luck.) Flying over Pola he saw shells whizzing past his plane “like moles burrowing through the air.” Over Mount Grappa guns were firing before, behind and to the sides of him. On one occasion he returned with his plane hit in sixteen places: on another there were twenty-seven bullet holes, including one in his wrist.

  Returning from a reconnaissance flight one evening before the searchlights were lit, his pilot miscalculated his angle of descent and the plane crashed on the airstrip, but both men escaped unhurt. On another the pilot lost control of a plane while attempting take-off. Instead of becoming airborne it careered across the runway, crashing into the earthworks around the gun emplacements. The plane was loaded with bombs. The engineers were standing by, as they did for each take-off, ready to see off the aviators with a war cry. Instead they whimpered, and d’Annunzio saw that they had all turned away and hidden their heads in their hands, not wanting to watch the inevitable catastrophe. But somehow, amazingly, the bombs didn’t explode: the plane didn’t catch fire. D’Annunzio and his companion stepped insouciantly out of the wreck, brushing earth off their cheeks and clothes. The pilot was killed soon afterwards, but not d’Annunzio.

  War brought him peace. To set out on a dangerous mission was, for him, to achieve “an ecstasy” he compared with that known by the great mystics. Leaning out from the prow of a plane he felt such joy it seemed to him it must overflow and fill the sky.

  He was alternating his flights with exploits on the ground. In May 1917 he joined the fighting at the mouth of the Timavo, a short, deep river which flows into the sea west of Trieste, and which formed an important line of defence for first one side, then the other. D’Annunzio was attached as liaison officer to the romantically named brigade, the Tuscan Wolves. He had met the commanding officer Major Giovanni Randaccio, an admirer of his poetry and sharer of his nationalist fervour, during the fighting of the previous autumn. Then, in his order of the day, Randaccio told his troops: “You are all heroes!” D’Annunzio approved. Randaccio joined his pantheon of god-like young men. He called him the “soldier of soldiers,” and wrote that to “make war with him was a sublime intoxication.”

  Now the two were reunited in a war-littered landscape—yellow-flowered meadows cluttered with hulking iron wreckage; marshes strewn with abandoned helmets and dead men. For two days and nights the “Wolves” fought their way towards the river. On the third day came the order to suspend operations. D’Annunzio was indignant. He had arrived bearing banners, including an enormous tricolour made for him by Olga, embroidered with the words “Beyond the Timavo.” He drove to headquarters, demanded an appointment with the Duke of Aosta, and persuaded him to countermand the order. Then, having taken time off to revisit his apartment in Cervignano for a wash (“extraordinary voluptuousness”), he returned to the battle line.

  The plan was that at midnight the men would cross the river—thirty metres wide, deep and in full spate—on a narrow pontoon bridge, then advance on the hill known as Quota 28, on which there was an Austrian battery. Having taken it, they would storm on to Duino. On both banks of the river, and during the crossing, the men would be within range of enemy guns. Randaccio was anxious. D’Annunzio “comforted” him. It is not clear who had first come up with this reckless plan, but it was certainly d’Annunzio who saw that it had to be carried out.

  The bridge was made up of single planks about forty centimetres wide, bobbing and bouncing on floating oil drums. The men had to cross it in single file, in the dark. The planks wobbled and tilted. They sank, so that men walked hip-deep in water, unable to see where to place their feet. Beyond the river stretched two kilometres of marshes providing no cover from the Austrian guns on the wooded hill. The first men over managed to cross the marshes unnoticed and reach Quota 28, occupying it briefly. But meanwhile Austrian gunners had begun to fire on the bridge and the men assembled on both banks. D’Annunzio records that the officers, by this time, had not eaten, nor drunk clean water, for thirty-six hours. Neither had the men. Now, seeing what was being required of them, forty of the troops on the far side of the river decided they had done enough. When their officers, yelling and threatening them with revolvers, tried to keep them in position they fired on them, shouting: “We don’t want to be sent to the slaughter again.” Waving white handkerchiefs or tying strips torn off their shirts or underwear to their bayonets, they surrendered, and allowed themselves to be taken prisoner.

  The Italian troops on Quota 28 had been driven back, pursued by Austrians troops who were now closing on the bridge. Of the Italian troops trapped on the far side some of those who had not surrendered managed to swim back across the river. D’Annunzio (who had not crossed) helped pull them onto the bank. Randaccio was hit. D’Annunzio was by him, pillowing his head on the useless banner. Randaccio could not feel his legs. He was numb from the waist down. He was growing cold. D’Annunzio followed him to the dressing station. As he was dying he repeatedly asked d’Annunzio, “Have we held Quota 28?” and repeatedly d’Annunzio lied to him, telling him the hill was won because, he explained afterwards: “The hero cannot but die victorious.”

  He had loved Randaccio living. He referred to the two of them as a “couple,” and he told Olga that Randaccio was his “peer”—the highest compliment he could pay any man. But as he had frequently fantasised about how lovely his women would be on their death-beds, so now he made a cult of Randaccio dead. “He was intensely beautiful, as though that same artist of the race, who had formed his flesh, had now sculpted him in marble.” He spoke at his funeral, his words competing with the din of an enemy bombardment, having covered his body with the banner destined for Duino. The dead officer was to become a key figure in d’Annunzio’s mythology of war, as hero, martyr and sacrificial victim. D’Annunzio’s eulogy to him was published as a pamphlet distributed throughout the Third Army. The banner which had pillowed his head and draped his coffin became one of the most used props in d’Annunzio’s political theatre—at once relic of the dead saint and promise of future glory.

  As Randaccio lay dying and the last of his troops retreated across the Timavo, d’Annunzio ordered a battery to fire on those remaining, now prisoners of the Austrians, on the other side. General Cadorna counted any soldier who was taken captive as a deserter and issued a directive instructing his officers that “deserters” were to be shot down, using machine guns or artillery where necessary. To discourage its soldiers from surrendering, the Italian government, alone among the combatant nations, refused to send aid parcels to its soldiers held as prisoners of war abroad: as a result one in six died of cold, hunger or disease. In ordering his men to fire on the captive Italians, whom he called “sinners against the fatherland,” d’Annunzio was following his general’s lead. But he need not have done so. It is because of this incident that historian Mark Thompson described d’Annunzio as “vicious.” In his repeated retellings of the story of that night, d’Annunzio tended to leave it out.

  D’Annunzio is in Venice, in the Casetta Rossa. Behind a screen in the music room stands Evandro, a bittern. Two soldiers snared the bird at the mouth of the River Timavo and presented him to d’Annunzio as a memento of the battle. Now Evandro has the run of the house and stalks th
rough it with, thinks d’Annunzio’s secretary, a “severe self-respect and a measured correctness towards others” which would be appropriate were he a president. The composer Gian Francesco Malipiero comes in. D’Annunzio invites him to play one of his own pieces. He sits down at the piano. As he sounds his first notes, Evandro comes out from behind his screen, crosses to the door and exits (he can’t abide music). “Look how refined he is!” says Malipiero. “He walks on the tips of his toes.”

  · · ·

  More flights. More orations. D’Annunzio was tirelessly crisscrossing the war zone, bringing the drug of his oratory to troops preparing to kill and be killed. He spoke at mass burials. He spoke on the eve of battles. His addresses were designed to manipulate his hearers’ emotions and alter their minds, tuning them in to his patriotic fervour, turning them on to the rage of battle, encouraging them to drop out of the benign contract which binds one human community to another. The military commanders approved. “If d’Annunzio could speak to the soldiers before every battle,” wrote General Diaz, “that battle would be three-quarters won.”

  Some way of boosting the soldiers’ morale was badly needed. Of the five and half million Italians who fought in the war, barely 8,000 had volunteered, the rest were conscripts. On trains carrying troops to the front, men opened fire on the military police, and tens of thousands of men deserted or went into hiding to avoid the draft. The troops who had surrendered on the night of Randaccio’s death were not the only ones to be fed up with the whole bloody business of warfare. In some parts of the line men could only be chivvied into marching on the guns in front of them, by more guns behind. Military police to the rear of the trenches fired on any soldier who seemed reluctant to advance. After one battle a doctor recorded treating eighty men shot by the enemy, and twenty-five shot in the buttocks by their own police.