Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  As the Italian army pushed easily through Friuli in October 1918, the famished Austrians throwing away their guns and racing homewards ahead of them, d’Annunzio exulted, as though the ground on which Italian boots now trod, must therefore and forever be Italian. “Those of us who flew over Trieste, passing between fires, took possession of Trieste. Whoever challenged the inferno of Pola seized the port for Italy … I was of that breed.” But that is not the way territorial disputes are resolved in the modern era. Negotiations between the Allies and the moribund Austro-Hungarian Empire were already under way when the advance began. By the beginning of November the roads into Istria, or over the Carso into Slovenia, lay undefended. D’Annunzio was one of many Italian officers raring to follow those roads, to continue southwards into Dalmatia, to flood the unredeemed territories with Italian troops, to make the Adriatic an Italian sea at last. But when the armistice was signed in November 1918 the Italian advance was halted.

  At Caporetto the army (so civilians thought) let the civilians down. A year later the civilian government, in agreeing to the “armistice line,” (so thought the army) let down the army. The shocking defeat; the truncated victory. Between them they left a nation riven by resentment and distrust.

  D’Annunzio sank into one of his cyclical depressions. He had seen hundreds of bewildered teenagers slaughtered for a cause they barely understood. He understood all too clearly that their deaths had been almost entirely futile. But the experience had left his appetite for violence unappeased. War was music: war was religion. He could not bear to be without it.

  On 3 November 1918, the night before the armistice, The Ship was staged at Milan’s La Scala, with new music by Italo Montemezzi, but the author was not celebrating. He told Antongini he regretted that he had finally given up his house in Arcachon. He didn’t want to live any longer in Italy “where the rabble is incorrigible.” He was awarded a gold medal for valour, and felt no pleasure in it. He thought about entering a monastery. He wrote to Romaine Brooks: “Even heroism is exhausted and blood no longer has the brilliance that once thrilled us … I am thirsty for bitter water … I have so much sadness in me.” Repeatedly he declared that he wished he had been killed, that to survive was disgraceful, that his vial of poison was always with him and he was tempted to use it. He adopted a new slogan. Clothing his glumness in Latin dignity he declared himself in hilaritate tristis—sad amidst rejoicing—and used the phrase as epigraph to all his letters.

  He wrote to Olga breaking off their liaison. He dwelt voluptuously on their past pleasures, on the whiteness of her leg when he peeled a stocking off it, as the calyx is turned back from a rose, and told her: “We will both be unhappy for ever.” (Olga suspected that he had already found consolation.) He fell ill, and was laid up for several days with a high fever, cheered only by a new puppy named Sva (after the motorboats). He wondered how he was to spend the rest of his life. He wrote flippantly that he might apply for a commission in the regular army, “or I may end as a Bolshevik, not without making a considerable splash. Or I may die on Sunday from Spanish flu.” The existence of a desk-bound author seemed intolerably dull. “Must I return to telling fairy tales and scanning verses?”

  Soon after the armistice, Costanzo Ciano, naval commander on the Beffa di Buccari, came to lunch at the Casetta Rossa. The two men ate “excellent tagliatelle” and “exquisite pink trout” while they talked about their unhappiness at the ending of the war, and of “vague hopes of starting up again. Bold plans.” Ciano’s son would eventually marry the daughter of Mussolini, who, in December 1918, was still a long way off being invited to such exquisite lunches, but who was thinking along the same lines. While d’Annunzio and Ciano discussed their “contempt for the little men who rule us,” Mussolini was calling on soldiers to “break the fetters of decrepit institutions” and become a “political avant-garde” ready to effect “a profound renovation of our national life.”

  The British and French had lured Italy into the war with the promise of substantial grants of territory on the Dalmatian coast. In 1915 that territory was still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Allies had no compunction about promising away their enemy’s land. By the time of the armistice in 1918, though, the map of Europe, and the Allies’ war aims, had changed drastically. The Empire was falling apart. The United States, which had not been party to the Treaty of London and whose president, Woodrow Wilson, had repeatedly declared his disapproval of such secret agreements, had entered the war and established itself as main arbiter of the peace. In the unredeemed territories to the east of the Adriatic, the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (subsequently Yugoslavia) was coming into being, and laying claim to the territory, from Istria southwards down the Dalmatian coast, that d’Annunzio had for so long been calling a part of the Greater Italy, and much of which had been promised to Italy in the Treaty of London.

  Before arriving in Paris for the peace talks, Woodrow Wilson declared that “all nations have a right to self-determination.” He was inclined to look favourably on the Yugoslavs’ claims. The British and French each had their own reasons for seeing the new state as a potentially useful friend. To them Croats and Slovenians and Serbians were peoples freed at last from the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, their new independence evidence that the war had been necessary and that its outcome would be benign. Italians, who had slogged through the long and bloody war against Austro-Hungarian armies, including large contingents of Croatian and Slovenian troops, and commanded—for the last year of the war—by a Croatian general, saw the southern Slavs quite differently, as their defeated enemy.

  Wilson announced his “Fourteen Points” according to which the peace settlement was to be determined. One of them was that “a re-adjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognisable lines of nationality.” There were no such lines. Along the eastern shore of the Adriatic—in the port cities of Pola, Zara, Spalato and Fiume—there were sizable and influential Italian communities (in some cases forming a majority of a city’s population) hemmed in by Croatian hinterlands. To the peacemakers in Paris, struggling to find equitable solutions to controversies over places they had never seen and ethnic groups of which they had no knowledge, the claims of such isolated settlements seemed more like a nuisance than a just cause. As Giolitti had foreseen, the Italians stood to gain almost nothing for their participation in the war.

  “Victory of ours, you shall not be mutilated!” d’Annunzio wrote in October 1918 (before that victory had actually taken place). The line became one of his slogans. For him—the man who had slept for years with a plaster cast of the headless and armless Victory of Samothrace in his bedroom, and named one of his mistresses after it—the slogan had a secret erotic significance. For his public it was a ringing call to further conflict. Three days after the armistice he was raging against the Allies’ decision not to allow the Italians to lay claim to the Austrian ships in the harbour at Pola. “Already they are cheating us!” He talked wildly of a new front, of bombarding Berlin. He had proved himself a useful, and surprisingly docile, servant of the high command. The citation for his final medal declared that: “He wholeheartedly dedicated his noble intellect and his tenacious will … to the sacred ideals of his native land, in the pure dignity of duty and sacrifice.” Now he repeatedly signalled that he was about the exchange the “pure dignity of duty” for the turbulence of political confrontation.

  In Genoa back in May 1915 he had addressed a gathering of Dalmatian Italians, promising them that their home was a part of Italy “by divine right and by human right” and in all the speeches he had made that month he had made plain that his own war aims (whatever his government’s might be) included the recovery of the “lost” cities of the eastern Adriatic. During the final weeks of fighting, as it became increasingly clear that those cities were unlikely to be restored to Italy, he gave a series of incendiary speeches at soldiers’ funerals in which he promised those who had been killed in battle not to dishonour t
hem by accepting a “mutilated Victory.” He called these orations “prayers.” He was the high priest of a cult of the bloodthirsty spirits of the fallen. Following Garibaldi, who had prayed “Give us this day our daily cartridges,” he composed a new version of the Lord’s Prayer. “Our dead, who art in earth as you are in Heaven … Deliver us from every ignoble temptation, Free us from every cowardly doubt … Keep aflame in us our holy hatred.” He declared that civilisation was a splendour generated only by ceaseless conflict, and vowed to the war dead: “We will fight not only to the last drop of our blood but, with you, until the last grain of our ashes … Amen.”

  Italy was on the winning side. Italians’ dogged endurance had fatally weakened the Hapsburg Empire. The “hereditary enemy” had fallen apart. The Italian nation could have congratulated itself on its success. But victory had come only after a year during which Italy had felt what it was like to be ignominiously beaten. Its post-war mood was as resentful and vengeful as any loser’s, and d’Annunzio was foremost among those shaping the story of the war’s end as one of Italian humiliation, Italian victimisation. It was a story which would have long-lasting and disastrous consequences. The nation was to develop politically in ways as pathological as did those countries traumatised by defeat.

  D’Annunzio wrote a tirade for the Corriere della Sera. Albertini refused to publish it: “You speak the language of those who believe our exploits can be measured by the quantity of our booty … I wish with all my heart that you would repudiate these violent ideas.” To the regret of both men, it was the end of their collaboration.

  On 31 October 1918, with the war not yet ended, representatives of the victorious “Big Four”—Britain, France, America and Italy—agreed that the Italian army should occupy the territory along the eastern shore of the Adriatic promised to them in the Treaty of London. This occupation would be strictly provisional and temporary, pending decisions on the region’s future to be made at the peace talks, and it would be undertaken on behalf, not of Italy, but of the Allied high command.

  Warships loaded with Italian troops landed in Pola, Zara and Cattaro. An Italian admiral assumed the title of “Governor of Dalmatia.” Very soon Italian troops, over-enthusiastically laying claim to territory they believed to be theirs by right, were finding themselves opposed initially by the Serbs (their wartime allies) and subsequently by the militias of the new state of Yugoslavia, which came into being on 4 December. A British officer reported that “Italians only supplied food to those who signed a declaration of loyalty to Italy.” When the Yugoslavs protested, other Allied forces were sent to dilute the Italian presence, but since the Italian General Diaz was the senior Allied officer in the region they came under his command. To the dismay of the Croat, Slovenian and Serbian people of Yugoslavia, and to the delight of many Italians, this felt not like Allied peacekeeping, but like an Italian invasion.

  D’Annunzio was determined to make that illusion real. Italy, he said, was like one of those exotic flowers which bloom overnight “with a violent magnificence.” The country’s late victory had made it, abruptly, gigantic. Its future destiny, and in particular the territory to be granted it, must be commensurate with its new grandeur.

  In January 1919, President Woodrow Wilson declared that the Treaty of London was invalid. Two days later, d’Annunzio published a “Letter to the Dalmatians,” promising the Italian inhabitants of Dalmatia that they would soon be united with their homeland. Rejected by the Corriere della Sera, it appeared instead in Mussolini’s Il Popolo d’Italia. In it d’Annunzio attacked the Allied leaders—Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George—in vitriolic terms. They were quack doctors preparing to amputate Italy’s limbs, or wild beasts with slathering jaws agape, ready to devour territory that was Italy’s by right. He swore to fight on for the cause of an Italian Dalmatia, with bomb in hand and blade between his teeth. “You will have me with you to the end [his italics].”

  Italy in 1919 was politically unstable and financially depressed. The economy was shattered by the costs of the war, which had been covered, not by taxation, but by reckless borrowing. The national debt increased eightfold between 1916 and 1919. The lira dropped to twenty-five per cent of its pre-war value.

  The vast majority of the troops had been peasants. Farms, without the young men to work them, were dilapidated, while women—mourning their sons and lovers—turned furiously against the landowners whom they blamed for the pointless war. Soldiers were reluctant to go back to impoverished villages. Cities were swarming with unemployed men. There were stories of uniformed generals shining shoes on the streets. In a revival of ancient Roman practice, each veteran had been promised a plot of land if he wanted it, but the land grants were never made.

  Italians back home received the returning army with trepidation. The “victors of Vittorio Veneto” had expected a heroes’ welcome, instead they came home to averted faces and locked doors. The land was full of men without occupation or income, and trained to violence. Worse, they fell into two mutually hostile groups. Parades of returning combatants were disrupted by anti-militarist protests. Soldiers in uniform were assaulted. Amerigo Dumini, who five years later would head the gang of thugs who killed Giacomo Matteotti, was converted to fascism, so he claimed, after being set upon by a socialist mob outside Florence’s Duomo. Soldiers’ anger against the government that had shown so little care of them festered. “Discontent began to snake its way through the ranks of the veterans,” recalled one of them.

  During the war the word “imboscato”—wooded-up, gone to the woods—had become a term of abuse used by the trenchocracy against anyone who was not fighting, be they deserters or those who had been legitimately excused military service. As the war dragged on, and the age of conscription dropped, more and more families hid their boys, more and more soldiers deserted. Even before Caporetto the countryside was full of men on the run from the military police, staying alive by robbery and scavenging. After the rout some 400,000 more soldiers went missing. To those men who had stayed and fought, and now came home to no satisfactory reward, the imboscati were hateful.

  Returning soldiers formed “Fasci di Combattimento”—combatants’ groups. Their aims were nebulous, their mood was violent. By the end of February 1919, some twenty such groups had sprung up. They were spoiling for a fight, and their natural opponents were the socialists, whom Mussolini had identified soon after Caporetto as constituting a more dangerous enemy than the Austrians had been.

  “When I returned from the war, like so many, I hated politics and politicians,” wrote Italo Balbo, aviator and leading fascist, in 1922. To return to “the country of Giolitti, who offered every ideal as an object for sale,” was intolerable. “Better to deny everything, to destroy everything, so as to rebuild everything from scratch.” He, and hundreds of thousands of men like him, craved violence and radical change, almost regardless of its direction. “Without Mussolini, three-quarters of Italian youths who had returned from the trenches would have become Bolsheviks.” Fascism saved Italy from a socialist revolution, in Balbo’s opinion, not by beating up socialists (though fascists did plenty of that) but by providing an alternative outlet for the anger the war left behind.

  In the cities food shortages triggered riots. Shops and warehouses were plundered. In the countryside peasants marched on landowners’ homes, and landowners employed thugs to intimidate or forcibly suppress them. “Now the war against the foreigner is over,” wrote the futurist Mannarese a month after the armistice; “class war has flared up again, more violent, more fierce.” Demobilised soldiers and deserters alike were resentful and hungry. Landowners looking for fighting gangs to protect their property, socialists hoping to foment revolution, nationalists intent on ridding the patria of socialism—all could draw from an immense and toxic pool of disaffected manpower.

  On the day the armistice was declared Mussolini chose to address the celebrating crowds from an armoured car manned by Arditi. The Arditi were the elite troops of the Italian army. Modelled
on the German Sturmtruppen, they were better paid and better fed than the ordinary troops, and, used for the most dangerous assaults, they died quicker. They carried not guns but grenades and daggers. Their task was to rush, unencumbered by packs, on enemy positions and fight there, hand to hand, until the heavily laden regular troops came up. They had a fearsome reputation. Their black uniforms were strikingly handsome, decorated with embroidered flames. Their flag was black, and bore the skull and crossbones. They affected a distinctive hairstyle, growing their hair long in front until some of them achieved forelocks as long as horses’ tails. One contemporary observer called them “mafiosi,” using the word in its original sense of a swaggerer, “a brave and assertive man who does not tolerate insult.” They were the ruthless dandies of the war.

  The futurist Mario Carli, who was one of them, wrote proudly that they were “legendary warriors, exempt from common law … bloodthirsty assassins, dagger between their teeth, provocative, hooligans, brutal as orangoutans.” They were well educated, self-confident. Politically unpredictable, they tolerated only minimal “formal discipline, no bureaucracy, the most flexible of hierarchies.” Some had been, or remained, futurists. Others were anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists. All had a penchant for violence and a dislike of authority. Carli coined the term “Arditismo” to describe their spirit, and defined it in images: “a deep black background against which the musculature of an acrobat glistens … the gay power of a twenty-year-old youth who throws a bomb while whistling a song from a Variety show.”

  So long as the fighting lasted the Arditi’s violence was rewarded, their anti-social tendencies condoned. But once the war was over the public wanted no more to do with them. As one of them wrote bitterly, after having risked their lives for the fatherland they were “received by the fatherland … as undesirable guests.” They were “believed to be wild and ferocious animals.” They were “refused work … slandered by the press. Persecuted by the police. Irritated by the totally unjust and ungrateful attitude of the Nation.” A contemporary observer describes them drifting from bar to bar in Milan, fearsome-looking but aimless, “talking loudly until boozed into silence.” They still wore their black shirts, still sang their anthem Giovinezza (Youth), still chanted “a noi” meaning that something (Italy, or tomorrow, or the world) belonged to them. But one of them wrote: “We have no direction any more … The war has become our second nature … Where shall I go? What shall I do?”