Conrad reportedly said on 22 May that, if the Italians did not attack at once, it would show they were ‘stupid dogs’ as well as cowards. When the last Habsburg officials pulled out of Gorizia on 25 May, they told the head of the grammar school to hand over authority to the first Italian troops to enter the city. Two days later, General Erwin Zeidler led the 58th Division into the city. The Italians had missed a chance to capture Gorizia almost without firing a shot. He was soon joined by General Wenzel Wurm, arriving with his corps from Serbia and an order to ‘stop the Italians with all methods as early as possible and to slow down their advance by causing them as many casualties as possible’. On his own initiative, Wurm prepared a bridgehead around Gorizia. He and Zeidler, an outstanding engineer, would make a first-rate team. By 1 June, the Austrians realised they were in the fight after all. This is why a Hungarian historian recently described the Italian delay as ‘a gift from heaven’.
Conrad organised the five divisions on the Isonzo into a new formation, the Fifth Army, led by a Croatian general – the highest ranking ‘Yugoslav’ in the empire. On 27 May, the day he assumed command, Svetozar Boroević von Bojna issued a set of fundamental orders. All positions must be held to the last man. Commanders must allocate all manpower not needed in the front line to the sacred duty of adapting positions so that counter-offensives could be launched. Defences had to include at least five rows of barbed wire, with the first row camouflaged. If the troops stayed calm and only opened fire when the enemy was less than 100 paces away, they would hold the line. If the enemy broke through, the defenders must not panic but stay in their place while the reserves moved up to contain and reverse the breach. Prisoners should be taken whenever possible, to gain information.
Like Cadorna, Boroević had lived in uniform since the age of ten, had an unremarkable appearance and a reputation for ruthlessness. Unlike the other man, his career was based on achievements in war. First decorated for bravery during the capture of Sarajevo in 1878, he rose to become a corps commander fighting the Russians in 1914–15. Consistently impressive and effective, able to inspire devotion as well as respect, he proved an excellent choice to lead the defence. If the Italians had made all speed in May, they would have caught the Austrians before Boroević set his seal on his new command.
Cadorna’s opposite number across the border was Franz Conrad von Hötzen dorf (1852–1925), the Austrian chief of staff until March 1917. Near anagrams as well as near contemporaries, the two men were alike in several ways. Their direct experience of war was marginal and long ago (Cadorna at Rome in 1870, Conrad in the Balkans around 1880). Like Cadorna, Conrad ‘believed that infantry could advance without adequate artillery support against entrenched positions’. Both men over rated the capacity of their armies to carry out successful offensives, while underrating their enemies – a blindness that was accentuated by their remoteness from the troops and their almost unaccountable powers. Temperamentally, both were possessed by intense convictions and strong passions, and given to rhetorical boldness that wavered in front of real opportunity.
The differences, too, were striking. Conrad’s was a larger, more gifted and complex personality. He was popular and self-confident as well as ambitious, exercising a power to charm and disarm that Cadorna never had. A brilliant linguist who mastered half a dozen languages, he loved the process of ‘entering into the spirit of a language … coming closer to the mentality of the people’. He assured his Italian mistress that he much admired her people’s ‘racial characteristics’; he also keenly admired Japanese martial spirit, so much finer than the ‘softened whites’ of Europe. He shared the Victorian fascination with the laws of nature (without the Victorians’ softening faith in Christian morality), the Viennese obsession with imperial decline, and the conservative hatred of liberalism. He was a tactical innovator who came up with new ideas for combat training, mountain warfare and military mapping. He was an inspirational teacher at the War School. He was also, however, a slave to philosophical dogma. For he was a Social Darwinist, convinced that the struggle for existence was an almighty law, the great principle that rules all earthly events. His first sight of corpses on a Bosnian battlefield filled him with ‘the conviction of the relentlessness of the struggle for existence’. As we shall see in a later chapter, Social Darwinism was a common belief, but the intensity of Conrad’s conviction was exceptional. Believing that non-Germanic peoples belonged to lesser races, such as the Turks in Bosnia with their criminal physiognomies, or the primeval, bestial warriors he had faced in Herzegovina, he argued that nationalist threats to the empire should be confronted and whenever possible, eliminated.
In practice, he advocated preventive wars against the Serbs and Italians. As incoming chief of staff, he was keen to settle accounts with Italy at the first opportunity. (Kaiser Wilhelm sympathised: it would, he said, give ‘lively satisfaction’ to join Austria in teaching their nominal allies a ‘salutary lesson’.) Italy responded with bristling suspicion until Alberto Pollio became chief of staff in 1908, when military operations against Austria became almost unthinkable. Conrad was still convinced that a showdown was inevitable and had best be launched before nationalism eroded the armed forces beyond utility. In February 1910, he again urged a preventive war against ‘Austria’s congenital foe’. Franz Ferdinand, the Emperor’s heir, shared Conrad’s visceral hatred, but the Foreign Ministry and the Emperor did not. When Conrad repeated his call the following year – tempted by Italy’s distraction in Libya – he was sacked. This move was naturally welcomed in Rome, just as his recall the following year was deplored. It came at the behest of Franz Ferdinand, who resented Serbia’s success in the First Balkan War (1912) and wanted Conrad back at the helm.
Conrad loved the empire’s Italian holdings in the way that British colonialists loved India, with a delicious sense of entitlement. As a young man, on the train to Trieste, he suddenly saw – as one still does, approaching from the north or east – the Adriatic spread below. ‘The world lay open before me. I was filled with a sense of joy and freedom.’ He spent four and a half years there, commanding the 55th Infantry Brigade, followed by a stint as commander in the Tyrol, where, as in Trieste, he despised the Italian agitators who were drawn, as he observed, from ‘the intelligentsia, the propertied classes, the middle class, schoolboys, teachers, and a part of the clergy’. The Italian peasantry, on the other hand, were mostly still loyal. He was convinced that the south Tyrol would be an excellent base for attacking Italy.
Conrad’s pessimism turned his high-risk programme for imperial renewal into a suicidal drive. Contrasting a desire for victory with the will to win, he accepted that the Habsburg empire lacked this will, yet believed it was better to risk total defeat than try to adapt. As he wrote to his mistress at the end of 1913, ‘Our purpose ultimately will be only to go under honourably … like a sinking ship.’ His actions the following summer showed the same spirit. When Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, Conrad urged immediate war against Serbia; he wrote privately that it would ‘be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued, because such an ancient monarchy and such a glorious army cannot perish ingloriously’. For he was under no illusion about Austria’s ability to win on three fronts (or four, if Romania joined the Entente). When the short, victorious campaign of his public predictions did not come to pass, he blamed the politicians for dragging the empire into war before it was ready.
As for Italy, Conrad was the last person to show facile optimism in 1914 – especially after Pollio’s sudden death removed the only Italian general that he almost trusted. On 23 July, when the Austrian foreign minister voiced doubts about Italy, Conrad commented that ‘If we also have to fear Italy, then we should not mobilise.’ Why did he ignore his own warning? His biographer, Lawrence Sondhaus, suggests that Conrad’s carelessness was due to the impossibility of including another variable in his calculations, amid the tumult of July, without losing his mind. Yet there were other reasons why he omitted to reckon on Italy’s likely betrayal. He de
spised the Italians as soldiers; on the other hand, if Austria was doomed to lose in the end, what did it matter if they joined the Allies?
At the same time, Italy was intimately associated for Conrad with love and hope, not war and betrayal. For he was besotted with an Italian woman, the wife of an Austrian industrialist. They had met at a social occasion in Trieste, when Conrad was happily married, but he remembered her when they met in Vienna seven years later. Conrad was now a widower, and Virginia was the mother of six children. Fascinated by his ardour, she recovered from her shock at his avowal of love. Her husband was complaisant, and Conrad became a fixture at the family home, and ‘uncle’ to her children. He persisted in wanting marriage, despite Catholic morality, his own eminence, and Virginia’s horror at the prospect of losing her children, as would happen if she were the cause of a divorce. Conrad fantasised about returning from a triumphant campaign in the Balkans, bolstered with such prestige that he could sweep all obstacles aside and make Gina his wife. Amid the shattering events of September 1914 on the Eastern Front, with the old Habsburg army in tatters around him, he confided to an astonished fellow officer that failure in the field would mean losing Gina: ‘a horrifying thought … because I would be lonely for the rest of my life’.4 Rationally convinced that Austria was doomed, but unconsciously bent on engineering a conflagration that would let him smash the chains separating him from the woman he loved – what could be more Viennese, more human, banal and apocalyptic?
Source Notes
SIX A Gift from Heaven
1 this particular story: Weber, 11–13.
2 losses that almost beggar belief: Deák.
3 ‘civilians in uniform’: This is Deák’s phrase.
4 military spending, even at its zenith: Rothenberg [1985].
5 The only ‘completely reliable’ elements: Spence [1985].
6 at least one British Foreign Office mandarin: Rothwell, 30.
7 The last Habsburg census before the war: Spence [1985].
8 the purge of many Serbs early in the war: Spence [1992].
9 these ‘schoolboys and grandfathers’: Jung.
10 The Italians had missed a chance to capture: Del Bianco, vol. I, 402.
11 ‘stop the Italians with all methods’: As quoted on the webpage: http://www.austro-hungarian-army.co.uk/biog/wurm.htm, accessed in February 2008.
12 as ‘a gift from heaven’: Farkas’s phrase.
13 ‘the water gleamed as if covered with silver’: this was the description by Rilke’s hostess, the Princess of Thurn and Taxis.
14 Conrad ‘believed that infantry could advance’: Rothenberg [1985].
15 Conrad’s was a larger, more gifted and complex personality: Information about and quotations by Conrad are from Sondhaus’s excellent biographical study (Sondhaus, 2000).
16 ‘be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued’: Rothenberg [1985].
17 ‘If we also have to fear Italy, then’: Palumbo [1983].
18 ‘a horrifying thought’: Sondhaus [2000], 158–9
1 They had a slang word for Italian economic migrants: Katzelmacher, ‘kitten¬ maker’ or tomcat – sexually promiscuous, with a large family back home, typical of backward peoples. (The same fearful contempt can be heard today when Serbs talk about Albanians from Kosovo.)
2 This hope was also the fear of at least one British Foreign Office mandarin, who predicted in March 1915 that the Treaty of London ‘would drive Dalmatia and the Slav countries into the arms of Austria’.
3 This was the same Duino where the German poet Rilke spent the winter of 1911–12 as the guest of the noble family that still owns the castle. Walking on the battlements one stormy morning in January when ‘the water gleamed as if covered with silver’, Rilke seemed to hear a voice calling from the air: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?’ This became the first line in the sequence of poems called the Duino Elegies (1923).
4 They married in autumn 1915, after the husband sued for divorce and Gina accepted generous terms for access to her children.
SEVEN
Walls of Iron, Clouds of Fire
Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your
compactness that of the forest.
SUN TZU
The first principle is, to concentrate as much
as possible. The second principle runs thus –
to act as swiftly as possible.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
The First Battle of the Isonzo
Cadorna’s first full-scale offensive had several objectives.1 The Second Army was ordered to take the summit of Mount Mrzli while enlarging the bridgehead at Plava, further south, and strengthening its position around Gorizia. These goals had to be pursued vigorously, aiming for success ‘at all costs’. Further south, the Third Army was to push forward on the Carso between Sagrado and Monfalcone. For these tasks, Cadorna committed only 15 of his 35 infantry divisions. The remainder were distributed around the Alpine sectors further west, or held in reserve. While the seven reserve divisions were soon moved to the Isonzo, Cadorna’s original decision showed an ominous reluctance to concentrate his forces, as well as complacency about the prospects of swift success.
At Plava, eight separate attempts to take Hill 383 on 24 June achieved nothing. Operations ground to a halt. The offensive around Gorizia failed due to lack of firepower against the strongest Austrian defences on the front. General Zeidler, who had been decorated for his fortifications in Bosnia and the Tyrol, ensured that his positions could not be seriously damaged by the Italian artillery. The bridgehead was safe as long as the hills of Sabotino and Podgora, looming above the river to the north and west of the town, were unconquered.
Front lines, 1915-18
The thrust against Mount Mrzli began on 1 July. Two days of bombardment were followed by an infantry attack. But a poor spring had yielded to a wet and squally summer. Torrential rain had turned the 40-degree hillsides into muddy pistes, exposed to Austrian fire. The mist that sometimes lay in the valley bottom afforded the only cover. Infantry on the higher slopes were unable to dig proper trenches in ground that was too muddy or too rocky. The front line slanted up the hill from Tolmein, so the Italians were exposed to flanking fire from the lower Austrian positions. The attacks fizzled out. On Mount Sleme, halfway between Krn and Mrzli, a battalion of the Intra Brigade struggled up to the enemy wire, losing more than 300 men in the process. The commanding officer who had ordered the attack committed suicide. This operation was not mentioned in the daily bulletins issued by the Supreme Command. Indeed, actions on Mrzli during the rest of the year would mostly take place in official obscurity. Other assaults were tried piecemeal, and failed. The Italians took no ground between Krn and Tolmein.
They were discovering that barbed wire was practically insuperable. The Perugia Brigade tried to breach the wire on Podgora with gelignite tubes on 6 July. Enemy fire was so intense that they could not get close to the wire. When the Italians attacked next day, regardless, the Austrians held their fire until the attackers were 30 paces away, while the artillery opened up against the reserves in the rear. No advance was possible. The only sector where Italian operations avoided a fiasco was around the Carso, where the bombardment started on the 23rd, against enemy lines near Sagrado. The troops of the 19th and 20th Divisions drove the Austrians back and got a foothold on Mount San Michele and Mount Sei Busi. An epic struggle for the westernmost heights of the Carso had begun.
Both sides knew the strategic importance of Mount San Michele. A sprawling, inelegant hill with four distinct summits, it fills the angle where the River Vipacco flows into the Isonzo, south of Gorizia. Its summit rises only 250 metres above the plain, but the northern and western slopes are steep. In the east and south, the gradients are much gentler as the hill merges into the Carso plateau. It formed an Austrian salient, protecting Gorizia and the Vipacco valley on one side and the Carso on the other. Without it, the Austrians’ defence on the lower Isonzo might unravel. The Ita
lians were not aware that, on this part of the front, the enemy defences were still shallow. Lacking rock-drills, the Austrians had had time only to hack knee-deep grooves in the rock, then heap rubble and soil into low parapets. With every battalion tasked to prepare 3–5 kilometres of line, they hastily adapted the rocky outcrops, ridges and natural craters, and disguised the barbed wire with branches.
Shortly after midday on 1 July, the Italians advanced from their bridgehead at Sagrado towards the summit of San Michele, with a secondary thrust towards a rounded spur closer to the river, known as Hill 142. Long afterwards, a junior officer in the Pisa Brigade, Renato di Stolfo, described the first attack. He was supposed to lead his platoon armed with a pistol, but there were no pistols, so he had nothing but his dress sabre, with no cutting edge. The day began with a thunderstorm at 06:00, as the men traversed the wooded flanks of the hill. Renato’s waterlogged cape was so heavy that he threw it away. As the men emerged from the woods, the sun rose over the brow of the Carso in front of them, dispersing the clouds; a rainbow arced across the sky.
The men rest for a few hours, trying to dry out. At noon, they form a line, dropping to one knee while the officers stand with sabres drawn. The regimental colours flutter freely. Silence. Then a trumpet sounds, the men bellow ‘Savoy!’ as from one throat, the band strikes up the Royal March. Carrying knapsacks that weigh 35 kilograms, the men attack up the steep slope, in the teeth of accurate fire from positions that the Italians cannot see. An officer brandishing his sabre in his right hand has to use his left hand to stop the scabbard from tripping him up. The men are too heavily laden to move quickly. Renato remembered the scene as a vision of the end of an era: ‘In a whirl of death and glory, within a few moments, the epic Garibaldian style of warfare is crushed and consigned to the shadows of history!’ The regimental music turns discordant, then fades. The officers are bowled down by machine-gun fire while the men crawl for cover on hands and knees. The battle is lost before it begins. The Italians present such a magnificent target, they are bound to fail. A second attack, a few hours later, is aborted when the bombardment falls short, hitting their own line. The afternoon peters out in another rainstorm.
The White War Page 12