Yet these blundering attacks, repeated less disastrously over the following days, pressed the Austrians harder than the Italians knew. On 4 July, the Austrian commander on the Carso reported that his situation was desperate: the last reserves had been pulled into the line. Control of the plateau edge was threatened. The Duke of Aosta, commanding the Third Army, had asked for reinforcements on the 2nd, but Cadorna was non-committal. By the time extra forces arrived on the afternoon of the 5th, the Austrian crisis was past.
On the southernmost sector, around Monfalcone, the Italian mood was gloomy. The first efforts to drive the Austrians off Mount Cosich and the neighbouring heights (Hills 85 and 121) failed badly. Even worse, the counter-attacks created panic. The Italians were taking steady high losses from the machine guns across the valley. The First Battle found Private Giani Stuparich near the Rocca, on the brow of a hill overlooking the bare, rocky valley. (Today the hillsides are thickly wooded, and a motorway passes along the valley.) He spent his days crouching behind a dry-stone wall reinforced with sandbags, facing a jumble of wire, nauseated by the stink of shit; for the men defecated in the open – anywhere, just to be safe from snipers – turning the pine- scented hillside into a dunghill. The constant rain churned the red clay into soapy, clinging muck. At night, he curled up in the muck and sank into sleep that was violent and black, like death.
The Austrians repelled four attacks on Hill 121. A fifth attempt fails when the company assails the wrong part of the line, where there are no gaps in the wire. Nothing goes well, and the forced passivity is a burden. When their commanding officer asks for volunteers to blow a hole in the enemy wire, Giani and his brother Carlo step forward. There is six days’ leave for the team that succeeds, but they are not after this reward; they are Habsburg Italians, volunteers from Trieste. ‘We are in this war because we wanted it; how can we hide behind silence?’ That night, they creep towards the enemy lines carrying gelignite tubes. Unusually, the party succeeds in breaching the wire, but the gaps are repaired before the Italians can exploit them. Giani’s spirits sink when the Austrians bombard Monfalcone; at this early stage of the fighting, the targeting of civilian areas shocks the idealistic volunteer.
The first full-scale attack against Cosich began at 02:30 on 30 June, in torrential rain. Austrian counter-battery fire silenced the Italian guns. Yet the dawn assault was not abandoned, as another veteran recalled: ‘All at once the cry goes up, with nothing human about it, “Savoy! Savoy!” – which the valleys echo up to the sky, as if invoking God’s witness to their martyrdom. But a wall of iron stops them, a cloud of fire envelops them.’
The last veteran of the first battle on the Isonzo was alive and well in a leafy suburb of Rome in 2004. Born in December 1894, Carlo Orelli was conscripted on 24 May 1915 and sent off to the Carso after notional training. Nearly 90 years later, he sat in sharp sunlight beside the opened shutters of his bedroom window. He was very still under his dressing gown, silk scarf and cloth cap; only an index finger moved, tracing a pattern on his leg. His blue eyes were filmy.
Orelli was a Socialist, but in the debate over intervention that raged in Italy in 1914–15, he switched sides, like Mussolini. ‘Supposedly it was all secret, but everyone knew the war was coming.’ The troop train left from Naples.
It was a lovely day, I remember it well. A great blue sky. We thought we were going to the front to take Trento and Trieste, which were under Austria. We had gone to war to conquer those territories, which were Italian. Austria had taken them from us. Then we would go forward, forward … We expected a short war, not one that would last so many years.
Words came awkwardly, in short breaths, as memories surfaced.
Was it a war of conquest or liberation? ‘Liberation,’ he said firmly. ‘We were not taking what was theirs.’ Were the troops eager for war? ‘Not enthusiastic, no! They thought it was a fine thing to reconquer our lands, le terre nostre, but they weren’t prepared for what faced them at the front.’
He was a non-commissioned officer in the 3rd Company of the Siena Brigade. Arriving at Sagrado at the end of May in cotton uniforms and berets, with boots of light canvas, the Italians pillaged the linen they found in the houses (‘Austrian stuff’, said Orelli), as well as blocks of sugar that were left in a factory yard. The men were mostly from Calabria, in the south. ‘You could not understand a word they said. Good illiterate peasants. I wrote their letters home for them. Oh, you people today don’t know how backwards Italy was in those times. They couldn’t read or write, but they never complained. They died in silence.’ He did not blame the army for poor training. ‘War is not something you teach, you do it and that’s all. Attack, fire, take cover when you have to. That’s it. And then bring in the dead.’
The Italians were hugely disadvantaged at the outset. ‘The Austrians had fine covered trenches, with bunkers. They shot at us from loopholes, while we were in shallow holes, ordered to charge the enemy with bayonets. It was attacks, attacks all the time, from dawn to dusk.’ The Austrians on Mount San Michele did not have to shoot much. ‘They only had to hold their positions and wait to kill us in the open.’
While the Austrian positions on San Michele during the first battle were not really much better (though they soon became so), Orelli’s recollection is true to the Italians’ sense of being desperately unprepared. And he was correct about the difference in firepower.
You cannot have any idea what an Austrian 420-millimetre howitzer sounds like. Quite different from what you would expect. It’s not like in a film. It was too far away to make a boom. It was more of a rumble, a distant roar, then a whistling that grew louder and louder the closer it came. Then we knew the shell was about to hit. It did not always explode at once. Sometimes it didn’t explode at all. That’s the lottery of death.
The Italians did not have any 420s, or any 305s for that matter. They had a few 149-millimetre guns at Sagrado, targeting those Habsburg trenches.
The Italians’ battle cry was ‘Savoy!’, while the enemy screamed ‘Hurrah!’, or ‘Živila Austrija!’ (‘Long live Austria!’) if they were Croatians or Bosnians. On Mount San Michele and Mount Sei Busi, the armies were 100 or 200 metres apart. There was a ‘tacit agreement’ not to make each other’s lives even worse than they had to be. Sniping was suspended between attacks.
Did you hate the enemy?
No, no, no! They were under orders, just as we were. War is war, if you try to kill me I’ll try to kill you, but there was no hatred. When we took prisoners, they were sent to work the land in Italy for the rest of the war. There was no mistreatment. It was the same with Italians taken prisoner. The Austrians, who had everything, offered our men fine food, because they knew we had nothing. We asked them to taste it first, in case it was poisoned, but it was all good stuff.
‘It was a war without hatred,’ he repeated, ‘not like nowadays, with all this …’ His attention drifted, following some elusive connection. The pause lengthened. ‘There’s war everywhere now,’ he announced. ‘A nation is dying today – the one led by that general with the beard, a prisoner now. What’s his name?’ He meant Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, lately captured but not yet executed.
Lightly wounded in the First Battle, Orelli was riddled with shrapnel in the Second. By this point, only 25 men of the 330 who had gone up to the line with him in May were still unharmed. He left the front in September 1915, never to return, so the attitudes that crystallised in him – including the conviction that gentlemanly conduct had persisted – reflected the first months of fighting. Orelli had not seen the spiral down into brutality and perhaps did not believe it ever occurred.
‘I remember the mountains,’ said Orelli, making a final effort for my benefit, ‘places where we fought. I remember my part of the front, at Sagrado, where the artillery was. I remember waking one morning and finding myself in a cemetery! But many things I don’t remember any longer,’ he finished, with a hint of frustration. Forgetting was a new experience, still resented. Even so, he re
cognised the names of hills on the Carso more quickly than his children’s names. He wanted to see those places again, but his legs were not what they had been. His parting handshake was warm and light, like holding a bird. ‘Many greetings to your family, and when you visit Rome again, come and see me,’ he said, patting the chair. ‘I’ll be right here.’
There is so much talk nowadays about Trento and Trieste, and the war to liberate them [he told his last interviewer], but nobody really knows what it was like.
He died in January 2005, a month after his 110th birthday.
Source Notes
SEVEN Walls of Iron, Clouds of Fire
1 a junior officer in the Pisa Brigade: Faldella, 18–20.
2 ‘All at once the cry goes up’: Albertazzi.
3 The last veteran of the first battle on the Isonzo: As well as interviewing Mr Carlo Orelli myself in May 2004, I have drawn on interviews by Paolo Rumiz of La Repubblica (unpublished); Aldo Cazzullo of Corriere della Sera, 1 November 2003; and Bultrini.
1 When the Austrians began to identify the battles on the Isonzo by number, the Italians followed suit, not guessing that this would play into the hands of enemy propaganda. As Cadorna launched offensive after offensive from the same positions against the same lines, the numbering of the battles underscored his failure to break through.
EIGHT
Trento and Trieste!
When I asked the 109-year-old Carlo Orelli what he had believed he was fighting for, he replied almost testily, ‘Why, Trento and Trieste!’ Another veteran, perhaps the last still alive at this time of writing, Delfino Borroni, gave the same answer to the same question: ‘For Trento. For Trieste. To get what was due to Italy. It was our land. Instead the Germans and the Austrians had chased us away. That wasn’t right.’
Their long dead comrades would say the same – if they could identify a reason at all. With an average age of 20 or 21, pulled straight from labour on the land, many or even most had little idea why they were in uniform. Italy’s war poets noticed a tragic symmetry between the completeness of their comrades’ ignorance and the totality of the sacrifice they were called on to make. Fresh evidence of this came as recently as 2005, in a series of interviews with surviving veterans, all well over 100 years old. Many confessed to having felt bafflement about Italy’s aims. ‘I did not know why there was a war at all,’ said one. ‘For that matter they didn’t let the troops in on anything. You had to find your reasons for yourself, on the spot.’ Introducing these interviews, the historian Lucio Fabi said the old-timers had forgotten the reasons. Given the vividness of their accounts, they were more likely expressing a truth that has not yet become quite palatable. Lectures by officers on Italy’s goals and purposes did not necessarily leave the blank-faced conscripts any the wiser. The key word ‘irredentism’ was mysterious to the majority. After months at the front, Private Mussolini reported in his newspaper that the peasant soldiers remained ‘unaware of the existence’ of the words ‘neutrality’ or ‘intervention’.
The task of explanation was made no easier by the secrecy that shrouded the Treaty of London. Expansion in the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor was hardly the stuff for inspirational talks to the troops, while the elaborate bloodthirsty speeches of D’Annunzio would make no more sense to many officers than to the men. According to Curzio Malaparte, the veteran and journalist, ‘The profound ignorance of our masses did not admit historical or geographical complexities. When the officers explained to us the ideal reasons of our war and the need to crush the barbarism and militarism of the Central Powers, the soldiers were deeply attentive; but they did not understand a word.’
Trento and Trieste, on the other hand, were actual places, not airy concepts, even if most of the soldiers had never heard of them before. They became the symbols of injustice and a national mission unfulfilled. The keyword in nationalist accounts of Austrian rule was ‘domination’. This vague word was paired with another, equally emotive: ‘redemption’. Redeeming these two cities for Italy was the most publicised and least controversial of the government’s reasons for going to war. Interventionists wore rosettes of red, white and green ribbon around the names of Trento and Trieste. Alliteration evoked a military rhythm: the tongue struck the palate like boots on freedom’s road. To the Triestine poet Umberto Saba, it was like diastole and systole: ‘the double-name’ that beat louder than his own heart.
The Trentino is a mountainous area the size of Devon or Delaware, shaped on the map like a man riding a bull. It reaches from the northern tip of Lake Garda to a line midway between Trento and Bolzano. It is bisected by the River Adige, whose narrow valley has always been one of the main trans-Alpine corridors and is now tinged with smog from traffic pounding up to the Brenner Pass or down to Venice, Verona and points beyond. A century ago its population was overwhelmingly Italian: the 1910 census found that its 383,000 inhabitants included only 13,500 German-speakers. The city of Trento had around 20,000 people. Between the Trentino and the Alps proper lies the region known to Italians as Alto Adige, the ‘upper Adige’, where the ethnic balance is very different. Its population of 242,000 included 16,500 Italian-speakers at most, and perhaps many fewer. (The 1910 census findings are disputed.) An Italian guide to the ‘unredeemed lands’ published in September 1915 admitted that the rural parts of the Alto Adige were ‘absolutely German’.
When it came under Austrian control in 1815, the Trentino was merged with the Tyrol – a move that local Italians resented. Their demand for autonomy was raised in 1848, the year of revolutions, then periodically up to 1914. The Austrians refused to risk losing control of this sensitive frontier. Their argument, that Trentino formed a natural extension of the Tyrol, admittedly somewhat Italian in character but still part of a Germanic whole, was not tenable if only for ethnic reasons.
For nationalists, Trentino was undeniably Italian, a reasonable claim that was taken, unreasonably, as proving Mother Italy’s entitlement to the whole of the south Tyrol. Although the tiny size of the Italian community undermined any ethnic claim to Alto Adige, the strategic claim was paramount. Unless Italy controlled the Tyrolese Alps up to the watershed, Venice and its lowlands would always be vulnerable to Austrian assault. Mazzini did not doubt that Italy must possess everything up to ‘the highest circle of the Alps’. The imperative of so- called natural borders trumped the national rights that Mazzini himself generally upheld. The Austrians were equally adamant that the Tyrol was theirs for ever. It had a particular status in their empire; coming under the direct authority of the royal house, it was the apple of Franz Josef’s eye. With its cattle and vineyards, felt hats, Lederhosen and dirndl skirts, pine-clad mountainsides and foaming rivers, it was an album of luscious images that summed up Habsburg Austria.
The failure of the 1866 campaign dealt a blow to irredentists in the Trentino. Vienna halted a process of enlightened reform that went back seventy years. Some societies and newspapers were banned. Students were no longer allowed to study at the University of Padua. Austria erected a customs barrier with Italy where there had been none before, hurting commerce across the frontier. In 1903, Italian teachers were banned from the university in Innsbruck, provoking demonstrations in Italy. Italian deputies in the Tyrolese assembly, also in Innsbruck, were outvoted by their German colleagues.
The Trentino’s Italian identity could only be dismantled by tyrannical repression, which was not in the Habsburg repertory. Despite the partial repression, extensive concessions were made to the Italians. Except in the army and police, theirs was the official language of local govern ment, courts and schools. In 1890, they founded a National League to defend their nationality. (It was tolerated until 1915.) The community paid for a monument to Dante; unveiled in 1896, the massive statue was a potent reminder of Italy’s past greatness and current misfortune. Around this time, an Italian ideologue floated the idea that the German-speaking Tyrolese were Germanised Italians. (This thesis would be exploited under Fascism and even afterwards.) An official
counter-offensive of pro- German measures and pan-Germanist propaganda, launched in the 1880s, only hardened the ethnic and linguistic divide. Yet the fact of division did not translate automatically into resistance. As elsewhere, irredentism was a concern of the urban élite. The farmers mostly favoured staying in the empire, for their best market lay to the north. Indifference to nationalist grumbles rested on economic common sense.
The empire persisted in its self-destructive policies. Over the long run, measures to suppress irredentism served to strengthen it. A few Austrian officials realised that economic under-development was fuelling tension, but little was done. When routes to rational progress are blocked, people turn radical, embracing ideologies of salvation. This process was personified by Cesare Battisti, a name familiar to all Italians because of his martyr’s death (every town in the land has a via Battisti). Editing magazines, launching cultural initiatives, penning a stream of reports on social and economic conditions, serving as a city councillor, a Socialist deputy in the provincial assembly and then in Vienna, Battisti was the sort of figure who can ignite and organise a political movement almost single-handed. He was a tireless agitator for Italian interests within the Habsburg empire before he became an enemy of that empire. As a councillor, he campaigned for civic issues: the quality of flour, public health. Not an extremist by nature, he was clear-thinking and practical, only driven to violent solutions by Habsburg refusal to reform.
The White War Page 13