The White War

by Mark Thompson

  By 1913, when the Italian army secretly hired him to write a military guide to the Trentino, Battisti had given up on Austria. He already knew his native valleys and villages by heart. Using his parliamentary position to get access to Habsburg army maps, he combed the territory anew. The following spring he started to do the same for the Alto Adige, up to the Brenner Pass, when he was abruptly redirected to the Carnian and Julian Alps. When he reached the Isonzo, in early August, an Austrian patrol stopped him and asked why he was examining this particular bridge over the river. Trekking around the mountains, Battisti had no idea that Austria had declared war on Russia and mobilised all men between 20 and 40. He hurried back to Trento and led his family over the border into Italy.

  Unlike other leaders in Trento such as the Catholic activist Alcide De Gasperi, who became Italy’s prime minister after the Second World War, Battisti realised that the events of August 1914 had destroyed reformist illusions for ever. He was still a socialist, anti-clerical, committed to the equality and liberation of all peoples. Austria’s rage to destroy Serbia confirmed that multinational empires had to be dismantled if socialism was to be established in Europe. Only national states could provide the framework of legitimate governance that gives socialist parties a chance to win power. For the Italians of the empire, the hour of destiny had struck. Battisti became the first prominent Italian to call publicly for Austria-Hungary to be abolished.

  Over the next six months or so, he spoke at over a hundred public meetings up and down the land, arguing for Italy to intervene. Sometimes he was cheered to the echo; at others, the anti-war faction stopped him reaching the platform or making himself heard. Privately he disagreed with nationalist demands for all of the south Tyrol; publicly he kept the faith, ‘because it is not for me, as an irredentist, to deprecate the maximal programme of the irredentists’. His speeches were larded with propaganda. He claimed that Trentino’s population was ‘entirely Italian’, and the only reason why Alto Adige’s population was four-fifths German was that ‘barbarian irruptions’ from the north during the decline of the Roman Empire had driven the ‘Romanised elements’ away from the Alps. Trentino’s mission was to hold back the ‘Teutonic elements’ and preserve its ‘incorruptible Roman-ness’. Everything about Trentino was, he insisted, Italian: the sky, the flora, the climate, the customs, traditions and feelings. Even the criminals were passionately delinquent, not like cold-hearted German crooks.

  Along with such absurdities, Battisti harshly criticised Rome’s official attitude to irredentism since 1866. While the Trentino sank into ‘wretched squalor’, governments in Rome sacrificed Trento and Trieste to their relationship with the great powers. Whenever Italy ratified its existing borders, it drove another nail into the coffin of patriotic aspirations. After the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, irredentism was dropped from foreign policy. ‘Whole generations in Italy not only feel no fraternity with the Italians of Trento and Trieste; they lack the most elementary geographical notion about those lands.’ This, Battisti argued, was why the real defender of Italian identity in the Trentino had become – Austria itself! For the brutality and cynicism of repression fanned the fire of rebellion. The more Austria discouraged political awareness among its Italians, the more convinced they grew that Trentino had no future in the empire. He gave political and economic reasons why Trentino should be annexed to Italy, but what he called ‘the reason of blood’ was paramount. ‘All the sons of Italy should be united in a single family.’

  Battisti’s Trento was recognisably medieval. Craftsmen and merchants bustled along narrow lanes in the shadow of a great castle, overlooked by steep hillsides crowded with vineyards and meadows. There were and still are a dozen places more or less like it on all sides of the Alps. Trieste was very different. The Austrians invented it in the eighteenth century to be their great port, connecting the empire to the seaways of the world.

  Trieste lies in the north-eastern corner of the Adriatic Sea, on the upper edge of the Istrian peninsula. It faces north-west, towards the Italian mainland, with its back to the Balkans. The city elders chose Habsburg rule in the fourteenth century to protect themselves against Venice. In 1719, when it was a fishing town with some 7,000 inhabitants, Vienna gave it the status of a Free Port and development began in earnest. The salt pans were filled in and a grid of streets was laid around a short canal, with imposing piazzas, a seafront, and quays reaching into the deep-water harbour. The old castle and cathedral were left on a hilltop in the background, picturesque witnesses to the activity below. When the railway arrived in the 1850s, Trieste grew even faster as the transit port for goods coming from or going to central Europe. After Venice was lost in 1866, it became the empire’s naval headquarters. After 1869, when the Adriatic became a route to the Suez Canal, Triestine prosperity increased again. (Italian trade hardly benefited at all.)

  Thriving in their fabricated city, the Triestines were more interested in commerce than politics. Language was a marker of class, not a flag of identity; the Italians filled the wide space between German-speaking merchants, administrators and army or navy officers on one side, and the Slavic peasants drawn in by the promise of paying work on the other. The commercial élite of shipping magnates, bankers and insurers comprised many nationalities. Cultures mixed here, overlapping rather than blending. The Jewish, Greek and Serbian communities all left their stamp on the architecture. They coloured its idiom too: the dialect called triestino amalgamates several influences in an Italian matrix.

  The city’s heyday lasted a quarter of a century, from around 1890. A third harbour was built. Preferential tariffs boosted Trieste’s attraction and the eastern Adriatic became the seventh biggest shipbuilding centre in the world. By some indicators, its citizens were the richest in the empire. Including the suburbs, the population grew from 155,000 in 1890 to 230,000 in 1910 and 243,000 in 1914. It was now the third biggest city in Austria, after Vienna and Prague – and ten times more populous than Trento. (In Hungary, Budapest was growing at a similar explosive rate.) Ethnically, 51 per cent of the population in and around the city was Slavic, with Slovenes outnumbering Croats by 20 to 1. Just over a third was Italian. In the city itself, Italians outnumbered Slovenes by more than 4:1, with almost 96,000 as against 22,500. In the suburbs, the Slovenes had a narrower majority: 28,000, compared with 22,000 Italians.

  Trieste had an affluent middle class, cafés, newspapers, theatres, and an appetite for culture. Its position between Vienna and Rome, as well as its hospitality to outside influences, made it a channel for ideas as much as trade, a natural home for innovation. Trieste was the crack through which modernism seeped into Italy. Ibsen and Wagner found early champions here. Freudian psychoanalysis entered Italy through Trieste. The young James Joyce came to teach English in 1904 and stayed to write two masterpieces and begin a third, Ulysses. (If the Austrians had not forced foreigners to leave in 1915, he would never have gone.) One of his middle-aged pupils, Italo Svevo, invented the psychological novel in Italian, writing in a ‘Germanic’ style that offended Italy’s literary purists. Marinetti, the impresario of Futurism, loved the modern swirl of ideas and ideologies, calling Trieste ‘our beautiful powder-keg’.

  The city’s modern buzz echoed more loudly because there were so few traditions to muffle it. Despite the massive solidity of the Habsburg buildings and the substantial Austrian commitment behind them, there was something rootless about Trieste, provisional, two-dimensional. Whether cultural status is measured by the canonical achievements of Western civilisation or by folklore, Trieste looked eccentric, flamboyantly crammed with different nationalities.

  This did not trouble most of Trieste’s Italians. These people were certainly patriotic: they celebrated the King’s birthday, adored the patriotic operas of Verdi, rallied for an Italian-language university, and resented the censors and narks who pounced on signs of nationalist disaffection. Yet, while there was no shortage of minor ‘provocations’, Italian extremists were almost unknown. (Guglielmo Oberdan, would
- be assassin of the Emperor, was the rule-proving exception.) This lack of zeal troubled some of the brightest middle-class Triestines who were born around 1890. The city’s vivid variety was no compensation for its shaming lack of national definition or continuity. The Habsburg Jewish writer Joseph Roth gibed that ‘national self-determination’ was ‘an intellectual luxury for a group that has nothing more serious to worry about’. Of nobody was this more true than Trieste’s irredentists. Benefiting from the city’s prosperity while despising its materialism, they were inspired by the heroic story of Italy’s unification. Austrian orderliness seemed paltry and banal to 20-year-old intellectuals whose only direct experience of the Kingdom of Italy was a spell at university in Florence or Rome. Their loyalty was to an Italy of the spirit, so imperfectly represented by governments in Rome. Whether they were convinced like Battisti that only a national state could deliver social justice, like D’Annunzio that nationalism was supremely beautiful, or like the Futurists that it was supremely thrilling, they felt, like nationalists in other border societies, more oppressed than the facts of their situation warranted.

  As well as exaggerating their oppression, the irredentists overstated the level of support in their community. In the run-up to war, Battisti claimed that all the Italians in Trieste demanded more than economic improvements and political autonomy. (‘The people in Trieste want complete liberty. They want to be redeemed from the Habsburg yoke. They, together with all of Venezia Giulia, want to be annexed to Mother Italy.’) This was never remotely true. Mario Alberti, a high- profile irredentist from Trieste before he was a high-profile Fascist, recalled that the prewar movement had minimal impact on the villages and little in the towns and cities. It had no following among industrial leaders or bankers, some influence among the middle classes (shopkeepers, craftsmen), and most influence among intellectuals (students, teachers, lawyers, doctors). He estimated that Trieste had about 500 active irredentists and no more than 4,500 sympathisers. One of the former was Giani Stuparich (b. 1891), whom we last saw in a trench above Monfalcone:

  Growing up in these parts meant growing up with an unstable heredity, one that constantly needed propping up. Simply going for a walk meant collisions. There was nowhere, not a single place, to repose in contemplation. If you sat on the bank of a stream, in order to lose yourself in its placid flow, a shout would immediately reach you from the other bank, a shout that you had to oppose. If you searched high up for the serenity of the sky which extends above the mountain crests, you found someone already there on the same summit who squared up to defend himself when you drew near and raised his staff, ready to strike.

  Compared to this feverish vision, political or economic arguments for annexing the city to Italy were papery. For this, in the end, was irredentism’s foundation: an appalled conviction that, wherever you went, you would be challenged by ‘a shout that you had to oppose’, an alien wielding a stick. It was an obsessive state of mind which James Joyce – who loved Trieste’s polyglot, hybrid openness – teased in his prose-poem ‘Giacomo Joyce’, written a few years before the war: ‘Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs … a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance.’

  The real cause of Stuparich’s dread was a factor that loomed very large in Trieste, though it did not exist in the Trentino. This was the threat posed by ‘the Slavs’. The German-speakers were not numerous; linked to the Habsburg administration, they would dwindle along with Habsburg power. The local Slovenes were another matter. The irredentists were outraged by Habsburg encouragement of Slav immigration to the eastern Adriatic towns, which was happening anyway for economic reasons. From around 1880, the Slovenes joined the imperial administration in droves, established banks and cultural societies, and won official status for their language in schools and courts. A Slovene middle class was emerging. When universal male suffrage was introduced for parliamentary elections in 1907, Slovenes in the countryside challenged the Italians in the urban centres. The Italians were used to holding disproportionate power in city councils along the coast, and resented its loss. Committed to minimising the Slavic presence in public life, Italian nationalism took on a strongly anti-democratic tint.

  Behind the irredentists’ hostility stretched a civilisational divide that was centuries old. Stuparich was not a racist; he belonged to an enlightened circle that studied the other subject peoples of the empire, taking their problems seriously. He himself wrote a fine book about the Czechs. Yet the Czechs were comfortably remote; about the Slovenes, his fellow Triestines, he had little to say. Where Battisti made rhetorical hay by likening the modern Austrians to the Hunnish hordes, the Triestine irredentists identified the Slovenes as latter-day barbarians. With no cultural achievements to their name (meaning, none that the Italians knew or cared about), communicating in an incomprehensible tongue, the irredentists’ Slavic neighbours – dockers, labourers, servants and nursemaids, but also clerks, teachers and priests – loomed as the first waves of an ocean that would drown the remnants of Italian identity.

  These remnants were shrilly celebrated by nationalist writers in Italy. As one of them complained, before the 1860s the mute and anonymous Slavs of the eastern Adriatic had ‘slept the sleep of their prehistory’. How dare the Austrians stir them into consciousness! The Italians of Istria numbered over 130,000 in 1910, and dominated the coast and larger inland towns. In Dalmatia, however, there were only 18,000 Italian- speakers in a population of 610,000. Luigi Barzini, the star reporter of Corriere della Sera, described the towns in inland Istria in 1913 as great fortresses under siege. Along the coast, ‘Italianism is uncontaminated, full, generous, ardent, and proudly struggling for its millennial life.’ Behind the ‘invading Slavs’ stood ‘the full weight of the vast Slavic masses of the empire with its social and financial structures, and its thirst for conquest. Behind the Italians’, by pathetic contrast, ‘there is no one and nothing. They are alone with their right.’ Egged on by the Habsburg authorities, the Slavs, ‘an inferior race’, were waging ‘a bloodless war of extermination’. By carrying this incendiary journalism, the Corriere della Sera hoped to stoke public feeling against the Triple Alliance and Socialist internationalism.1 More likely it narrowed the slender space for liberal debate about nationality politics in the empire.

  Beyond the cries of persecution, what alarmed the irredentists was their anxiety that, in the terms that dominated thinking about nations and nationhood, the Slovenes were powered by the unstoppable energy of youth. Many educated Italians worried that their own civilisation was torpid and exhausted; in Trieste, this worry sharpened into paranoid fear. History’s next winners would prove their strength by trampling on the has-beens.

  People who claim to believe in determinist ideas rarely act on them. Moderate spirits wanted a rational redistribution of power within the empire, letting the non-Germanic peoples organise their own affairs. Nationalists argued, with desperate chauvinism, that Italy could still use force to assimilate the Slovenes. The most extreme wanted a war to bring the empire down; without their imperial sponsors in Vienna, the Slavs could be put in their place.

  Stuparich and other young Triestines felt in their souls that Italian identity on the eastern Adriatic could be saved. Dazzled by idealism, they took their city’s prosperity for granted. While they dreamed of turning Trieste into a moral example to the world, they ignored the sources of its prosperity. When they remembered economics at all, they called for Trieste to replace Venice as the Queen of the Adriatic. In Rome, Sidney Sonnino, before he started angling to bring Italy into the war, was hard-nosed enough to admit that Trieste would be ‘ruined’ if it joined Italy. This was a forecast that irredentists could not afford to heed; instead they insisted that if Italy controlled enough of the hinterland, the city could remain buoyant.

  Even in Trieste, where socialists outnumbered irredentists, wiser heads saw that severing the city from central Europe would rob it of a future. One such head belonged to Angelo Vivante, a
Triestine Jewish journalist who analysed ‘Adriatic irredentism’ (the title of his classic study) and reached three conclusions. Trieste’s economic potential for Italy was very limited. The Slovenes and Croats were entitled to resist assimilation; if the Italians were right to resist Austrian domination, then the Slavs would be right to resist Italy. The third conclusion followed: ethnic or national cohabitation was the only way to ensure the wellbeing of all the peoples concerned. The national issue should be resolved bilaterally; the partly Italian identity of this region could be affirmed without war, inside the Habsburg empire, to which undeniable economic interests bound the territory. The empire should be helped to evolve into a democratic union of peoples, as a station towards a European socialist confederation.

  However utopian his vision, Vivante’s practical priority was conciliation and reform. Militant irredentists shouted him down. Ruggero Timeus, who would volunteer for the Italian army in 1915 and die in uniform that September, warned that if Trieste and Venezia Giulia remained in Austria, the Italian minority would be drowned in a sea of Slavs. It followed that Italy should provoke a war and conquer Venezia Giulia by force. This was in Italy’s interest in any case, he added, as the young kingdom ought to expand around the northern Adriatic, to become ‘master’ of the sea.