3 The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, strolling in Agram (now Zagreb) on 20 October, nearly 200 kilometres away, imagined he could feel the ground vibrating under his feet. ‘Subterranean rumblings’, he noted in his diary. ‘Guns on the Isonzo.’ Next day, he reported rumours circulating in the cafés ‘that the guns on the Isonzo are audible. The Isonzo has its magnetic field and we all walk around inside its spell.’
The Italians were nowhere near taking Tolmein. Hill 383, looming over Plava, remained impregnable. As for Gorizia, there were 30 assaults on Sabotino and Podgora, often in driving rain. The corps commander on this sector was General Luigi Capello, promoted from divisional commander on the Carso, where his ruthlessness justified the nickname he had earned in Libya: ‘the butcher’. This reputation commended him to Cadorna, who otherwise disliked Capello as too political and, especially, too active as a Freemason. Their on-off partnership defined much of the Italian war for the next two years.
On the Carso, control of San Michele switched from one side to another amid savage fighting over three days. The Italians repeatedly overran the Austrian front line, but could not withstand the counter-attack. Again and again, they charged at positions that turned out not to have been seriously damaged. Their assaults were stopped short by intact wire. The Austrians had made good use of the quiet months since the Second Battle. By the time the Italians had taken the first line of enemy trenches, the enemy reserves had reached the second line, which was in better condition than the first line and well able to block any further advance while the Austrians prepared their counter-attack.
Between San Michele and Monfalcone, the Carso escarpment rises and falls without any clear summits. The name given to this limestone wilderness is Monte Sei Busi, which translates as Six Holes Mountain. (To someone walking over the surface, the name could as well be Sixty or Six Hundred Holes.) The Siena Brigade’s task in the Third Battle was to take the Austrians’ long, well-fortified front line on Sei Busi. On 23 October, the trench was taken after three days of bloody assaults, with all three battalions engaged. The rejoicing was short-lived; that night, the Italians were driven back to their jump-off position. As usual, they had no time to prepare their defence. The next morning, the Austrians called for an hour’s ceasefire to tend the wounded and collect the dead. Soon afterwards the Siena Brigade was replaced with a regiment of Bersaglieri and the Sassari Brigade. Together, these fresh forces retook the trench early in November, and kept it. Yet another massive effort had yielded a ‘success’ which was scarcely visible on the map.
Bad weather lasted throughout the battle, intensifying at the end of the month. By early November, the trenches were quagmires of filth, the roads almost impassable. The first snowfalls forced the fighting to stop.
The last days of the battle, 3 and 4 November, were extremely violent. Brigade diaries reported fears that some units might crack and desert en masse. The attacks on San Michele were weakening under the internal pressures of exhaustion and hopelessness. The Italians had sustained 67,000 losses along the front. On San Michele, the Catanzaro Brigade alone lost almost 2,800 men and 70 officers between 17 and 26 October, nearly half of each category. The Caltanisetta Brigade, deployed alongside the Catanzaro, took even heavier casualties, losing two-thirds of its men and 63 per cent of its officers between 22 October and 3 November. South of Monfalcone, the 16th Division carried out a frontal attack on Hill 121, the nearest point to Trieste that Cadorna’s army had yet reached. This one failed attack cost 4,000 Italian casualties. The battle’s only gains were trivial: some ground along the river, south of Plava, and two hills to the west of Podgora, bringing the Italians a hundred metres closer to Gorizia.
The extra artillery and tinkering with infantry tactics had made little difference. One reason was the rigorous centralisation of command and control. Given the poor communications on the battlefield, this made bad decisions inevitable. An episode involving the Lazio Brigade, recovered by the historian Giorgio Longo, illustrates this with tragic clarity.
The brigade was stationed on the northern slope of San Michele. It is the steepest face of the hill, rising 270 metres from the Isonzo within 900 horizontal metres. The 132nd Infantry Regiment (Lazio Brigade, 29th Division, Third Army) was stationed between regiments of the Perugia and Verona Brigades. It faced formidable Austrian defences, guarded by multiple rows of barbed wire and machine-gun nests, backed by batteries to the east. Flanking movements along the river were barred by a redoubt with outlying trenches that the Italians judged to be impregnable. On 21 October, the 132nd Infantry was ordered to take a ridge on the northern slope. Known as Hill 124, this ridge was ringed with barbed wire that had suffered only a few narrow breaches. Efforts to widen the breaches with wire-cutters and gelignite tubes had mostly failed. Inevitably, the attackers suffered heavy losses; over ten days of continuous assaults, the 132nd lost 26 officers and 707 men. The survivors sheltered in muddy holes; their soggy uniforms could not be dried.
On the evening of the 31st, the regiment was ordered to renew its attack the following morning. The commanding officer, Colonel Viola, decided to resist. He reported to the brigade commander, General Schenardi, that attacking in these conditions was impossible: the rain had made the steep slopes too slippery; the paths disappeared under sliding mud; the triple rows of wire were intact; enemy fire turned the assaults into pointless butchery.
Schenardi knew Viola as a courageous CO who would not refuse an order without good reason. Throughout the following day, he urged him to proceed with the attack. The other man bought time by sending out wire-cutting patrols. That evening, Schenardi put the best face possible on the colonel’s refusal in a report to his divisional commander, General Marazzi. Wire had blocked the 132nd Infantry’s progress, and subsequent wire-cutting patrols had been killed by enfilade fire from above. They would send night patrols to try again, but if these failed to widen the breaches, the next day’s attack could only succeed if the Verona Brigade, adjacent to the Lazio, gave timely support. He ended by assuring the general that every effort was being made and every hardship endured to achieve success.
At divisional headquarters in Sdraussina, two kilometres away, Marazzi warned that the men’s ‘extreme energy’ might be undermined by weakness in the officers. Any commander suspected of shortcomings should be replaced. Behind their defences, the enemy were few and disheartened. ‘Strike a vigorous blow with every means, and victory shall be ours.’ Marazzi was under pressure from the corps commander, General Morrone, who had been stung by a phone call from the Duke of Aosta himself, in his headquarters at Cervignano some 16 kilometres away, regretting that the previous day’s action had brought ‘no appreciable result’. On the morning of 2 November, Marazzi informed the irate Morrone that ‘the most energetic orders’ had been given ‘to drive the troops forward with the utmost vigour’. Every man would do his duty to the last, at whatever cost.
General Schenardi ordered the attack to take place at 13:00 hours. Colonel Viola protested that the breaches in the wire were still too narrow, due partly to damp fuses in the gelignite tubes. Without support from the Verona Brigade, the 132nd would be massacred again. Once again, zero hour passed without an attack. When Schenardi asked about the Verona Brigade, General Marazzi snapped back: attack at once, never mind the Verona Brigade! A quarter of an hour later, he followed this order with another: if Colonel Viola hesitates for an instant, relieve him of his command.
Viola duly gave orders to advance. As usual, he led from the front. The platoons poured uphill in waves, only to break against the wire, still ‘nearly intact’ according to the brigade diary. Reinforcements arrived, but the enemy fire was overwhelming. Around 19:00, the regiment fell back. The following day, Viola prepared to lead his men back up the hill, but torrential rain forced a postponement. The same happened on the 4th. The 29th Division was exempted from the next rotations, so the men of the 132nd stayed at their sodden posts. By 10 November, the regiment was stunned by exhaustion, in terrible condition
. That evening the steady downpour became a cloudburst, flooding the trenches and turning the paths into foaming streams. Two days later the 132nd was granted a week’s leave. Colonel Viola died on 22 November, leading his men in yet another attack against Hill 124.
The Third Battle was suspended on the evening of 4 November, but Cadorna was unreasonably convinced that Boroević’s army teetered on the edge of collapse. Knowing that 24 fresh battalions were due to arrive within a week or two, he felt sure Gorizia could still be taken. After a week’s pause, the Fourth Battle was launched with a short bombardment. The infantry did their best to charge up the open slopes of Mrzli, Podgora, Sabotino and San Michele, swept by machine-gun fire. The rain pelted down, the temperature sank, and then – on 16 November – heavy snow fell. There would not be a proper thaw until spring 1917, when corpses were revealed after a year and a half.
Thanks to the wire and machine guns, Austrian units that had lost half their men held back Italian advances with three times their own strength. A bit of ground was taken here and there, after huge losses, but nothing decisive. Capello, an intuitive soldier, knew it was impossible to succeed in such conditions, with the men exhausted. He sent a graphic report to General Frugoni, commanding the Second Army. As the rations were cold by the time they reached the men, and short as well, the mud-soaked infantry could not ‘restore their strength with hot, abundant rations’. Some units went more than two days without food. They were not so much men as ‘walking shapes of mud. It is not the will to advance that’s lacking … what they lack is the physical strength.’ Even the reserves had spent days in water and mud, hence were not capable of reinvigorating the first-line troops. Malingering and self-mutilation were serious problems. Malingerers imitated symptoms that doctors found hard to verify. With so many infantrymen presenting tidy wounds to their hands or feet, officers learned to look for telltale scorchmarks. Self-mutilation could be punished with summary execution or jail, but the trend was only reversed much later, when the Supreme Command sent all suspects straight to the front line.
Amid the routine slaughter, 18 November marked a turning point: the Italians shelled Gorizia for three hours. This was the start of ‘total war’ on the Isonzo. Until now, both sides had mostly refrained from targeting civilians – though Austrian ships and planes had shelled several Adriatic cities in May 1915. Astutely, the Italians had milked the fact that they had less to gain from targeting civilians. In July, Cadorna offered to support a joint commitment against targeting ‘open cities’. The Austrians were not interested: they wanted to exploit their superiority in the air.
Gorizia was known as the Austrian Nice, the city of roses or violets. Blessed by a mild climate in winter, with hills behind and the turquoise Isonzo in front, it flourished under the Habsburgs. Long avenues were lined with handsome villas. The public gardens were exceptionally pretty, the medieval castle on the hill was picturesque. The hospitals and convalescent homes were patronised by wealthy Viennese and Bavarians, who formed a German crust on top of the mixed Italian and Slovene population. After May 1915, fighting quickly reached the city’s edge. The first wave of refugees brought some 40,000 people through the city, local Italians as well as Slovenes, carrying or dragging whatever they could save from the invaders; many would spend years in internment camps. Although the prewar population of 31,000 soon halved, as citizens fled to safer regions, numbers were kept up by several tens of thousands of Habsburg troops quartered in the city, turning it into a virtual third line. Curtains of reeds were hung across the streets to block enemy snipers’ sight-lines; otherwise life continued almost normally. Officers and their wives strolled in the gardens, sat in the cafés, and kept local businesses afloat. Authority passed from the mayor to General Zeidler, legendary commander of the 58th Division, who chose not to evacuate the city, perhaps because the attack was a gift to Habsburg propaganda.
Why did Cadorna abandon the moral high ground now, when he knew that Gorizia could not be taken during this battle? His memoirs offer no clue. Perhaps he decided that civilised restraint had become a luxury, or the spectacle of the city’s near-normality so close to the front line harmed his own men’s morale. Joffre, who visited the front, may have advised that he could not afford to spare the city. Whatever the reason, Cadorna privately admitted that Gorizia was more a political than a strategic objective, and the shelling brought no advantage to offset the propaganda loss.
The Supreme Command ordered a last offensive on Mount Mrzli and around Tolmein for 23 November. Senior officers were unconvinced. Many of the men could no longer fit their boots onto their swollen feet, and frostbite was a danger. The mud, too, undermined morale: when their uniforms dried out, they were stiff as boards. The sight of Sicilian peasants shivering in a trench, hands purple and swollen, unequipped for climatic extremes that were as inconceivable to them as the war itself, could sow doubt in any observer’s mind about continuing the assaults in sub-zero temperatures. But Cadorna was not an observer; he was in Udine, nearly 40 kilometres from Mount Mrzli, surrounded by deferential staff officers.
Even so, on 26 November, the Italians pushed the Austrians back to within 20 metres of the summit. Taking advantage of a rising mist, the counter-attacking Austrians quickly drove the Italians back to the Big Trench. A separate push to take the southernmost end of the ridge, directly above Tolmein, was also repulsed. Inching up the mountain, the Italians eventually found themselves only eight metres below the Austrian front line. Pelted with grenades, rocks, barrels, even tins filled with faeces, they could get no further. It was rumoured that a corps commander shouted at his staff, ‘Don’t you see I need more dead men, lots more, if we’re to show the top brass that the action against Mrzli cannot succeed?’ By the end of 1915, the losses of two brigades that had served on Mrzli from the start – the Modena and Salerno – exceeded 9,000 men.
Operations petered out in the first week of December, when heavy snowfalls obliterated trenches and wire. The Fourth Battle had added 49,000 Italian casualties to the 67,000 from the Third. Austrian losses were 42,000 and 25,000 respectively. Summarising the reasons for failure, the Italian official history of the war blamed the barbed wire, which was ‘practically impossible’ to destroy. Many months would pass before the Italians found a remotely effective solution.
Source Notes
ELEVEN Walking Shapes of Mud
1 ‘Where are the trenches?’: Salsa, 49.
2 ‘restore their strength with hot, abundant rations’: Rocca, 102–3
3 ‘Don’t you see I need more dead men’: Balbi & Viazzi, 245.
4 49,000 Italian casualties to the 67,000: Isnenghi & Rochat, 167.
5 ‘practically impossible’ to destroy: Alliney, 78.
1 The ‘methodical advance’ engaged front-line units in raids and other small-scale actions along the front. The purpose was to keep the Austrians in ‘continual tension’, denying them the advantages that accrued from the Italians’ predictable cycles of preparation and attack. However, as these smaller actions were largely fruitless and costly, they also sapped the Italians.
2 ‘Where are the trenches?’ asked a junior officer, arriving on San Michele in November 1915. ‘Trenches, trenches …’ came the wondering reply. ‘There aren’t any. We’ve got holes.’
TWELVE
Year Zero
Civilians on the Italian Front
Before Cadorna settled into the winter’s work of preparing to campaign again in the spring, he helped the government fend off its critics in Rome. Although they dominated parliament, the Liberal and Socialist deputies had been subdued since May. Massive public support for the army made it almost impossible to challenge the government politically. But the failure to gain a breakthrough in 1915 made Prime Minister Salandra more vulnerable, and some opposition deputies tested the water by raising a problem that was genuine and might be eye-catching, but stopped short of implicating the military. This was the government’s policy towards civilians in the occupied areas. The deputies were par
ticularly concerned about the internees, men and women arrested on the orders of the Supreme Command without a legal basis and often on flimsy pretexts. The internees were forcibly transferred – sometimes with their children, sometimes by cattle truck – to locations the length and breadth of Italy, where they lived under police surveillance, subsisting on hand-outs, amid suspicious Italian patriots.
On 11 December, having agreed a line with Cadorna, Salandra assured parliament that only 200 or 300 of the internees were Italian citizens. The remainder – numbering no more than 2,000 – were Austrian subjects from the liberated territory. Internment was only used with people whose presence in the occupied territory might, ‘even unconsciously and without blame on their part’, benefit the enemy. Nevertheless, he promised to review the cases of the Italian citizens and let them return home when security allowed. A week later, the Supreme Command followed up with a soothing (and hollow) assurance that internment would no longer be ordered on the basis of vague allegations. In fact the number of internees was already 5,000 and would rise to 70,000. Internment began as soon as the army marched into eastern Friuli and the Dolomites. As the highest authority in the war zone, the Supreme Command decided who should be interned and on what grounds. There were no fixed criteria for these judgements, and decisions were made by the commanding officer on the spot, or by military police.
The White War Page 18