The White War

by Mark Thompson

  The occupation created a golden chance for score-settling. Local nationalists, prone to the intolerance that partners revolutionary idealism, prepared blacklists of their opponents, who were not lacking, for most Habsburg Italians were not nationalist at all. Kinship ties, ethnic origins, hearsay, anonymous letters, the testimony of ‘trusted’ informants, and sheer malice: all these played a part in the drama of internment. Francesco Rossi, a labourer, was arrested and interned after he was overheard saying that Italy was poor and would never be able to help poor people, as Austria had done. A family of seven was deported to southern Italy for giving their youngest child the ‘disrespectful’ name of Germana. The infant’s godfather was interned as well for good measure. Six men from Villa Vicentina were interned for allegedly criticising the Italian army in a bar. Their offence was ‘defeatism’, like Leonardo Mian of Aquileia, interned after insulting army officers when in his cups. Another man was reportedly slow to help an Italian soldier who fell in a river, so he was packed off to Puglia at the far end of Italy. Few internees were given any reason for their treatment. Many files contain no allegations at all. Lack of open enthusiasm for the occupation was enough to prompt misgivings. Giuseppe Leghissa, a trader, was banished to Tuscany for being ‘notoriously hostile to the cause’.

  ‘Spying’ was a standard accusation. Actual espionage did not have to be proven; arrest and internment followed from being in the wrong place at the wrong moment, or asking about Italian strength or intentions. A housewife could be charged with collaboration for hanging sheets out of windows facing the Carso, allegedly signalling to the Austrians. Parish priests were interned for ringing the church bells (and they were rung everywhere when the Italians marched in, because Pentecost fell on 23 May). So bell-ringing was prohibited, along with possession of firearms and keeping pigeons. A Germanic accent and old-world Viennese manners aroused suspicion, as several titled landowners learned to their cost. Accusations were thickest in the areas where Slovenes lived. In some cases, internment was justified with the single word: ‘Slav’.

  A powerful factor was the irredentists’ animus against the Catholic Church, for Catholicism was still regarded as nearly synonymous with anti-Italianism. When the Ponton brothers, Massimiliano and Giuseppe, were arrested and taken to the main square in Palmanova at the end of May 1915, a local man jumped at Giuseppe ‘like a wild animal’, according to a witness, screaming, ‘We’ve got you now, you filthy German, you spy! Now you’ll pay for your wrongdoings!’ He punched Giuseppe hard on the head, then threw him back against a wall. Onlookers cheered as Giuseppe bled. The brothers were led away to join the other internees who had been rounded up, thirty or so altogether, to be handcuffed and shoved into carts (for the peasant farmers) or open carriages (if they were landowners or priests), then taken under military escort to prison, where a crowd was waiting with stones and sticks, led by ‘well-dressed men’ who shouted, ‘Now you’ll see who’s master! You’ll see what happens when you side with the Catholic swine!’1 The police stood by as blows rained down on the handcuffed men.

  The Ponton brothers were pillars of their community. What had they done to deserve this violence? Giuseppe’s offence was logged as ‘ex- Mayor, Catholic’, while Massimiliano’s was ‘pro-Austrian, member of Catholic associations’. Making matters still worse, their brother Olivo was active in the movement against irredentism, and had fled to Gorizia at the start of the war. This movement was led by the People’s Catholic Party of Friuli (PCPF), with a programme that chilled the marrow of Italian nationalists on both sides of the border. For the PCPF argued that Italian identity and rights could thrive within the empire on a basis of strong local autonomy. This was precisely what the irredentists denied. Every Habsburg Italian who believed in a bland constitutional settlement for Italians in the empire had made life harder for the irredentists and now, logically, would do so for the occupying forces. Activists who shared this vision were the worst enemies of the irredentists, rather as, elsewhere in Europe, democratic socialists would soon be the worst enemies of communists. The PCPF was led by a priest from Gorizia, Monsignor Luigi Faidutti, demonised in the nationalist press as a ‘renegade’.

  The clergy were automatically suspected of supporting the PCPF. Of the 80 priests in the occupied territories, 59 were interned in 1915 on generic grounds of spying, inciting resistance, and ‘Austrophilia’. They were replaced by Italian priests in military service, often natives of western Friuli. The Supreme Command described this policy as ‘just and praiseworthy’, for the local priests had ‘always supported the Austrian government, and hence could contribute to a state of mind not at all favourable to the new regime’. This was a slur on many priests, who simply had a different notion of what was good for the Habsburg Italians, but as a policy it made sense. Apart from their loyalty to the Apostolic Majesty in Vienna, most of the clergy were Slovenes, like their flock, and their opinion of the invaders was sharpened by ethnic antagonism. The Habsburgs were defenders of the faith, whereas the Italian army – led by Cadorna’s father, as it happened – had conquered the Papal States and confined His Holiness to the Vatican, like jailers. Many saw Cadorna’s forces in the darkest terms as profaners and rapists, and warned their congregations accordingly from the pulpit.

  Other influential figures in the community were also targeted. Mayors, retired officials, teachers, tradesmen: all were likely to be interned. Some were sent to Udine or the Veneto; others to Piedmont and Lombardy; most ended in Tuscany or further south. All men between 18 and 50 from the ‘redeemed’ territory were supposed to be confined to the island of Sardinia. Consequently, three-quarters of the internees found themselves in one of the poorest, least healthy parts of Italy, where Habsburg Italians – let alone Slovenes – could make no sense of the impenetrable dialect. Italians sent to Sicily baffled the local people by speaking Italian – the Sicilians assumed that enemy civilians were bound to be German.

  The state gave the internees one lira each per day: twice as much as a private in the infantry, but not enough to meet elementary needs. If they managed on their own savings or income, they could choose where to live. While some sank into ruin, most managed to find their feet. Clubs of local patriots would denounce internees to the police, but the police did not always listen and there were open-minded families ready to share food and lend clothes.

  As well as internments, Cadorna’s Supreme Command ordered mass evacuations. Everyone living within 500 metres of the ‘zone of military operations’ was supposed to be moved away. Many villages were virtually emptied. In all, more than 40,000 civilians were evacuated during the first year of the war. Some were sent a few kilometres down the road; most ended up unthinkably far from hearth and home, anywhere between Sicily and the French border, until 1919.

  Families were given a few hours’ notice to collect whatever they could carry, then escorted to collection points at Udine and Palmanova to be registered, disinfected and vaccinated against cholera and dysentery, then moved on to their destinations, where no camps had been prepared and there was no prior co-ordination with local authorities. Only when the Austrian offensive in 1916 drove almost 80,000 Italians off the Asiago plateau did the government realise that provision for refugees should be systematised. Even then, unlike in France or Britain, no central body was set up to organise refugee affairs.

  Official and popular suspicion was pervasive; these people might have been ‘redeemed’, but they were still Austrian subjects. People spat on the evacuees in the streets of Livorno: ‘You Germans, coming here to eat our bread.’ They were moved around in convoys, under police escort. Their movements were often restricted. In some places, priests and teachers reached out to the evacuee groups. Yet they were practical people, ready to make the best of things – even the baffling foodstuffs. (Pasta and rice were unknown in eastern Friuli before the war.) As well as the daily subvention from the state, they were allowed to take paid work. A March 1916 report on Habsburg Italian evacuees in the southern province of Abruzzo o
bserved that they mourned ‘the tranquillity that they have lost and the prosperity they believe is gone for ever. But there is no rancour or hatred.’

  Evacuee life was especially tough for the 10,000 or more Habsburg Slovenes who had to move to the interior of Italy. Apart from the shock of displacement, few of them could communicate with local people, who resented them more than the Italian evacuees. The same report from Abruzzo described the Slovenes as ‘very submissive and docile’ but also ‘closed and suspicious’. The adults kept a distance from local people, though the children were more prepared to mix. In some places, the local authorities did not want to accept Slovenes at all.

  The Supreme Command set up a new office to manage the evacuations and other civilian matters in the occupied territories. This was the General Secretariat for Civil Affairs, led by a lawyer, Agostino D’Adamo. Although he reported to Cadorna, D’Adamo came from the Ministry of the Interior. He was a key figure, the man who would prepare the full-scale integration of the ‘redeemed’ territory into the Kingdom of Italy. Cadorna’s priority was his army’s security. Salandra supported this, but he wanted something else as well: a political revolution to entrench Italian sovereignty over the conquered land. It was a delicate project, for Italy was party to international conventions that forbade occupying powers from imposing permanent changes in territory occupied in war. An occupying regime could only impose its national laws as far as necessary to ensure public order. It was entitled to demand obedience but not loyalty, a fragile distinction.

  The Italians now disowned their international obligations, claiming exemption in the name of ‘special considerations of law, of political opportunity, and sentiment’. From Rome’s point of view, the occupation should from the outset mean ‘the reality of the redemption, the stabilisation of liberty, and the accomplishment of national solidarity’. Without formally claiming the conquered land, as Bulgaria for example would do with Serbia, Italy laid the foundations for postwar annexation by integrating it into Italian life. D’Adamo spelled out the implications to the Supreme Command in March 1916: the population of the ‘occupied territories’ must understand that there could be ‘no return to the preceding state’ and they were subject to Italian sovereignty.

  As these areas had been part of the Austrian Empire for four centuries, compared with the Kingdom of Italy’s half-century of existence, and the local people had no reason to prefer Italy, it was not easy to induce this understanding. D’Adamo aimed to preserve the form of Habsburg administration while filling it with new national substance. ‘Pro-Austrian elements’ were to be removed from public life and replaced by individuals with ‘Italian sentiments’. The purges were directed at local level by civil commissars. Italian became the sole official language. Slovene-language education was stopped; Italian history and geography loomed large in the new curricula. Army officers taught the lessons, and military chaplains took catechism classes. Pupils celebrated the birthdays of Italy’s king, queen, and queen mother. German and Slavic place-names were Italianised in order to ‘restore dignity’ that had been lost to ‘Austrian mangling’. By the end of 1917, some 2,500 toponyms had been changed. A project to impose Italian versions of Slovene surnames was launched.

  Yet D’Adamo was a humane pragmatist who did his best for the people. Food and healthcare were provided, and state support was not withheld from families with men serving in the Austrian army. Even the Slovene press, across the border, gave credit where it was due, quoting the villagers’ praise for the new regime. And he had a spine: when the government squeezed the local population unreasonably, he spoke up – as when Rome wanted to force the introduction of Italian currency – for he believed the population should be won over, not simply coerced. This was a rare insight; the government mainly acted as if the locals should have their noses rubbed in the reality of Italian power. Despite a few enlightened policies, there was no systematic effort to convince them of the benefits of the new regime. As often in Italian history, individuals redressed the negligence and callousness of institutions.

  D’Adamo’s job was made harder by several murderous reprisals against local people. At the end of May 1915, the commander in Villesse believed – mistakenly – that the villagers were shooting at his men. He ordered everyone to be rounded up and kept as hostages. Then he shot six people, including the deputy mayor. The rest were interned. A week later, the Italians carried out a summary decimation of farmers from half a dozen hamlets between Caporetto and Tolmein. The adult males were rounded up and accused of betraying positions to the enemy and sheltering Italian deserters. Their denials were waved away by the commanding officer, a captain, who lined the farmers up and ordered every tenth man to step forward. The unlucky six were shot in the back and buried where they fell, scapegoats for the Italian soldiers’ lack of enthusiasm for futile attacks against a much smaller Habsburg force, including many Slovenes, on the Krn–Mrzli ridge.

  Compared with the slaughter on the hills above, these were minor mishaps, statistically almost invisible. But they were blatantly unjust, and they echoed around the occupied territory, poisoning local attitudes. A soldier stationed near Tolmein wrote in his diary on 30 June: ‘The population is still hostile. Spies are constantly being shot at Caporetto.’ In fact the shootings were sporadic; the soldier’s impression of incessant executions – like the rumours that spread, for example about Slovene women cutting off the heads of wounded Italians – spoke volumes about the nerve-jangling atmosphere.

  The Italians believed the liberated areas were teeming with spies – how else to explain their failure to break through? The other reason for their jumpiness was dismay at their reception by the people who were being ‘redeemed’. Expecting fierce resistance, the troops were dis comfited by the eerie emptiness of the land that they entered on 24 May. Then they were baffled by the attitude of the civilians. The villages were heavy with fear and distrust; even in towns with a reputation for nationalism, like Cervignano, the streets were empty and the houses shuttered. A deputy who had volunteered wrote to Salandra that ‘we are welcomed coldly, with suspicion, often with open antipathy’ in every village from the sea to the mountains. Italian commanders were reduced to forcing the local authorities to put on a show of pro-Italian emotion.

  The welcome was even chillier in the Dolomites. Some valleys were pro-Austrian, others pro-Italian, depending on their proximity to the border and the trade that flourished along them. On the whole, the Habsburg Italians were loyal to their emperor. Italian nationalists venerated the Alps, their ‘natural frontier’, as the home of epic virtues: strength, sincerity, simplicity, faith and family. Ironically, these virtues tilted the mountain-dwellers against new-fangled Italy. For nationalism came late to the mountain communities, filtering in with the spread of Alpinism in the last third of the nineteenth century, when Italian and Austrian climbers competed for the honour of first ascents. Soldiers were dismayed to find people even in the southern valleys, closest to Italy, ‘very hostile’ to the men who were ‘fighting to liberate their brothers’. An elderly Italian in Cortina was heard to comment, ‘Wonderful! They have come to liberate us. But who will liberate us from them?’

  Slovene newspapers reported with glee that the Italians were ‘particularly angered’ by the local people’s attitude. After the wild rhetoric about the mission of Latin civilisation, many soldiers expected ‘the Slavs’ to hail their deliverance from cultural inferiority. By an irony that eluded them, the Italians were reaping the harvest of state policy towards the Slovene minority on their own side of the border. Since 1866, the Slovenes in Italy had envied the position that their conationals (often their blood kin) enjoyed across the border. The Italians did not realise that the terms of the Treaty of London meant – especially when simplified by Austrian propaganda – that they were seen as alien conquerors. Italian propagandists blamed their Austrian counterparts for brainwashing the locals with lies about Italian savagery.

  But these people had been living with the war for nearly a
year. Their menfolk were fighting in Galicia or Serbia. In the summer and autumn of 1915, the civilians in eastern Friuli saw their world turned upside down. They were dazed by the disappearance of the empire in which they and their forefathers had lived. The regnicoli, peaceable immigrants from Italy who in many cases had lived in these villages for decades, were forced out. The dusty lanes were torn up by the first motor vehicles that some of the locals had ever seen. Men and women were drafted into labour gangs to build tracks into the mountains. Fields were seized for barracks, depots, field kitchens, hospitals and airfields. The mortality rate in these villages soared, for the war brought disease.

  All this occurred against a background of low-level ethnic distrust. The Slovenes were broadly pro-Austrian, without being aggressively anti-Italian. Their experience of war was exactly what the Italians could not imagine. Behind these misunderstandings lay a deep ignorance of the people who lived around Italy’s north-eastern border. North of Gorizia, the population on the Isonzo front was entirely Slovene, mostly smallholding farmers with cows and goats, maize fields and orchards, shod in wooden clogs, ploughing their narrow fields with horses, eating rye bread and polenta, flat cake made with maize flour. The only Italian- speakers were women who had been in domestic service in Trieste. Further north, in Carnia, even the locals who were not Slovene and spoke something a bit like Italian, larded with Germanic and Slavic terms, were quite unlike the Venetians. The first Italian officials to make their way up these valleys after the 1866 war did not know how to classify the locals: were they German or Italian? These settlements shared an Alpine culture that linked them with the north and west; they also lay close to trade routes that connected the Mediterranean with central Europe.