The White War

by Mark Thompson

  The Austrians had tried to dilute Italian nationalism by encouraging the regional identity of Friuli. There was and is a Friulan identity – as the Italian state has accepted since 1945. Other ethnic identities had survived in the lee of the Alps: the Ladini, who had kept their ancient forms of community life in the high valleys of the Dolomites; the Cimbri on the Asiago plateau, with their Germanic dialect; the Mocheni further west in the Trentino. These particularities held no interest for Italian nationalists. The committed volunteers pouring across the border in 1915 felt they were entering virgin land that was, in a mystical way, destined to be Italian. Amleto Albertazzi, a 2nd lieutenant in the Fusiliers, shinned up a beech tree near the eastern bank of the Isonzo, in the first week of June 1915. His heart leaped to see ‘the lands that will soon be ours: a high chain of mountains on the horizon; lower down, a series of hills sloping down to the plain, studded with little villages, growing denser around industrial Monfalcone’, then Mount Hermada ‘like a colossus’ and Duino with its sombre castle, lapped by the sea. On the horizon, there is Trieste, ‘white city of our dreams’.

  What mattered was the place. The inhabitants were décor, not essential. Mussolini’s journal shows this outlook perfectly. Moving over the old (1866) border in September 1915, he notices a little boy drawing water at a pump. What is his name? ‘Stanko.’ Stanko what? The boy does not understand the question, and Mussolini does not realise that Stanko must be a Slovene. Someone tells him the boy’s surname is Robančič. ‘A completely Slavic name,’ notes Mussolini, then changes the subject. This encounter, so revealing of Italian assumptions, needs no comment on his part. In Caporetto a few months later, he notes the ‘enigmatic faces’ of the Slovenes. They still do not like us, he reflects. ‘They submit with resignation and ill-concealed hostility. They think we are only passing through and don’t want to compromise themselves in case yesterday’s masters return tomorrow.’

  For the most part, civilians were not brutally treated. Compared with the sufferings inflicted on Armenians, Belgians, French, Poles, Serbs and Russian Jews, they were fortunate. The Italians’ lack of initial planning probably worked in the civilians’ favour; mixed with the general population rather than cooped up in camps, like the Austrian evacuees, they had more opportunities to earn a living and integrate with the community. Perhaps, too, the lawful treatment of Slovenes and German- speaking Austrians in the border area reflected a general failure by Italian propagandists to poison the attitudes of ordinary soldiers.

  It was different on the other side of the front. Before the war, life for Slovenes had been better in Austria than in Italy. During the war, life was better in Italy – even under occupation. Compared with conditions in the empire, it was easy to survive in occupied Caporetto. Even a week before Italy attacked in May 1915, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior advised people to stay at home, assuring them that full provision had been made in the event of war. Three days later, the villages on the Carso and the Isonzo began to be evacuated. Trieste, Gorizia and Monfalcone were not evacuated, perhaps for propaganda reasons. Many of their inhabitants left of their own will. Half the populations of Trieste and Gorizia moved away. Many villagers, too, took the initiative to go east. By the end of May, 100,000 civilians – Italians, Slovenes and Croats – had moved or been moved to the interior.

  As elsewhere, internment was a preventive tool against suspected spies and saboteurs, potential enemy sympathisers, and political opponents (anarchists and socialists). It was the fate of some 3,000 male regnicoli of military age who had not left the empire by the end of May. Their wives and children – almost 12,000 individuals – were sent elsewhere in Austria or returned to Italy via neutral Switzerland, with the help of the Red Cross. These families often left their apartments fully furnished, with the floors swept and clean tablecloths on the table, never dreaming they would be gone for years. Life was particularly hard for Habsburg Italian evacuees and refugees in the empire. Statistics are fuzzy, but there were probably well over 20,000 of these. They were victims of the difficulty of proving a negative: how to convince the authorities that they were not covert irredentists? Mistaken for regnicoli or political internees, they met with hostility that corroded their loyalty to the empire. They had done nothing wrong, yet they were virtual prisoners far from home, subject to strict order, half starving, denied the chance of work, unable to move far from their camps, suspected by the local people. The camps became hotbeds of Italian nationalism.

  Assistance for internees, evacuees and refugees was better organised but less generous than in Italy. In 1915, some of the camps were equipped with schools, churches, baths, laundries and electric light; others were primitive, insanitary barracks. Conditions deteriorated during the war, along with everything else in the empire. By late 1916, food was in short supply. The Ministry of the Interior was responsible but until the end of 1917, helping refugees was a concession, not a legal obligation, made to preserve what the ministry called ‘the sense of belonging to a common fatherland’. Like any concession, it was arbitrary; hence the ethnic Italians were treated like ‘objects of administration’, as one of their leaders complained, ‘as if they had no will, no rights of their own’. Matters were hardly better for the Slovenes, who killed time in the camps by singing songs and reciting the verses of Simon Gregorčič, a shy priest from Caporetto, who had foretold the carnage nearly forty years earlier:

  Here at the clash of sharpened blades,

  your waters will be tinged with red:

  our blood will run to you,

  that foe will make your current drag!

  Bright Isonzo, then remember

  what your ardent heart implores …

  The first historian of the war in Friuli explained why Italy’s internees and evacuees were not worth studying: ‘They do not stir that sense of the heroic which makes suffering admirable, sacrifice luminous, death honourable and envied.’2 It was better to omit these elements than spoil a sublime picture. The real history was preserved and transmitted orally, by survivors. Families never forgot the catastrophe of displacement. When the Italian soldiers broke the news, the lanes between the houses rang with screams; some people tried to bury their valuables in the cellar while others beat their heads on the wall, wailing.

  One man who lived long enough to inform a new generation of historians was Andrej Mašera of Caporetto, interviewed when he was ninety.

  What I think is that the Italian soldiers who came to fight here felt cheated. Because they had been told, ‘We’re going to liberate our brothers.’ But when they spoke to us, nobody understood a word. This is why I think the Italian soldiers really had been cheated. Before they came into the war, there was great propaganda about liberating us, but once they got here, they asked themselves ‘Where are those brothers of ours? Just what are we doing here?’

  Source Notes

  TWELVE Year Zero

  1 the Ponton brothers, Massimiliano and Giuseppe: Milocco & Milocco, 119–20.

  2 demonised in the nationalist press as a ‘renegade’: Pavan, 263.

  3 ‘always supported the Austrian government’: Milocco & Milocco, 95.

  4 the tranquillity that they have lost’: Cecotti, 141.

  5 D’Adamo spelled out the implications: Milocco & Milocco, 75.

  6 ‘Pro-Austrian elements’ were to be removed: Cecotti, 25, 82.

  7 ‘The population is still hostile’: Bonamore.

  8 forcing the local authorities to put on a show: Milocco & Milocco, 34.

  9 ‘very hostile’ to the men: From a report by the colonel of the regiment that occupied Colle Santa Lucia, south of Cortina, in May 1915. Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxxv.

  10 ‘Wonderful! They have come to liberate us’: Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxxiii.

  11 ‘the lands that will soon be ours’: Albertazzi, 35.

  12 Mussolini’s journal shows this outlook: Svolšak [2003], 125.

  13 ‘They submit with resignation’: Svolšak [2003], 307.

  14 like ‘objec
ts of administration’: Cecotti, 113, 111.

  15 the verses of Simon Gregorčič: Pavan, 225.

  16 ‘They do not stir that sense’: Giovanni Del Bianco, quoted by Cecotti, 15.

  17 ‘What I think’: Pavan, 374.

  18 ‘the glow of a more radiant future’: Svolšak [2006], 158.

  1 The irredentists were mostly well educated, town-dwellers. These men in suits had probably fled to Italy before the war and returned with the army.

  2 This historian, Giovanni Del Bianco, also argued that the executions at Villesse had been offset by ‘the glow of a more radiant future, and new hopes arose, as if to affirm the fluctuations of life and death by which the becoming of peoples is destined to unfold’. Boilerplate dialectics were a convenience for historians under fascism, as for those under communism.

  THIRTEEN

  A Necessary Holocaust?

  A certain plodding earnestness and strict discipline

  may keep up military virtue for a long time, but can

  never create it.

  CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

  At the end of 1915, the volunteer officer Guido Favetti sits in a trench behind Monfalcone, facing Mount Cosich. Nothing stirs. Amid the ‘glacial silence’, metaphors for the situation arise in his highly educated mind. The two warring nations seem to be separated by a silent strip of death, a tongue of fire. Life is suspended; death hovers in the air, ready to pounce. The anticipation of atrocity is a terrible burden, yet the prospect of death is not demoralising; instead, it induces a mild melancholy, like going to the dentist.

  This fine disdain for danger was shared by many middle-class irredentists, whose faith in what Favetti called ‘the religion of the Fatherland’ could not be shaken. It was much harder for ordinary conscripts to distance themselves from their experience in this way; intellectual consolation was not available. Remarkably, Favetti – who deplored the men’s lack of idealism – recognised this, and imagined the state of mind of

  … the infantryman keeping watch with his rifle at the loophole while a shell smashes the trench a few metres away; legs, arms, bits of brain fly through the air, hitting your face like shrapnel … someone is screaming because he has lost his legs, or his stomach is split open, he’s raving, he gabbles a prayer, one of those prayers that make you weep.

  Favetti’s ‘feeble words’ can never describe the ‘mortal anxiety’ of an infantryman under attack or ordered to attack, when ‘enthusiasm, patriotism, no longer exist, or rather, they didn’t exist before for these masses of peasants and workers’. Stepping beyond stock responses, Favetti exclaims to his diary: ‘Is he not a true hero? They are all like this – all of them!’

  *

  For several months after the Fourth Battle, the army was close to collapse. Cadorna’s losses in 1915 ran to 400,000, including 66,000 killed (compared with 28,000 Austrians). To grasp the intensity of destruction, consider the fate of a single brigade, the Casale, known as the Polenta Brigade due to its yellow colours. In May 1915, its strength was 130 officers and 6,000 soldiers. After 440 casualties during June and 800 more in July, it spent three months on Podgora, the steep hill west of Gorizia, where it lost another 2,822 men, including 86 officers – two-thirds of its total strength. During seven months at the front, the Casale lost 154 officers and 4,276 men, dead, wounded and missing.1 Tens of other brigades suffered equivalent losses.

  The survivors’ morale was shaky; even for enthusiasts, the jubilation of their ‘radiant May’ was a mocking memory. The troops were unprepared, in every sense, for the conditions they faced. Lacking weapons, ordered to attack intact barbed wire, struck down by typhoid and cholera, poorly clothed and fed, sleeping on wet hay or mud, the men began to realise that they were ‘going to be massacred, not to fight’. Hardly Garibaldian warriors, rather cannon fodder in a new kind of war.

  The positions and communications were improvised. Most of the front line was impossibly exposed and highly vulnerable to counter-attack. The trenches were still shallow scrapes, filthy with rubbish. Even on San Michele, the epicentre of the front, there was no real line; hummocks made of sandbags and rubble alternated with stretches of completely open, unprotected ground.

  Sweat, dust, mud, rain and sun turned the men’s woollen uniforms into something like parchment. Their boots often had cardboard uppers and wooden soles. Lacking better remedies, the men rubbed tallow into their cracked feet. Helmets were in very short supply. The wooden waterbottles were unhygienic. The tents – when they had them – leaked. The wire-cutters were almost useless, and unusable under fire: ‘mere garden secateurs’, as a Sardinian officer wrote disgustedly in his diary. Ration parties were often delayed by enemy fire. The only hot meal was in the morning, and so poor that soldiers often rejected most of it. The pervasive stench could, anyway, make eating impossible. The effects of such poor nutrition were evident after three or four days in the trenches, and some units sent out raiding parties for food and clothing in trenches that the enemy had abandoned. The soldiers slept on straw pallets, but there were not enough to go around. Even in the rear, before proper hutments were built, the men lived in tents that quickly became waterlogged and filthy. Abysmal medical care led to ‘a good number of avoidable deaths due to inhuman treatment’. Wounded men were routinely ‘shipped on 20 or 30 km ambulance runs on vile roads and then kept waiting for hours outside hospital’.

  On the higher positions, the infantry tried not to freeze to death in their dug-outs, heating rations on Primus stoves that made everything taste of petrol. They slept in holes or pits, wrapped in their coats, packed together for warmth, under canvas stretched between boulders. During their brief spells out of the line, they were often drafted into labour platoons. As for recreation, nothing was organised in the rear areas. To the puritanical Cadorna, free time was a regrettable necessity. Men were forbidden to enter cafés or bars during the day, or to be seen in public ‘in easy company’. (A soldier might be arrested for strolling arm in arm with his fiancée.) There were no libraries, cinemas, or theatres. The only distractions were alcohol (the soldiers called it their petrol), authorised brothels (separate for officers and men), and saucy literature. The first modern Italian novel to sell more than 100,000 copies was Mimi Bluette, Flower of my Garden, by Guido da Verona, the story of a ballerina pure in heart though not in deed, who kills herself at the pinnacle of her renown. The book’s huge popularity in the trenches troubled Father Giovanni Minozzi, a priest who believed that immoral literature made the soldiers’ souls ‘flabby’. The following summer, he set up Soldiers’ Houses, where men off duty could relax amid improving books, discuss their worries with priests, and be helped to write letters home. These high-minded places were not much fun, but they did some good.

  A senior medical officer with the VI Corps (Second Army) assessed the men’s health in early January 1916. Their clothing was of poor quality, torn and crusted with mud. Their feet were frostbitten and swollen. ‘Psychic disturbances’ were most acute where the trenches were continually exposed to the enemy. ‘Standing inert with the prospect of having to attack or be attacked, from one moment to the next, certainly has a great influence on the evolution of these disturbances of the nervous system.’

  Morale was also damaged by the callousness of many senior officers, which Cadorna encouraged and even demanded. Regimental commanders vainly objected that men should not be sent against unbroken barbed wire. A corps commander on the Isonzo, General Vincenzo Garioni, argued that the massacre of infantry should be seen as ‘a necessary holocaust’. The slaughter was therapeutic, a purgative that strengthened the army for future battles, rendering it fit for victory. Whether this nonsense was more a cause or an effect of the senior commanders’ indifference to suffering, it is hard to say.

  As well as the losses due to poor equipment, countless lives were thrown away because the men lacked elementary training, for example not even being told to keep their heads down when they reached the trenches. A staff officer in Carnia realised in summer 1915 th
at ‘Nobody has a clue how to lay wire, how to throw a hand-grenade, how to attack a trench system.’ A rare British witness of the 1915 campaigns was George Barbour, a Scottish Quaker who served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit on the Isonzo after several months in Flanders. He recorded his dismay at the sight of men trying to move along a road to the rear, in November. The road was under fire, and the Italians were clueless how to protect themselves. ‘When told to advance, they do so in the most inconvenient manner possible at a slow double and then again expose themselves under cover by lying against the projecting bank at the corner where the shells always fall … they seem to be babes in the art of war.’ Regular lunch breaks were further evidence of poor professionalism: ‘The victor will be he who can put his heart into the thing for 2 successive days – all the Quisca batteries stop for 1½ hrs at lunch time & the Austrians do the same with the same infantile regularity.’ This slack custom endured throughout the war.

  Something that revolted foreign observers and sensitive Italians alike was the carelessness about latrines. Giani Stuparich’s reaction, cited earlier, was dainty compared to Carlo Emilio Gadda’s. For the future novelist, then a lieutenant in the 5th Regiment of Alpini, military defecation gave a frightful insight into national character. ‘Shit of every size, shape, colour, texture and consistency is scattered everywhere in the vicinity of the camp’, he wrote despairingly, ‘yellow, black, ash grey, swarthy, bronze; liquid, solid, etc.’ Incredibly, the men could not see how needlessly unpleasant they made life for everybody – themselves included – by not using latrines. This chronic inability to grasp the wider effects of their actions was a trait that he dubbed ‘the cretinous egotism of the Italian’. A British private who spent the last year of the war in Italy was shocked by the appearance of an abandoned camp: ‘literally a field of filth. I had never seen such a disgusting sight and wondered what kind of epidemic was being bred amidst the excreta and soiled paper.’ With such disregard for basic hygiene, how could the Italians hope to wage war properly?