These humble problems were beneath Cadorna’s notice. When in Rome, he grumbled that he felt much better ‘at the front’. By this he meant his headquarters, for he rarely ventured closer to the fighting. The Supreme Command, jokily known as the Comandissimo, was a world apart. To Rudyard Kipling’s visiting eyes, it was like a monastery or laboratory: simple, austere, dedicated. This was not the view of officers up the line, who saw Cadorna’s staff lavished with privileges: working in safety, with fine food and drink, their families installed nearby and chauffeurs at the ready; given fast-track promotions, contact with ministers and the King, and unmerited decorations.2 It was hardly surprising if this pampered coterie did not question ‘the boss’, as they called him.
Enemy propaganda made good use of Cadorna’s lack of progress and carelessness about losses. One leaflet in the autumn printed maps of the paltry territory that the Italians had captured since May, alongside estimates of the casualties they had taken. Another, released over Italian positions from hot-air balloons before the Fourth Battle, reproduced an order of Cadorna that a certain position must be taken regardless of how many lives were lost.
These conditions frayed the bonds of discipline. The first proper mutiny occurred in early December 1915. After four months in the trenches, the 48th Regiment (Ferrara Brigade) was reduced to 700 effectives. Despite losing some 2,300 men, the regiment had just performed well during a month on San Michele. Then, on 11 December, some 200 of these survivors – almost all Calabrians, from the far south of Italy – were granted a spell of rest and recuperation while the remaining 500 were sent back to the front at Tolmein. The men’s sense of injustice welled up, and shots were fired. The divisional commanders set up an extraordinary court martial and two soldiers were shot, less than 24 hours after the offence.
Another incident occurred on 20 December at Kamno, on the middle Isonzo, directly below Krn, when a regiment of the Salerno Brigade was ordered back to the first line. Apparently fuelled by drink, someone fired a shot at the officers’ mess. The divisional command surrounded the regiment with four battalions, complete with machine guns and artillery. The following morning, an extraordinary court martial considered the charge of ‘revolt in the presence of the enemy’ – a dubious charge, as the rebels were not in the line. Eight were sentenced to death, others to hard labour for 20 years. The condemned men wept as they were led away. After witnessing the executions, the regiment was escorted back up the line by carabinieri (military police).
One of the chief grievances was the lack, and irregularity, of home leave. Cadorna believed he could not spare the men from the front during the autumn offensives. The longer they went without leave, and the worse the army’s results in the field, the more fearful the Supreme Command became that the soldiers’ accounts of life at the front would harm wider support for the war. The censorship of their letters and the press, and the relentlessly upbeat statements issued by Udine and Rome, left the public completely unprepared for realistic accounts of the war. Cadorna had set a trap for himself that time would spring.
With Christmas impending and the front locked down by winter weather, it was impossible to keep postponing the men’s home leave. When a fortnight’s leave was granted to tens of thousands of soldiers in December, the impact on public spirits was perceptible. Stories circulated about terrible losses on Mount Col di Lana in the Dolomites; entire regiments thrown at positions on the Carso that could not be taken; trenches that could be stormed but not held. The government warned that any soldier on leave who spread ‘tendentious or exaggerated rumours’ which weakened ‘faith in the success of our endeavours’ would be returned to his unit. The threat did not work; on 16 January, Cadorna ordered commanding officers to take harsh measures against ‘defeatism’ among soldiers on leave.
This was not his only political annoyance as the year drew to its end. Salandra wanted visible success – even though other fronts were stagnant too. Having given Cadorna sole charge of the conduct of the war, he was unhappy that a bloody stalemate was his reward. He found the supreme commander personally difficult; Cadorna refused to inform the government of his plans or curb his demands for weapons, ammunition and equipment.
Cadorna stuck to his doctrine; nobody, he declared, not even Napoleon (his favourite precursor) could have obtained better results.3 The keys to success were resources and sacrifice. He was convinced – not wrongly – that the Austrians were desperately stretched. (Over the winter, they called up 850,000 men, mostly aged 43–50. The oldest Italians in the line at this time were 39.) He saw himself as labouring to persuade a feckless government and a fickle nation that a long, grinding campaign was inevitable. There might be few dramatic breakthroughs, but victory was likely; for the Austrians could never match the Italians in manpower, or prevail in a Materialschlacht, a war of material; the Russian Front and the Allied naval blockade would see to that. On top of this, Cadorna had another reasonable grievance. He was unhappy with Sonnino’s decision to send two divisions to Albania in early December, as insurance against Allied backsliding on the promises of April 1915. Cadorna was a soldier, not an imperialist, and feared the diversion of resources.
Only one minister had the knowledge or nerve to suggest an alternative strategy. In an explosive memorandum to Salandra, the Minister of War, General Zupelli, pointed out that most of the nation’s medium and heavy artillery was not deployed on crucial sections of the Isonzo. Boldly, he proposed that Cadorna should mount a fresh offensive on the Carso in early February. It should start with a bombardment by at least 500 medium or heavy guns on a front no wider than 12 kilometres, giving Cadorna an intensity of firepower resembling that on the Western Front. Delaying the resumption of war until April or later would benefit Austria more than Italy. Zupelli made his case to the cabinet at the end of January. Sonnino, angling to get Cadorna replaced by someone more congenial, urged the establishment of a Council of War as a forum for ministers and generals. This was transparently a gambit to keep tabs on Cadorna. Fearing the general’s wrath, Salandra referred the matter to the King, the only person to whom Cadorna was accountable. What did he think? If the army repeated the extensive frontal attacks that had already failed, would they not – insinuated Salandra – be knocking their heads on a wall?
Cautious Victor Emanuel sent his aide de camp to Udine. Denouncing Sonnino’s idea, Cadorna accused the government of trying to provoke his resignation. The King was sympathetic; in his milder way, he shared his general’s contempt for Roman shenanigans and his low opinion of Salandra. Cadorna followed up with a strongly worded letter: ‘These parliamentary regimes in the Latin style are made to corrupt the country in peace and sweep it to perdition in war. And do not accuse me of anti-liberalism just because events have made me so sceptical.’ To his wife, he wrote that his principal enemies were no longer the Austrians.
The army’s dismal showing against Albanian guerrillas helped Cadorna; had he not foreseen a fiasco? Then his position was suddenly weakened, when the army lost a piece of territory north of Gorizia. Counter-attacks were beaten back by Croatian and Hungarian regiments. More than 4,000 men were lost, half as prisoners. These were worrying figures, and rumours circulated that the front-line units were going soft. In this pass, Cadorna’s staff turned to their contacts in the press. Journalists dubbed Cadorna the generalissimo, a title that stuck. The Corriere della Sera editorialised that ‘Italy has found her Duce’, her leader: a dramatic claim. D’Annunzio penned an ode, imploring God to aid the ‘Duce’ in his mighty task.
Temper his certainty, O Lord, and
nail his certainty in our breasts.4
The Idea Nazionale told its readers that Cadorna was ‘the only man Italy still believes in’. The boss was particularly pleased by the compliments in Mussolini’s newspaper: ‘Who would have believed two years ago that Signor Benito would ever sing my praises.’
With the wind in his sails, Cadorna bore down on the original troublemaker. He had picked Zupelli for the job in October 1914, when he
needed a trusted aide in preparing the army for war. Now he had been stabbed in the back. (There was no such thing as constructive criticism; the commission of inquiry after Caporetto found that Cadorna displayed ‘intolerance of every judgement and assessment … even from persons who had the right and duty to discuss his decisions’.) At the end of February, Cadorna told Salandra that Zupelli had to go or he would resign. The Prime Minister warned Cadorna not to price himself out of work, but with the King’s backing and matters in Albania going from bad to worse, the supreme commander was unstoppable. When Salandra offered to resign, the King refused and cajoled Cadorna into backing down. Zupelli’s position was untenable, and he resigned. The new minister of war was Paolo Morrone, a biddable general proposed by Cadorna.
The ‘government in Udine’, as the Supreme Command was becoming known, had trumped the government in Rome. No more was heard of the Council of War, and Zupelli was banished to the front. He had done his job well: machine guns and hand-grenades were being produced in large numbers. Another weapon also began large-scale production. This was the bombarda, a primitive trench mortar or bomb-thrower that fired tail-finned shells (up to 400 millimetres calibre) in a high trajectory. The Italians finally had something to rend barbed wire, and even blow the entanglements out of the ground.
Back in the war zone, certain lessons had been learned and applied. The forward positions were thinned out, to spare as many men as possible the rigours of winter. The Third Army brought its batteries closer to the front and experimented with ways to make better use of observers. The defences were strengthened on the middle and upper Isonzo. The engineers constructed proper positions on some sectors. The defensive fall-back lines on the River Tagliamento were taken in hand. The forces around Gorizia – VI Corps, under the dynamic and alarming command of General Capello – were placed under the Third Army, linking them with the forces on the Carso.
As the call-up was extended to further conscript classes, 24 new infantry regiments were formed in early 1916, together with two Bersaglieri regiments and 246 battalions of Alpini, specialised mountain troops destined for the Dolomites and the Tyrol. Italy’s 35 divisions in May 1915 would increase to 48 by the end of 1916, bringing the total number deployed on the front to one and a half million. The infantry began to be issued with heavy overboots and greatcoats; rubbed with grease, these gave better protection against the elements. Hobnailed leather boots arrived. Much was still amiss with the uniforms – woollen socks were in short supply, and the capes absorbed water – yet by April, the Third Army (at least) was for the first time better equipped than the enemy. Barracks were disinfected. Anti-cholera vaccinations were carried out. Iron helmets were distributed to the wire-cutting parties, and then to sentries as well. Over the winter, front-line tours were shortened to 15 days and organised in cycles: units should pass from the first to the second line, then back to the reserves. In practice, the time spent in the line was not standardised.
Finally, concessions were made to the attacking infantry; they could leave their heavy knapsacks behind when they went over the top. In a break with Garibaldian tradition, officers were permitted to direct attacks from behind. This reform was forced on the Supreme Command by the toll on the officer corps in 1915. Best of all, from the infantry’s point of view, the Supreme Command ruled that sector commanders should seek to bring their front lines within 50 metres of the enemy’s foremost positions. This distance was later reduced to 30 and then 20 metres, trying to minimise the infantry’s exposure in the death zone.
Cadorna could outmanoeuvre Italy’s government, but not her allies. On 6 December, the Allied commanders met again at Chantilly to decide on strategic priorities for the coming year. It had been a terrible year for the Entente, and Joffre and Haig wanted an overwhelming focus on the Western Front. The Italians, represented by Cadorna’s feckless deputy, General Carlo Porro, were left in no doubt that their front was a sideshow. They and the Russians pledged to launch synchronised attacks in the spring, some time after March. This timetable was made irrelevant by the German onslaught at Verdun and the Meuse, starting in late February. By early March the hard-pressed Joffre was calling for his allies to launch supporting offensives. Cadorna wanted to wait for the spring thaw before renewing the attack on Gorizia. Reluctantly, he promised a modest ‘offensive demonstration’. Publicly, he gave it a grander name: it would be a ‘vigorous offensive’ along the length of the Isonzo.
Starting on 11 March with a 48-hour bombardment, the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo concentrated on the middle reach of the river between Tolmein and Mount San Michele. This involved the usual bloodbath on the hill of Podgora, where Zeidler’s Dalmatian units resisted with their normal doggedness. A few kilometres away, the Italians gained a hundred metres of altitude on Mount Sabotino – a genuine achievement, made possible by long preparation over the winter, entrenching and sapping up the mountain’s western flanks. On San Michele, the Third Army gained ground near the hamlet of San Martino, only to lose it when the Austrians used tear-gas shells. Offensives around Tolmein and on Mount Mrzli met with no better success. Snow in the north and fog in the south forced a cessation. Yet the fighting ran on; the Austrians counter-attacked, tightening their grip on Tolmein and Rombon, while the Italian 18th Infantry Regiment captured an important position south of San Michele, between Mount Sei Busi and Monfalcone.
The Italians took another 13,000 casualties without improving their position much or helping the French in any way. A Croatian newspaper crowed that the fifth offensive had ‘ended in the same kind of success as the first four’. Cadorna took the outcome as final proof that he needed much more heavy artillery. His opposite number, Conrad von Hötzendorf, drew a different lesson: that the moment had come to turn the tables.
Source Notes
THIRTEEN A Necessary Holocaust?
1 Amid the ‘glacial silence’, metaphors for the situation: Favetti, 75, 78.
2 ‘Is he not a true hero? They are all like this’: Favetti, 114.
3 Cadorna’s losses in 1915 ran to 400,000: Procacci [2000], 77.
4 ‘going to be massacred’: The pro-war liberal, Giovanni Amendola, writing to Luigi Albertini of Corriere della Sera, 11 November 1915.
5 ‘mere garden secateurs’: Giacomel [2003a], 65.
6 ‘a good number of avoidable deaths’: Barbour. Diary entry for 5 November 1915.
7 made the soldiers’ souls ‘flabby’: Franzina [1999], 69.
8 ‘Standing inert with the prospect’: De Simone, 115–6.
9 ‘a necessary holocaust’: Sema, vol. I, 143.
10 ‘Nobody has a clue how to lay wire’: Col. Douhet, cited by Procacci [2000], 75.
11 ‘When told to advance’: Barbour. Diary for 5 November 1915.
12 This slack custom endured throughout the war: The British Official History of operations in Italy recorded that, ‘as noon approached Italian officers very obviously became uneasy and wanted to stop any work in hand.’ Gladden, 30.
13 ‘Shit of every size, shape, colour’: Roscioni, 127.
14 ‘literally a field of filth’: Gladden, 26.
15 two soldiers were shot: Longo 165 ff.
16 The joke went around: Gatti [1997], 117.
17 Another incident occurred on 20 December: Alliney, 90–2.
18 ‘tendentious or exaggerated rumours’: From a statement on 8 December 1915 by the Minister of War. Longo, 164.
19 Sonnino, angling to get Cadorna replaced: Rocca, 110–11.
20 Cadorna solicited comments on tactics: Longo ff.
21 ‘Who would have believed two years ago’: Rocca, 112.
22 ‘intolerance of every judgement’: De Simone, 144.
1 The Casale Brigade would lose 2,000 more men on the Asiago plateau in May and June 1916, then another 3,000 in the battle for Gorizia in August 1916.
2 Lieutenant Ugo Ojetti, a middle-aged art historian doing propaganda work at the Supreme Command, was given the Bronze Medal for Military Valour for entering Gorizia on 9
August 1916, shortly after the first Italian troops. The joke went around that he was then awarded the Silver Medal for Civil Valour, honouring the nerve he had shown by accepting the first medal.
3 In January 1916, Cadorna solicited comments on tactics from senior commanders. The conventional replies showed that no higher wisdom was circulating away from the Supreme Command. On the other hand, free-thinking officers may have kept their real thoughts to themselves.
4 Was this a rhetorical flourish, or had D’Annunzio sensed the irresolution beneath Cadorna’s tenacity?
FOURTEEN
The Return Blow
The defensive in war cannot be a state of endurance
… a defensive, without an offensive return blow,
cannot be conceived.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
Austria’s passivity on the Isonzo did not suit the fiery Conrad, chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, who longed to take the battle to the traitors. After Serbia was overrun in mid-November, the Habsburgs were fighting on only two fronts and Conrad believed he had an opening. He cherished two bold ideas for an offensive. One was an attack across the upper Isonzo, between Tolmein and Flitsch. The other was an operation out of the Tyrol towards the sea. As 1915 drew to its end, this second idea became an obsession. If the Austrians surged across the mountains onto the plains of the Veneto, their impetus and the enemy’s disarray would make them unstoppable. Reaching the sea near Venice, they would cut Cadorna’s supply lines. Even if the Italian reserves improvised defences in front of Padua and Venice, they would not be able to counter-attack effectively. Unless Britain and France sped to the rescue – an unlikely prospect, he thought, given their focus on the Western Front – Rome would have to sue for peace.
The White War Page 21