Boccioni modelled the piece in plaster; bronze casts were only made after his death. Even so, he knew it was his sculptural masterpiece, the closest he had come to conveying ‘pure plastic rhythm’. Pure in form, however, rather than motive, for his figure is imbued with violent Futurist purpose. It has been compared with Marinetti’s vision of a superman, a ‘nonhuman and mechanical being, constructed for an omnipresent velocity … cruel, omniscient and combative … endowed with surprising organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks’. Boccioni’s figure even has the protrusion ‘in the form of a prow from the outward swell of the breast bone’ that Marinetti foresaw as the evolutionary result of modern life.
Art historians praise its ‘bursting vitality’ and ‘vital tension’ for ‘representing an epoch’, ‘the dynamic anxiety of our time’. This does not go far enough: Boccioni prefigured the infantry attack, not as it really would be, but as generals and intellectuals imagined it. The sculpture was only a year old when its posture began to be replicated by soldiers on the Western Front. In this sense, Boccioni’s nameless, mutilated figure, storming unstoppably ahead, as if propelled by ‘extreme resolution’, was, in Nietzsche’s phrase, born posthumously. And after all, had not Nietzsche himself ruled that ‘the magnitude of an “advance” is even to be measured by the mass of things that had to be sacrificed to it’? In the First World War, the image of infantry as masses of ‘things’ was more than a metaphor. Father Gemelli, who had Cadorna’s ear, argued in his influential studies that a ‘good soldier’ must lose his identity; for the price of complete obedience was depersonalisation, isolated from familiar bonds and affections. With hindsight, Gemelli’s theory and Boccioni’s figure anticipate the Fascist myth of a ‘new Man’, the ‘soldier citizen’ who would be stripped of ‘individual autonomy and consciousness… trained to consider himself as a mere instrument of the State, and prepared to sacrifice his life for it.’ Has a sculpture ever dramatised more memorably its creator’s contempt for the ‘brutalised and cowardly race’ of ordinary people, the ‘rabble whom we must lead into slavery’? Has an omen of the avant-garde ever been fulfilled on such a scale?
It is delightful that the best Italian critique of vitalism should be a comic novel, written in and about Trieste, the powder-keg city itself. Italo Svevo’s masterpiece, The Confessions of Zeno (1923), recounts the decidedly unheroic adventures of a man who is inept, irresolute, unsuited to the battle of life, but generous, and truthful to the paradoxes of his nature, which is also ours. But Svevo wrote his novel in the war’s aftermath. While researching this book, I found one solitary insight about vitalism written at the Italian front. It came from John Dos Passos, the future novelist. He came to Europe in 1916 as a Harvard graduate, naïvely intent on cultural tourism, then volunteered for the American Red Cross. After a few months of driving ambulances on the Western Front, he was transferred to Italy, arriving at the end of 1917. He spent seven months on the plain near Venice, watching the Italians strengthen their defensive line between Padua and the sea. The landscape was dreary in winter, its horizontal lines broken by rows of pollarded trees, ‘black and gnarled in the mist’.
With little to do, time weighed heavily. The war seemed far away; distant gunfire rattled the windows of the café where he wrote letters. Amid the monotony, an air raid was ‘wonderfully exciting … the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earthshaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.’
Dos Passos’s letters and diaries are perceptive in a democratic American vein. The Italian officers’ contempt for the other ranks outrages him; their ‘overbearing nastiness to anyone they don’t lick the boots of is disgusting’. Intrigued by the abstract motives and forces that bind people to the war, he is shocked by the power of nationalism with its ‘patriotic cant’; it is ‘the one thing that enslaves people more than any other to the servitude of war’. Near the end of his tour, he dropped a startling remark into a letter home: ‘No I believe no more in the gospel of energy – One thing the last year has taught me has been to drop my old sentimentalising over action.’ Among eyewitness accounts from the front, this is a sentence in a million. It took an American volunteer to notice something so fundamental about Italy’s war.
Source Notes
TWENTY The Gospel of Energy
1 ‘calm and steadfast’: Frescura, 139–41.
2 veterans’ memoirs say little about the frontal attack: This impression is confirmed by Isnenghi, who probably knows the veterans’ literature better than anyone. Isnenghi [1997], 285–8.
3 their casualty rates over the war: Bosworth [1996], 66.
4 the ‘absurd’ moment: Bultrini & Casarola, 85.
5 ‘whole body racked by terror’: Bultrini & Casarola, 114, 149, 44.
6 ‘the blood chills before an assault’: Favetti, 113.
7 ‘Those who have not been through’: Lussu, 95.
8 another 25 shot in the buttocks by the carabinieri: Giacomel 2003a, 105.
9 ‘straggler posts’ as a barrier: Sheffield, 74.
10 ‘Voices and shouting on all sides’: Mario Puccini.
11 ‘The outcome of war will always’: Cadorna [1915], 34.
12 ‘Infantry that finds itself under fire’: Cadorna [1915], 28.
13 ‘When a soldier lacks the spirit’: Cadorna to Orlando, 3 November 1917, in Orlando [1960], 501.
14 ‘should proceed without such certainty’: Cadorna [1915], 36, 27.
15 ‘waves’ of men: Cadorna [1915], 31–2.
16 ‘imbued with a determination’: British Army General Staff, 141.
17 ‘the exercise of human qualities’: Howard.
18 the ‘triumph’ of ‘one will’: Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton, in Howard.
19 ‘a conquering state of mind’: Howard.
20 ‘the inner force that cannot be rationally grasped’: Berlin, 317.
30 ‘the political principle of the nineteenth century’: Arendt, 178.
31 a ‘glorious minority’: Missiroli [1932], 22.
32 ‘did not want to become Italian’: Mario Puccini.
33 ‘Outside the struggle’: Russo, 12, 47–8, 153–4.
34 ‘The Italian middle classes wanted to believe’: Sforza [1945], 136.
35 ‘tranquil, serene, rested’: Gatti [1997], 162.
36 Luigi Barzini paid tribute to Cadorna’s: Isnenghi [2005], 191.
37 ‘firm and indestructible will’: Cadorna [1915], Premesse, para.
38 there were seeds of the later cult in the earlier: Isnenghi [1999]; Ventrone [2003], 219.
39 Fascism was the vitalist regime par excellence: Bosworth [2007], 181.
40 ‘a permanent revolution, emancipating action’: Satta, 42.
41 an architecture of ‘fearless audacity’: Antonio Sant’Elia, quoted by da Costa Mayer.
42 they enjoyed a following among workers: Ballo, 369.
43 ‘is only for those who know what to do’: Quotations from Schiavo.
44 a ‘great fraternal sacrifice of all Italians’: Carrà.
45 ‘D’Annunzio because he was immoral’: Dos Passos.
46 ‘splendid optimism’: ‘splendido ottimismo’ was Marinetti’s tribute. Marinetti [1987], 73.
47 twice as many deaths during a week: De Simone, 176.
48 ‘I like your whole campaign’: Marinetti [1978]
49 ‘an experience of supreme helplessness’: Ousby, 84–5.
50 ‘restless, aggressive mind’: Golding’s phrase.
51 ‘ferocious conquest’: Tallarico, 108.
52 ‘My Futurist ideals, my love of Italy’: Tallarico, 127.
53 ‘The life we lead’: Boccioni [1971], 318.
54 ‘a living gun’: from W. H. Auden’s 1937 poem, ‘Wrapped in a yielding air …’ Auden in the 1930s was brilliantly perceptive about vitalism and its ambiguities.
55 the Renaissance statue of the warrior Colleoni: The masterpiece of Andrea del Verrocchio, made around 1480, this equestrian statue stands on a high plinth in Venice.
56 ‘nonhuman and mechanical being’: Marinetti [1971]. The comparison is suggested by an art historian, Marianne Martin.
57 ‘bursting vitality’: Tallarico, facing 121; Ballo, 366.
58 propelled by ‘extreme resolution’: This is how Carlo Salsa interpreted the crouching run of the infantry during an attack. Like Frescura, Salsa was a vitalist intellectual who went on to support Fascism. Salsa; Isnenghi [2005], 239.
59 a ‘good soldier’ must lose his identity: Procacci [2000], 81.
60 Fascist myth of a ‘new Man’: Gentile [1986], 115.
67 ‘brutalised and cowardly race’: From Boccioni’s Open Letter to Papini, dated 1 March 1914. Boccioni [1971], 74
1 The composer Stockhausen’s scandalous comment on the destruction of New York’s twin towers on 11 September 2001 – ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos’ – was pure Marinetti.
2 The Futurists were obsessed with the headless statue of Nike, Greek goddess of victory, in the Louvre. Marinetti proclaimed that a racing car was more beautiful, and a plaster reproduction was smashed at the wedding feast of the painter Gino Severini. Were they disturbed because they could not reconcile her contemptible prestige as a cultural treasure with her splendid (Futuristic) attitude of surging and sensuous affirmation?
TWENTY-ONE
Into a Cauldron
If victory is long in coming, the men’s weapons
will grow dull and their ardour will be
damped.
SUN TZU
The Tenth Battle of the Isonzo
Boroević was certain that Cadorna wanted to attack again before the end of 1916. He was right: an attack was planned for early December. On the 7th, a break in the bad weather allowed the artillery to warm up. But the winter soon closed in again and the infantry stood down. (Someone joked that even the weather was Austrian.) According to Cadorna, the troops in the Vipacco valley were drowning in mud. The postponement would last five months. Minor actions flared here and there as the Austrians tried to wrest back the territory they had lost since August. Still, the front was relatively calm and sometimes completely so. General Robertson was struck by the ‘absolute quiet’, broken by an occasional rifle shot: ‘a very different state of affairs from what we were accustomed to on the Western Front’.
Meanwhile, much was happening across Europe that affected the Italian war. Joffre hosted another inter-Allied conference in mid-November, where the chiefs of staff agreed that the Allies’ decisive blow should involve combined offensives in May 1917. Cadorna’s task was to draw the maximum number of Austrian divisions away from the Eastern Front. He was also asked to help the French and British by sending more units to Albania and Salonika. This request was refused, but he pledged to support an offensive in France.
Italy was again treated as capable at best of diversionary action. But things were about to change for the better. When David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as British prime minister in early December 1916, he was bent on carrying out what he would call a ‘fundamental reconstruction of Allied strategy on all fronts’. He planned to launch the process at a conference of Allied prime ministers, ministers of war, and chiefs of staff. In the first week of January 1917, the British and French prime ministers travelled to the conference in Rome by train from Paris. Lloyd George was nurturing a pet project with huge implications for the coming year’s campaigns. He wanted Britain and France to lend the Italians so much artillery in the early part of the year, up to 400 medium and heavy guns, that Cadorna would retake the initiative on the Isonzo, capture Trieste, ‘get astride the Istrian peninsula’, and knock out the Austrian fleet. His logic ran like this: the events of 1916, including the bloodbaths on the Somme and at Verdun, had confirmed there was no prospect of breaking through on the Western Front, where both sides had massed their strongest forces. Yet the Allied military leaders were so obsessed with Flanders that they failed to realise how weak Germany’s ally now was; Austria’s subject nationalities were not wholehearted about the war; and it was fighting alone against Italy. If the Italians could land a solid blow, their tottering enemy would have to transfer forces from the Eastern Front, weakening the Germans. This would strengthen the Allies everywhere. In the best of outcomes, the reinvigorated Italians would knock the Habsburg empire out of the war altogether.
While the cabinet agreed to let him float his idea in Rome, Lloyd George was well aware that the British and French military would resist any scheme that diminished the Western Front. The French were now committed to launching a vast offensive no later than April 1917. As conceived by the new French commander-in-chief, Robert Nivelle, who had recently replaced Joffre, this could produce a breakthrough that would cripple the Central Powers. Lloyd George, much taken by Nivelle, was ready to accept French leadership in a joint operational command, but Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, bridled at playing second fiddle to ‘a junior foreign commanding officer’, as he complained to the cabinet.
Robertson was also travelling to Rome. Although he and Haig had their differences, they both deplored Lloyd George’s attempts to find a way around the Western Front, and resented his loathing of the doctrine that cost so many lives for so little gain. They were convinced he was toying with public dismay at the scale of killing in Flanders, only pretending not to understand why the enemy must be attacked frontally, where he was strongest. At various times, after all, he had promoted the Balkans, the Eastern Front and the Middle East as alternative theatres. Now he was doing the same with Italy, and Robertson would have none of it. Sensibly, he neither trusted the Italian estimates of their own potential nor believed that Germany would let Austria-Hungary reach a separate peace with the Allies, regardless of how well the reinforced Italians might perform.
In this situation, Lloyd George might have been expected to exercise his legendary powers of persuasion on the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, and his minister of war during their hours on the train. He did nothing of the sort. He did not even show them his memorandum outlining Allied options for 1917. When the party reached Rome, he sent the cabinet secretary to brief Cadorna. But the canny Robertson got to him first.
When Lloyd George made his case, next day, the British and French generals’ scepticism was deepened by the overdone praise of Cadorna. The French objected that lending batteries to Italy would jeopardise the Nivelle offensive, so Lloyd George promised that the 300 guns would ‘absolutely’ be returned in good time. When Cadorna’s turn came to speak, he showed no enthusiasm. Guns that had to be returned in May were, he said, not worth having. Haughtily reluctant to plead his own cause, confused by the Anglo-French tensions, and anxious not to raise expectations, he ducked and quibbled. An onlooker who knew him quite well was Sir Rennell Rodd, Britain’s ambassador to Rome. Watching Cadorna pass up a unique chance of substantial Allied support, Rodd reflected that it was a moment when character shapes outcome.
Undaunted, Lloyd George offered to let Cadorna keep the British guns for longer. This off-the-cuff contradiction of policy infuriated Robertson without reassuring Cadorna, who was haunted by the spectre of a second Austrian attack out of the Trentino, dismayed that the Allies would lend no troops, and troubled that he would have to attack, inviting German reprisals, without simultaneous offensives on other fronts. These were not negligible problems, yet another man would have sensed that nothing was to be gained by rubbing a would-be benefactor’s nose in his own shortcomings. Lloyd George did not forgive Cadorna for squandering ‘the most promising chance afforded to him to win a great triumph for his country’. Publicly, however, Italy’s eligibility for military aid was on the table, and the Anglo-French commanders could not wish it off again.
Cadorna’s sense of Austro-German intentions was sound. Conrad could be counted on to argue for a combined attack from the Trentin
o and across the Isonzo. In December 1916, he had won influential support from the chief of operations at the German Supreme Command. General Ludendorff, however, still rejected the idea. When Conrad raised it again in January, the Germans offered to discuss it after the next Allied offensive.
From Cadorna’s point of view, the danger remained real and present. When the Germans shortened their line in France at the beginning of 1917, he worried that the spare troops would be sent in his direction, and sent urgent pleas to the Allies for 20 divisions plus artillery. Even Robertson conceded that contingency plans for Italy’s defence should be prepared. When he visited the front at the end of March, he was dismayed by the makeshift condition of the defences; it was with a view to bolstering these, not to support an offensive, that planning began in April to move six British divisions to Italy by rail, to strengthen the rear lines around Padua. Also in April, ten British batteries of 6-inch howitzers were despatched to the Carso.
Lloyd George’s argument in Rome is familiar to every scholar of British policy and planning in the war. What has not been clear is the source of his conviction that Italy held the key to a transformation of the war. Robertson decided the whole harebrained scheme was Lloyd George’s invention, of a piece with his detestable ‘indifference to military opinion on military matters’.1
The White War Page 32