The White War

by Mark Thompson

  The initial bombardment, when it started on 12 May, was more intense than anything the Austrians had seen before. With more than 3,000 guns, it was on a scale familiar in France and Flanders, and it built to a fearsome climax. Crossing into the Isonzo valley at dawn on the 14th, the Scottish Quaker volunteer George Barbour was struck by the contrast between the serenity of the Bainsizza plateau, stretching away in front of him, and ‘this extraordinary strip of hell, right down 2,000 feet below like a volcanic rift in the ground, full of noise and black smoke with the silver stream of the river waggling like a snake in the underbrush’. Descending towards Plava,

  … the road seems to be going straight down into a cauldron, screened alternately on left and right by wicker screens as it zigzags. At one point I stopped the car and looked down through a gap in the screening right down onto the nose of Monte Kuk which was having a heavy dose from the Italian large calibre guns, so that the [Austrian] trench line stood out as the base of a continuous smoking wall of dirty black fumes.

  Zero hour followed at 12:00. By now, the mercurial Capello had been convinced by intelligence reports that a frontal assault on the ridge to Monte Santo held the key to glory. Five regiments were launched against the lone Habsburg battalion on Hill 383. Outnumbered by 15 to 1, the Austrians still inflicted 50 per cent casualties on the attackers before succumbing. Italian interdiction fire played a part: reinforcements could not reach the beleaguered defenders. A kilometre to the south, the Avellino Brigade crossed the Isonzo and wiped out the Dalmatian infantry of the 22nd Regiment. So violent were these clashes that the Avellino took 60 per cent casualties, losing 3,000 men.

  The next summit along the ridge was Mount Kuk, a steep-sided cone with excellent sight-lines into the Isonzo valley. The Florence Brigade, edging up the hillside, was held at bay. Better results were achieved further south, on Monte Santo. After a devastating bombardment, involving the batteries hidden in the summit of Sabotino, the Austrians could not resist the Campobasso Brigade. The summit was taken but could not be held. For the next 24 hours, attackers and counter- attackers chased each other across the summit in increasingly ragged waves. As for the new bridgehead north of Kanal, Capello decided to spare only two battalions for this bold action. They crossed the river easily but could not penetrate the Bainsizza. There would be no flanking operation behind the Kuk–Vodice–Monte Santo ridge.

  On the central Carso, the Duke of Aosta threw 60 battalions at the fortified line beyond the Vallone, aiming to deepen the salient that was carved out during the Ninth Battle. The Duke had dramatically increased the reserves, ready to exploit any success. But there was nothing to exploit. To their amazement, the Italians found they were outgunned on the central Carso. With their usual pinpoint accuracy, the Austrian batteries barred the way. Halfway through the second day, the Third Army’s losses stood at 25,000 men. The offensive was scaled down.

  At this point, the feeling at the Supreme Command was that Capello had made ‘very slight progress’ at a heavy price: 5,000 or 6,000 dead and wounded in three days. Cadorna was rattled. He had not expected such fierce resistance. Accusations were flung around, and heads rolled. In keeping with his original plan, Cadorna was minded to halt operations on the middle Isonzo and bolster the Third Army with mobile batteries. Capello promised that if he could keep the 200 medium and heavy guns, he would capture Vodice and Monte Santo. Cadorna let himself be talked around. As soon as Monte Santo had fallen, the guns would be sent to the Third Army.

  Capello’s flaws were on a scale with his talent. By letting him sweep aside the sober assessment of tactical realities, Cadorna reduced the prospects of a breakthrough on the Carso. For a couple of days, Capello made impressive progress. Kuk fell on the 17th. Fresh forces attacked the line below Mount Vodice, the last peak before Monte Santo itself. On the 18th, several Italian divisions attacked a few thousand Austrians, remnants of various regiments. The Italians were separated from the summit ridge by 250 metres of open ground, with rudimentary defences – no wire or foxholes – but enfiladed by machine guns. Despite immense losses, they pushed the Polish militiamen off the summit in the late afternoon. There was no breakthrough, however: the Italians were stopped on the ridge, unable to push down its eastern flank. At the same time, Capello’s secondary action – further south, along the six-kilometre front between Monte Santo and the Vipava valley – came to nothing. He had hoped that surprise would compensate for the lack of artillery preparation or support. Predictably, the Italians were driven back with heavy losses.

  Early on the 20th, Capello’s artillery opened up against Monte Santo. Ten or twelve waves of infantry were flung uphill. Eventually the Italians overran the summit, only to be forced back yet again by a counter-attack. Vodice had fallen at last, but efforts to proceed along the ridge to Monte Santo were unavailing. With the men back in their jumping-off line, Capello called a halt, judging that exhaustion had cancelled the advantage of numbers.

  A price was paid for rewriting the battle plan. For Cadorna’s original gambit had succeeded. Boroević reacted to the preparatory bombardment on the middle Isonzo by correctly suspecting a diversion from the Carso. When the infantry attacked the Kuk–Monte Santo ridge on the 14th and 15th, however, he changed his mind and rushed five divisions up to the ridge and the Bainsizza plateau. By 18 May, the Austrian force on the central Carso was cut to a single division. But the Third Army was unable to take advantage; it sat on its hands while Capello failed to capture Monte Santo.

  On the 23rd, the Third Army batteries belatedly opened the second phase of the battle. Although still lacking those 200 extra guns, the shelling was fiercer than anything before on the Carso. Supported from the air and by floating batteries at the mouth of the Isonzo, the infantry’s surprise attacks on the 24th and 25th widened the salient, rolling over three Austrian lines to capture a band of territory two kilometres deep from the central Carso to the sea. The Austrians melted away in front of the Italian right. Habsburg prisoners reported a crisis of morale, yet the Austrians did not buckle. The Third Army was still several kilometres from the Hermada–Trstelj line, but real progress had been made. By the 26th, Boroević was moving units south from Gorizia to contain the Italian thrust. A few extra regiments were transferred from the Tyrol, and the Germans allowed the Austrian high command to transfer two more divisions from the Eastern Front. Meanwhile the Italians ran out of energy and resolve, and almost out of shells, just when the enemy was at the point of collapse.

  The Austrians would, though, have the last word. On 4 June, Boroević used his reinforcements from the East to launch surprise attacks north of Hermada, regaining some of the ground lost to the Third Army. The Italian losses were huge: 22,000 men, including 10,000 prisoners. Rumour had it that three regiments had surrendered without fighting, complete with their officers and equipment. Cadorna railed at the treachery of men who chose surrender rather than death. Privately, he wished he could ask Boroević to have them flogged. Officially, he wrote a furious letter to Prime Minister Boselli, blaming the government for laxity towards domestic opponents of the war.3 After three weeks, the Italians had taken more than 150,000 casualties, including 36,000 killed. The Austrians had only 7,300 killed.

  One of the last operations in the Tenth Battle took place on 28 May, near a tiny place called San Giovanni, on the coast road to Trieste. A church in a grove of trees, a few houses, a war memorial: if you blink, you miss it. Below the road, Italy’s shortest river surges from under a limestone cliff. This is the Timavo: green, glassy, gelid, some thirty metres across and scarcely a couple of kilometres long, but deep.

  The advance since 24 May had stalled here. Inland, the Austrians held firm on the Hermada massif. Ahead, the way was blocked by Hill 28, a thinly wooded knoll on the coast. A battalion of the 77th Infantry, the ‘Tuscan Wolves’, would cross the river on plank bridges below Hill 28 and capture it. A detachment would then cross two kilometres of low, open ground to the cliff-top village of Duino and hoist a huge Italian flag on the
castle ramparts. The Italians of Trieste would take heart while the Austrians lost it.

  The chances of success were negligible. The ground on both sides of the Timavo was a dreary marsh, with no tree cover. It would be impossible to infiltrate enough men across a plank bridge, under fire, quickly enough to reach the target. Even if by a double miracle the Italians took the hill and reached Duino castle, their flag would have been invisible from Trieste, nearly 20 kilometres away.

  This ridiculous plan was partly conceived by a 54-year-old captain in the Novara Lancers – none other than Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s celebrity bard and all-round decadent. Sharing the Futurists’ fascination with aeroplanes, he had made daring flights over Austrian territory. He also milked events for personal publicity, lobbying far and wide for medals. He admired Cadorna, composing odes in his honour. Unofficially, many in the army found him comical and even hateful.

  For this operation D’Annunzio was adjutant to the battalion commander, a Major Randaccio. The poet’s diary is thick with omens. The weather is overcast, threatening rain. The men are exhausted after ‘suffering and fighting for 24 days!’ Only one of the planned bridges has been constructed: a line of planks 40 centimetres wide lashed to oil drums, with no handrail or cable. Observers have spotted barbed wire and snares on the objective. The ‘enormous difficulties’ have disheartened Randaccio: ‘He does not seem to have much faith. I comfort him.’ Rumours that the operation may be postponed send D’Annunzio hurrying to the high command, where he gains instant access to the Duke of Aosta, and authorisation to proceed.

  Back at the Timavo, he can see the lightning conductor on the castle of Duino. The river fascinates him, and he is thrilled to see soldiers washing where mythical Castor or Pollux once watered a white horse. He is woken at a quarter to midnight from a delicious dream of his lover’s breasts. (She is a Triestine lady, installed in Venice with complaisant husband.) Off in single file to the riverbank, with the poet carrying the flag. A small force manages to cross the planks under fire and some men reach the hilltop but cannot secure it. Randaccio sends for re inforcements which, as ever, are lacking. Austrian machine gunners concealed on the hillside enfilade the river bank and bridge.

  When the remaining troops on the riverbank see what they are expected to do, forty of them mutiny. Tying white shirts to their bayonets, they shout back at the officers who call them cowards. ‘We don’t want to be led to the slaughter!’ ‘Even the men who were taken prisoner write that it’s fine in Austria!’ The men who reached the hilltop are surrendering. Randaccio orders a retreat. Men stagger back across the planks, under fire. Some fall into the water. D’Annunzio, who apparently has not crossed though the official bulletin will say otherwise, helps them to clamber out. Randaccio is badly wounded; the poet pillows his bleeding head on the flag.

  The survivors’ sullen faces make D’Annunzio wonder if these ‘traitors’ will shoot him. Consoled by the certainty that any Italian blade or bullet will turn into diamond the moment it pierces his heart or shatters his brow, he is determined to punish the renegades. For he is convinced the objective could have been held if only ‘a small unit of real men’ had got there. So he orders the nearest battery to fire on the column of Italian prisoners across the river. Later, he notes that ‘battle leaves in the sensual man a melancholy similar to that following great pleasure’. The infantry feel sad as well, though in a different way. The impact of this fiasco on their morale can be gauged from the fact that 800 officers and men of the Puglie Brigade surrendered on the Timavo later on the 29th, complete with rifles and knapsacks.

  D’Annunzio alone profited from the operation, futile even by Cadorna’s standards: a miniature version and indictment of the great offensives that had cost half a million casualties. For D’Annunzio was a propagandist more than a soldier, and propaganda is a realm where gesture is substance and words are deeds. The Timavo operation was a gesture, and in his terms it succeeded brilliantly, culminating beside Randaccio’s grave in Aquileia, where the poet gave an oration that launched the major’s posthumous career as a legend. The Duke of Aosta had copies of the speech distributed to the men of the Third Army.

  Randaccio fulfilled the poet’s criteria of heroism: leading a ‘heroic’ action, dying in the attempt, then depending on the poet for transfiguration. On his deathbed, Randaccio begged for the capsule of poison that he knew the poet always carried into battle. He asked three times and was, biblically, thrice refused. Why? D’Annunzio explained in his funeral oration: ‘It was necessary that he suffered so that his life could become sublime in the immortality of death.’ Legend also required a final, ruthless illusion; D’Annunzio swore to the dying man that Hill 28 had been taken and held, making Randaccio ‘the victor’. For a loser to die in battle was merely banal; for a winner to do so, on the other hand, was ‘beautiful’. His reported last words, inevitably, were ‘Viva l’Italia.’

  The action was written up rapturously in the official bulletin, which stated that the ‘audacious few’ were ordered to retreat on the brink of achieving their objective, despite ‘the violent storm of bullets’. Surprisingly, D’Annunzio’s biographers make little of this episode, even the boast about firing at his own men. Maybe they suspect he made it up, though he had the rank to do it and was vicious enough. It would, also, have been fully in keeping with Cadorna’s notion of military discipline.4 Perhaps he invented Randaccio’s deathbed scene. What he did not fabricate was the pointless slaughter of the men of the 77th Infantry. Yet the poet’s irresponsibility pales beside that of the Duke of Aosta and the Supreme Command, seduced out of thought by charisma, whether Capello’s blustery vitalism or D’Annunzio’s flattering glamour.

  A greatly outnumbered and completely multiethnic Habsburg force – comprising Dalmatians, Ruthenes, German Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs and Poles – had repulsed the biggest Italian attack yet mounted. Austrian artillery fire was still accurate and effective against regiments that still advanced slowly over difficult terrain, in compact masses. The Austrians, by contrast, used highly mobile assault forces, which proved their worth during counter-attacks.

  Following events from his cell, the implacable Colonel Douhet concluded that the Tenth Battle had failed to achieve a single strategic goal. Gorizia had not been secured, key objectives on the Carso or the coast had not been captured and the Hermada massif had not been touched, let alone conquered. More surprisingly, this bleak judgement was echoed at the highest level of command. The Duke of Aosta, leading the Third Army, cut an imposing figure. Tall, handsome, melancholy, he was not given to airing controversial views or large conceptions. The bright young things around Cadorna at the Supreme Command thought he was diffident and dull-witted. Colonel Gatti, the brightest of the bright, liked him but judged him ‘uncultured’ because his grammar was faulty.

  When the two men met on the evening of 26 May, Gatti was startled to hear the Duke say that, while the battle had gone well, at this rate it would take more than ten years to win the war. Final victory could only come by crushing the Central Powers, which would always recover from smaller defeats. But how could this be achieved? People had had enough of the war; at some point they would rebel. The Allies could not be expected to give more help. The army would press ahead, taking bits of territory here and there, until the peoples of the warring states cried ‘Enough!’

  He is absolutely right, Gatti thought. There is no military solution. American intervention may make a difference, but who knows when? This hopeless vista was widely shared. The mood on the Isonzo front was resigned, or worse. The journalist Rino Alessi wrote to his editor on 6 June that the troops seemed ‘depressed beyond measure’. Gatti was haunted by something the commander of the 120th Infantry told him at the end of the battle. ‘They did not rebel: when they were pushed out of the trenches, they went; but they wept.’ Something new is starting to appear, Gatti reflected in his diary, something that was not there at the beginning of spring. The Tenth Battle had knocked the stuffing out of
the army. It might carry on like this for months or years, just like – so they say – in Germany and Austria, where each illusion of victory has yielded to the next, down to the present day. Or it might not. He wondered if the Italians were still paying for Cadorna’s original decision not to attack the Tyrol in 1915. For the Tenth Battle had involved fewer than half the Italian divisions: ‘149 splendid battalions and 500 guns’ remained in Trentino.

  The Tenth Battle had a codicil elsewhere, far from the Carso. The Austrian counter-attack around Hermada in early May led Cadorna to bring forward a long-planned offensive on the Asiago plateau. After the failure of the Punishment Expedition in 1916, the Austrians had not been driven off the plateau. In fact, they re-created their strategic advantage on the Isonzo, by holding firm on a chain of hills that bisected the plateau. The northern end of this chain overlooks the Sugana valley, like the gable end of a house that towers 2,000 metres high. This is Ortigara, a wilderness as rocky as the Carso but steeper, and with even better sight-lines onto the approaches.

  Cadorna’s first assault, in November 1916, had come to nothing. Now he resolved to overwhelm the Austrians with sheer weight of shells and men. A new force was created for this purpose, the Sixth Army, under General Mambretti. Eventually the date of 20 June was set; Mambretti would have 200,000 men with 100,000 reserves. When the Austrians counter-attacked on the Carso, the attack was brought forward to 9 June. On the 7th, the weather turned: summer storms lashed the plateau. The following day, a mine under the Austrian front line exploded a day early, killing 130 Italians. By this point, the Austrian action on the Carso had petered out, so Mambretti could have reverted to his original timetable. Instead he attacked on the 10th. The target was a chain of four peaks that had to be approached over open, steep terrain.